News Elon Musk's SpaceX to build its own advanced chip packaging factory in Texas – 700mm x 700mm substrate size purported to be the largest in the indu...

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Elon Musk reportedly plans to move some chip packaging capabilities in-house at SpaceX.

Elon Musk's SpaceX to build its own advanced chip packaging factory in Texas – 700mm x 700mm substrate size purported to be the largest in the indu... : Read more

 

[rustbucket4245]

Surely bringing even MORE complicated parts of production in-house at a company whose products keep failing spectacularly will fix the problem...

 

[GenericUser2001]

Surely bringing even MORE complicated parts of production in-house at a company whose products keep failing spectacularly will fix the problem...

Which SpaceX products are failing? They are successfully launching rockets every two or three days now, and their Starlink network works just fine; I haven't heard anything about unusual failure rates for the satellites or the ground terminals customers use. Now, to be fair, some of their test craft have had some rather explosive issues, but well, that is why they test stuff. The stuff they actually sell to customers seems fine.

 

[bolweval]

Which SpaceX products are failing? They are successfully launching rockets every two or three days now, and their Starlink network works just fine; I haven't heard anything about unusual failure rates for the satellites or the ground terminals customers use. Now, to be fair, some of their test craft have had some rather explosive issues, but well, that is why they test stuff. The stuff they actually sell to customers seems fine.

Seems to be a case of MDS, similar to TDS..

 

[ThisIsMe]

Well, I guess since the blatant market manipulation attempts, intentional non payments, and open support for every other tech company failed to fully force Intel into a hostile takeover situation…

..guess you start building from scratch!

 

[hotaru251]

They are successfully launching rockets every two or three days now, and their Starlink network works just fine

they've had rockets explode back to back iirc was in news last week.

Also starlink sats are apparently being damaged faster than expected. https://futurism.com/the-byte/solar-storms-elon-musk-starlink-satellites

 

[ryu750]

Surely bringing even MORE complicated parts of production in-house at a company whose products keep failing spectacularly will fix the problem...

Can you give a little more detail on what you mean or this some kind of political babble?

 

[JamesJones44]

they've had rockets explode back to back iirc was in news last week.

Also starlink sats are apparently being damaged faster than expected. https://futurism.com/the-byte/solar-storms-elon-musk-starlink-satellites

That's conflating SpaceX's Starship with their launch rockets. They are two very different things. Their Falcon 9 rockets for example are launched a few times a week without issue. Out of 496 lunches only 3 have failed. I'm not a Musk fan, but using Starship which is an experimental craft as a point of failure is like calling early engineering sample CPUs that underperforms failures because it's not doing well in early engineering samples.

 

[JTWrenn]

Which SpaceX products are failing? They are successfully launching rockets every two or three days now, and their Starlink network works just fine; I haven't heard anything about unusual failure rates for the satellites or the ground terminals customers use. Now, to be fair, some of their test craft have had some rather explosive issues, but well, that is why they test stuff. The stuff they actually sell to customers seems fine.

I think we could definitely say Starship has been failing, but people go to far on the anti SpaceX stuff. I personally don't like that we don't have competition and that NASA hasn't kept up. Musk being in charge is spooky as well because the guy is very unstable. That said you can't argue much with their first few gens of rockets, but Starship is starting to feel more and more like it has some root level problems. We will see though.

That's conflating SpaceX's Starship with their launch rockets. They are two very different things.

But it is their new product right? I mean you can argue they are different and that is fine, but how often does a product that isn't new fail and then keep getting used?

That said none of this is about things failing. It's about vertical market integration to control supply chains and make more money per device. It is generally quite bad for the over all economy. I would rather this be at least forced to be a different company even if they are both owned by Elon. This is much more an SEC issue than an engineering one and unfortunately our SEC has been horrible about vertical integration.

 

[JRStern]

I was going to say their need for space-qualified packaging is unique at this point, but hey Elon has always said he doesn't believe in stuff like "space-qualified", commercial is good enough, with a little duct tape and some hammering.

 

[JamesJones44]

But it is their new product right? I mean you can argue they are different and that is fine, but how often does a product that isn't new fail and then keep getting used?

That's the point, it's not a new product. It's not on sale, you can't book travel or transport for it, it may never be released for general use. It's a product in development, not a product for sale.

Just because the issues can be seen in public with product that is in development doesn't mean it's a broken product. If that was the case the thousands of cars the automakers produce ever year that they never sell to iron out kinks would mean every automobile ever made is a broken product. If you go to Detroit/Phoenix/Toyota City/etc. you will see tons of these cars rolling around on the street, usually in "camo", sometimes with hazard on pulled over on the street. I doesn't mean anything other than they are working on a product that is not yet for sale.

 

[usertests]

Regardless of what rockets you're talking about, it could be all over now.

 

[ezst036]

Well, I guess since the blatant market manipulation attempts, intentional non payments, and open support for every other tech company failed to fully force Intel into a hostile takeover situation…

I definitely missed the news stories about Elon Musk strategically positioning various moves so that he could do a hostile takeover of Intel corporation.

