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"Setting aside issues like the shortage of available talent and the average of four years to develop and bring a new ASIC to market, the material costs alone ar
by Symmetry 10y ago
"Setting aside issues like the shortage of available talent and the average of four years to develop and bring a new ASIC to market, the material costs alone are high. The manufacturing of a typical two-gram chip requires 1.6 kilograms of fossil fuel, 72 grams of chemicals, and 32 kilograms of water. The materials involved in making a 32Mbit RAM chip can add up to as much as 630 times the mass of the final product."
You realize that this is replacing a number of general purpose chips and reduces the new amount of materials consumed to accomplish a task, right? If you're not spending those 72 grams of 'chemicals' on your ASIC your spending 720 on general purpose CPUs.