In the words of someone after they'd puzzled out the puzzle, "...so it looks like that die in the picture is pre-release engineering material. Where the hell did you find that?"
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/350
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/364
I find it strange that whoever decided to do this kept the correct datecode on the packaging. Presumably they didn't label them as ATMega 328s until the order came in, it would have been trivial to change the datecode to something reasonable for that chip.
Years back, I talked to someone who had done some analysis on some of the "fake silver/gold" bars floating around places (I think they were common on Silk Road for a while?). Apparently some of the people faking metal bars didn't actually bother learning what a "Troy Ounce" was.
There was a "10 oz" bar that was 10 ounces - 283.5 grams. Except, in metals, "oz" means Troy Ounce - so it should have been 311 grams. You could literally feel that it was light if you were used to dealing with metals.
For example, I heard that a common practice in Shenzhen is selling reels of genuine components, but the "lot number" (serial number) on the labels are removed, so the manufacturers cannot trace these unauthorized resales back to the source. Another example, in a personal hobby project I needed to use a specialized controller that is not available on the public market, but a AliExpress vendor has them, it's likely surplus from somewhere.
> I can see those chips available in their thousands on aliexpress and similar sites for 10x the price
The quantity is not always real, sometimes they just put a random number here. And even when it's accurate, the sales occur via various online and offline channels simultaneously.
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Disclaimer: It's extremely risky to order components from an unknown source, I do not endorse doing it. And my hypothesis on their origins is my speculation, so take a grain of salt.
I guess they were tight tolerance ones that made it into a ultra cheap smd kit.
There's a saying I've heard before: How many 1% resistors can you find in a bag of 5% resistors? None. The 1% resistors were already sorted out and sold as such. I'm not sure how true it is, but if it's true, perhaps a bunch of higher-precision resistors somehow made their ways into a resistor kit not because of random chance, but because they were surplus...
Your BOM can be 1000 vulnerabilities to a focussed short-squeeze.
I suppose this is a predictable and reportable business risk.
I suspect it isn't just the Chinese speculating right now.
I do suspect that the Chinese are probably the only place in the world that had rolls of random semiconductors tucked away in various factories not being used. So, some of these are genuine--most are probably fake. Caveat emptor.
However, I'm am totally down with everybody who depends on Always Late Inventory(tm) getting a rude awakening. The problem is that the lesson won't stick.
People in Bolivia and Peru struggle to afford local food (e.g., Quinoa) because they're outbid (by money, but certainly not necessity).
* COVID stay at home * Every kid wants to be a streamer * E-sports becoming a real sport * 2 new console releases * Amazing new CPU's from AMD * Amazing new graphics cards from AMD/Intel. * Another crypto boom/bubble (depending on who you ask)
All these factors have put pressure on chip production.
Buying out all stocks of some rare MCU which only has probably few million units on the market at any given time at $0.1 just to resell for a few dollars later is quite real given the unprecedented squeeze.
How much would a car company pay for a rare, out of stock chip which is the only thing missing in a car worth $100k?
There is murmur in Chinese BBSes frequented by industry insiders about distributors intentionally either stuffing their part stock counts, or diminish them to play the price.
And designing products around perceived availability that doesn’t actually exist.
I think we'll see some of this in the future where a company's only purpose may be to hedge on bets on what will be unavailable in the near future for "a fair price"
I do think the market won't use these suppliers a lot just like the US-made masks which got millions of orders but only after china stopped sending stuff.
I'm not a trump supporter but he did the right thing on this front.
> I'm not a trump supporter but he did the right thing on this front.
It's a shame you have to admit that. I'm a liberal and think we should be putting a hard squeeze on unilateral trade. This policy makes sense for the US and other countries regardless of your party.
You can see that the US is starting to ramp up hard core. With international navies now sailing into the South China sea and a deafening rise of anti-CCP news and (admittedly) some propaganda, player two has finally entered the game.
I live near an air force base and over the last few weeks have seen (and definitely heard!) an almost daily fighter jet exercise. This hasn't happened in years.
China is going to be in a very tough spot soon.
People like to join teams. So if I have an opinion that's not part of the "team" or part of the "other" team then people like to attack those opinions. That's why I make sure I say something along the lines of "Hey, I'm not on the other team, but I have a different opinion."
If there is a problem, the best solution likely frustrates either team, at least a little.
And so time is wasted in bullshittery rather than getting on with the job.
Funny you should mention that... I live in the UK and a few weeks ago there were military maneouvers near my house. I've been here 18 years and this is the first time they've happened.
Happened across the country too.
Either
(a) submit a history of gaming high scores with dates
(b) a Github repo with Tensorflow or Pytorch code that has commits from at least a year or two ago
(c) play a hard in-browser game to show your skill
Buying a 3090 is not a basic need.
We realized they all had the same MAC address. So we just overrode the MAC in the OS and got them to work.
Someone cloned a card perfectly :)
Most commonly referred to as New-old stock (NOS).
No, this is just good old-fashioned capitalism.
No, that's capitalism.
No, this is called capitalism! Everyone should be proud.
I can very easily hoard goods in a controlled centralised economy as well, the only major downside is the governmnent will likely throw me in some Gulag if they caught me.
It's actually market forces, nothing whatsoever to do with capital.
Not saying planned economics is some sort of silver bullet, only that it has uses in extreme situations.
In a centralised capital control economy such as communism it is well documented that there was hoarding as well, communism never removed the human component no matter how much they tried.
Centralised planning fails utterly as the complexities of the supply systems are way beyond are current abilities to project. And fully planned economies have well documented failures anyway so your comment about this being a problem of capitalist systems is fully disingenuous; or maybe they were just not socialist enough, right?.
What we had here in this instance for semiconductors was a confluence of factors that I doubt anyone would have planned for. Also I feel much of it is sensationalized. We are talking super high end consumer electronics for the most part. The leading few nodes of production are mostly Apple for example and the further back in the production node you go the more players and capacity is available.
The price signal being the major data input that informs production plans. In centrally planned economies, they basically just guess. They'll lie to you and say it's possible to "predict" demand. And when supply constraints happen, well I'll be damned it's the friends of all the Party members that get their share first.
We have a similar situation - 13 month lead times. In one case we were able to substitute a $1 part for a $150 military version. The other situation can't be fixed so easily: Xilinx FPGAs. Each unit of our product has 120 of them and we are building dozens just for orders this year.
We've already had our assembly house lose $10K of parts through employee theft as well. They still don't know "how it happened" but honestly only a handful of people would know they were valuable and know how to fence them! Probably not minimum wage employees to be honest.
It probably is an angle to the war.
That and shutting down low-tech supply chains for routine things like TP - just so people know, the dominant standard supply chain for paper products is to use US/Canadian and Malay/Indonesian or Brazilian (tropical) wood chips, shipping these to China to make raw paper rolls, then bringing it back to the US to be cut into TP et al.
It's easy to disrupt things without even shutting down the supply chain - MOST JIT (just-in-time) supply chains (which are 99% of all supply chains today) are tuned to accept no more than 5%-10% volume variance so you can shut down supply chains by forcing the variance to 20%-30% without even going to 100% off.
This is part of what happened to TP in 2000; the other part was the fact that commercial and residential TP supply chains can not be mutually substituted - BY LAW.