I would like to know more.

 

[Misgar]

If you go to Detroit/Phoenix/Toyota City/etc. you will see tons of these cars rolling around on the street, usually in "camo", sometimes with hazard on pulled over on the street.

I've seen chekerboard cars at vehicle test sites. They don't like you getting too close with a camera in some situations.

As for things catching fire and exploding, anyone remember the Pinto?
https://www.autosafety.org/ford-pinto-fuel-tank/

Regarding the new wafer size of 700mm x 700mm, in the past, crystals were grown from vats of molten Silicon by pulling and rotation. The result is a cylinder of pure Silicon which is sliced into thin wafers.
https://heatingtechnologysource.com/induction-heating-techniques-for-semiconductor-crystal-growth/

I've seen photos where they etch processors over the entire surface of each wafer, with some chips only half formed at the edge.
https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/m...at-fab-or-foundry-semicondutor-wafer-texture/

Do they "square off" the new wafers to 700 x 700mm for some reason? You might get more whole chips out of a circular wafer as opposed to a square wafer.

 

[abufrejoval]

Do they need that for their DOGO, no Doje, ...whatever... chips that they designed for AI training?

I wonder how many of those are still lying around unused, since all you hear since Hotchips 34 is that he's buying from Nvidia, if perhaps at bro prices (one place to offload all those newly banned China chips?).

But with Texas being Republican where Musk is spreading his scent, I'd dare say he might not get building permission for an outhouse these days.

Good thing he made backups while working for the White House, since they might be busy reviewing his student visa and substance abuse.

Reaching for my popcorn...

 

[bit_user]

If you look at how erratic Elon's behavior has become and how poorly his Twitter takeover has gone, I wonder if he's not reaching a point where it's becoming difficult to attract investors to go in on some of these ventures with him. And he needs other investors, because most of his wealth isn't liquid or easy to liquefy. Just imagine the outcry from Tesla investors, if he dumped a bunch of his shares right now. I think that's why he's doing this through SpaceX - because it can borrow money a lot more easily than he can.

Even leaving that aside, is he going to be able to attract all the talent he needs, in order to pull off some of these ambitious plans?

I think it's entirely possible Elon has jumped the shark. It wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing has happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes
​

 

[JamesJones44]

If you look at how erratic Elon's behavior has become and how poorly his Twitter takeover has gone, I wonder if he's not reaching a point where it's becoming difficult to attract investors to go in on some of these ventures with him. And he needs other investors, because most of his wealth isn't liquid or easy to liquefy. Just imagine the outcry from Tesla investors, if he dumped a bunch of his shares right now. I think that's why he's doing this through SpaceX - because it can borrow money a lot more easily than he can.

Even leaving that aside, is he going to be able to attract all the talent he needs, in order to pull off some of these ambitious plans?

I think it's entirely possible Elon has jumped the shark. It wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing has happened.

​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes​

​

I've honestly been wondering that for a while, he's gone off the deep end on a lot of issues in general. I remember the fight he had with a rescuer in the Thailand cave collapse, calling them a "pedo guy". This fight with POTUS probably touches a bigger audience and Elon in a way has alienated his largest buyers, but I still hear people talk about him like he's Einstein or Edison (Which I personally think is misplaced, but that doesn't matter). Time will tell if he can keep all of this rolling or ends up like Howard.

 

[abufrejoval]

The thing to remember is that there is no process shrinks for brains and that their energy consumption isn't really dynamic, either: whether you believe you're using your brain or just have it run on idle, the actual metabolic rate needs to remains very much the same. Its neurons can't clock down or stop as if it was a silicon chip, they'd literally starve and die, so at best the brain shifts between distinct activities.

When you choose to use your brain more actively for thought or System 1 business in terms of Daniel Kahneman, that means your System 1 to System 2 transition process, where e.g. short-term memory gets filtered and selectively stored, has to stop for lack of (sleeping/dreaming) resources. And you need those System 2 "inference type" short-cuts, because consciously thinking about everything, including moving all parts of your body, is too exhausting for survival.

You add drugs to halt that transition, an essential brain function goes off the rails: sleep isn't wasted time, it's essential to keep your biological intelligence working.

Obviously a healthy body metabolism will allow for more brain activity generally, but we aren't talking 1:10 or 1:100 ratios, perhaps 1:2 can be done, I'd actually guess much less. And neurons without metabolism to sustain them would die, not recover.

So expecting "constant true genius" from a system where the main choice is at best temporary distribution of metabolic resources, not significant scaling, is plain dumb.

Elon Musk may believe he is true genius, and others may be motivated to go along with that illusion. But you can't re-design biology on-the-fly, because we don't even have the full RTL and documenation on genes and brains just yet. And even if we did, we couldn't just switch the protein base for something post quantum: apart from snags like mortality, the energy efficiency of brains actually is hard to beat, not even aliens (or dolphins) have yet been able to prove otherwise.

