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Japanese Chip Shutdown Causing Shortages
An anonymous reader writes "Japan's natural disasters and nuclear crisis have already caused silicon wafer shortages that are rippling through the global supply chain of semiconductors for everything from your garden variety PC to the biggest Google server farm. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan have shut down 25 percent of the global semiconductor raw materials production, threatening to cause shortages and price hikes in everything from smartphones to supercomputers. Intel and Qualcomm are countering that they have stockpiles and alternative manufacturing plants that can pick up the slack, but dozens of other electronics makers require critical components only manufactured in Japan."
AMD recently announced they aren't going to cut prices on last series of CPUs due to this
This is very very wrong. Japan just supplies about 10% of wafer. (China supplies about 40% itself). I think thats a work of someone that wants to play on a dropped stock price...., so watch out.
The nips probably own and designed some of those most critical chips, not EVERYTHING is designed in the US you know. And Japan is not some shitty 3rd-world country where you can pay children a nickel a day to inhale sulfur; I doubt that it is any cheaper than producing them in the US. Then, new designed aren't interchangeable with the old ones, so it would take a huge amount of time and money to redesign all the produces to work with the new chips. It would be easier and cheaper just to wait for Japan come back on line.