IBM Boss Says Chip Shortage Could Continue For A Few Years

IBM President Jim Whitehurst said it could be a “few years” before the global chip shortage eases. His remarks put him in general agreement with other industry players, who also believe that the crisis won’t be ending any time soon.

Speaking to BBC World Business News, Whitehurst pointed to the time gaps between when a “technology” is developed, when a chip factory is constructed, and when the chips finally come out.

“So frankly, we are looking at couple of years… before we get enough incremental capacity online to alleviate all aspects of the chip shortage,” he said.

Taiwanese manufacturing giants TSMC and Foxconn both see the chip shortage possibly extending into 2022. The crisis has already caused havoc across tech industries. Apple has warned of iPad and Mac shortages, while Sony doesn’t expect to keep pace with the spectacular demand for its Playstation 5 through next year.

The COVID-19 pandemic crippled worldwide chip production and also coincided with a breakdown in US-China relations, leading to chip-hoarding by China and a growing chip-making race between the two countries.

Chia Crypto Mining Reportedly Cripples Inexpensive SSDs In Just A Few Weeks

By now, it’s clear that many among you have begun the process to mine the Chia, a form of cryptocurrency also known as Burstcoin (Burst) that utilises available storage space, instead of GPUs and CPUs. If you’re using high-speed SSDs to “plot” your space, though, you may want to ensure that they’re suited to the task.

As pointed out by Tom’s Hardware, using inexpensive, consumer-grade SSDs could end up being rendered unusable in just 40 days or several weeks. Statistically, a 1TB with a 600TB to be written (TBW) endurance would usually take over five years before it begins to fail. Imagine then, the cost of running several SSDs in RAID mode.

Even renown overclocker, Roman”der8auer” Hartung has advised that, for miners building a Chia mining rig, it is imperative that they find and use SSDs with high TBW and DWPD ratings, so as to minimise the risk of drive failure in the long run.

There is, unsurprisingly, a catch to all this. SSDs with higher resistance to failure ratings are usually made available to commercial and professional markets, such as datacentres. To that end, such SSDs are usually sold at far higher prices, due in part to the enterprise-grade features that are usually integrated into them.

Chia has been steadily gaining momentum in the cryptocurrency world, but it should be noted that at the time of writing, the coin still isn’t publicly traded.