 

[Why_Me]

If you look at how erratic Elon's behavior has become and how poorly his Twitter takeover has gone, I wonder if he's not reaching a point where it's becoming difficult to attract investors to go in on some of these ventures with him. And he needs other investors, because most of his wealth isn't liquid or easy to liquefy. Just imagine the outcry from Tesla investors, if he dumped a bunch of his shares right now. I think that's why he's doing this through SpaceX - because it can borrow money a lot more easily than he can.

Even leaving that aside, is he going to be able to attract all the talent he needs, in order to pull off some of these ambitious plans?

I think it's entirely possible Elon has jumped the shark. It wouldn't be the first time this sort of thing has happened.

​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Hughes​

​

CNN’s primetime viewership tanked to a pitiful 374,000 for the week of May 26 to June 1.

Meantime, X shows are crushing it:

1.⁠EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS - 4.3M
2.⁠69 x MIN - 3.8M
3.⁠ON THE GROUND - 2.8M
4.⁠UNCANNY VALLEY - 1.4M

A staggering average of 3M views

AppStore Ratings 一 June 8 一 News

 

[bit_user]

Meantime, X shows are crushing it:

Just to be clear, I was talking about Twitter's financial performance. According to this, the revenues of X are barely enough to cover the interest payments on the loans that Musk took, in order to buy it. That's the corporate equivalent of barely being able to afford the minimum payment on your credit cards.

New Insights Suggest X Is Struggling To Make Money

X may not have turned a profit in 2024.

www.socialmediatoday.com

In order to finance his Twitter takeover, Musk could point to successes like Paypal, Tesla, and SpaceX. However, Tesla is not currently looking so rosy and he's also got a big scar on his track record from what happened with Twitter. So, he's not going to get such favorable terms on financing any of his future endeavors. That was my point. It wasn't meant to be political, just financial - and there's no arguing that his Twitter takeover has been any kind of financial success.

 

[JTWrenn]

That's the point, it's not a new product. It's not on sale, you can't book travel or transport for it, it may never be released for general use. It's a product in development, not a product for sale.

Yeah I think that is a thin argument. A product exists before it is ready for sale. A lot of companies go through these growing pains, and right now Space X is hitting a bit of a wall as they try to scale up some things. It doesn't mean they are a horrible company, but it does show they are human and sometimes products go sideways. Arguing it's not technically a product, would just change the word not the issue. That's just pedant stuff.

Just because the issues can be seen in public with product that is in development doesn't mean it's a broken product. If that was the case the thousands of cars the automakers produce ever year that they never sell to iron out kinks would mean every automobile ever made is a broken product. If you go to Detroit/Phoenix/Toyota City/etc. you will see tons of these cars rolling around on the street, usually in "camo", sometimes with hazard on pulled over on the street. I doesn't mean anything other than they are working on a product that is not yet for sale.

I mean...even you called it a product here. If any of those cars lit on fire, it becomes a big story. Happened to the first hybrid Vett and it was a pretty big story, when one of them did it. That product didn't cost anywhere near as much as one of these rockets. So the scale and issue is pretty different. It also didn't happen so many times in a row, and it didn't get as much press because it lit on fire, didn't explode all over.

The other thing is...if you live by the hype you die by the hype. Elon runs that hype train hard on all of his companies. So he gets the other edge of the sword sometimes. It's fair to call it a troubled, or currently failing product because it hasn't made much progress in a while.

 

[JamesJones44]

Yeah I think that is a thin argument. A product exists before it is ready for sale. A lot of companies go through these growing pains, and right now Space X is hitting a bit of a wall as they try to scale up some things. It doesn't mean they are a horrible company, but it does show they are human and sometimes products go sideways. Arguing it's not technically a product, would just change the word not the issue. That's just pedant stuff.

Starship is NOT for sale... I'm not sure where the disconnect is here.

 

[JamesJones44]

I mean...even you called it a product here. If any of those cars lit on fire, it becomes a big story. Happened to the first hybrid Vett and it was a pretty big story, when one of them did it. That product didn't cost anywhere near as much as one of these rockets. So the scale and issue is pretty different. It also didn't happen so many times in a row, and it didn't get as much press because it lit on fire, didn't explode all over.

An unreleased product is still a product. The Nintendo Switch 2 was a product 6 months ago even though you couldn't buy one. That doesn't mean it's ready for release, buy, etc. it is simply something a company is working on hoping to sell.

 

[bit_user]

Starship is NOT for sale... I'm not sure where the disconnect is here.

I think of it as a service. A railroad has trains and uses them to serve customers. What they sell is transportation, not the trains.

If Starship is planned to be used in contracts with paying customers, then I would consider it a production vehicle, in the same way I consider Amazon's in-house servers to be production hardware, even though you can only rent time on one and not buy it outright.

 

[JamesJones44]

I think of it as a service. A railroad has trains and uses them to serve customers. What they sell is transportation, not the trains.

If Starship is planned to be used in contracts with paying customers, then I would consider it a production vehicle, in the same way I consider Amazon's in-house servers to be production hardware, even though you can only rent time on one and not buy it outright.

I agree with that thought. At this point Starship can't be rented, space leased, etc, a better description of Starship would be calling it a R&D project.