On 2021-02-11 10:10, jim bell wrote:

CNBC: Why there's a chip shortage that's hurting everything from the PlayStation 5 to the Chevy Malibu. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/10/whats-causing-the-chip-shortage-affecting-ps...

The reason there is a chip shortage is tech failure. Old fabs in the west are stopping, and new fabs keep opening, but then the opening is delayed because working chips just are not coming out of them. We are massively dependent on Korean and Taiwanese fabs - and the politically correct explanations of the chip shortage are a reasonable account provided you just politely ignore the mysterious decline of western fabs. China hopes to be able to produce state of the art chips soon. They have made a lot of progress in recent years. Chinese made CPUs still suck - but they are CPUs, they can run Linux and windows, sort of. Just kind of slow and ugly. That is a very large step forward. China hopes to end dependence on foreign made chips by 2025. It is a plausible goal. They seem to be on track so far. Meanwhile we become rapidly more dependent on foreign made chips. At the moment, state of the art is Korean and Taiwanese.