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Kind of disappointed to find an obvious error in the first paragraph of a feature in Wired. > "produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world’
by mrandish 4y ago
Kind of disappointed to find an obvious error in the first paragraph of a feature in Wired.
> "produces, by one analysis, a staggering 92 percent of the world’s most avant-garde chips—the ones inside the nuclear weapons, planes, submarines, and hypersonic missiles"
I'm no expert on semiconductors or even hardware but even I know that the vast majority of chips designed into such critical military systems are based on quite old designs and process nodes for multiple reasons (TEMPEST rating, fully characterized, proven reliable at long duration, guaranteed availability, etc). This is the kind of thing I'd expect competent editorial review even in a 'pop-tech' magazine to catch. I'm pretty sure that over the years even Wired itself has run articles about the "gray hairs" needed to still maintain old code on old CPUs running in military hardware...
- monocasa 4y agoI'm not sure that is an error. Military spec chips a long time ago gave up on special processes/chips a while ago as it was self defeating at the end of the day. Most chips get a reliability economy of scale that you miss out on if you divorce yourself from the commercial market. For most of the other use cases where there isn't an of the shelf chip, an FPGA on a commercial (but high spec/reliability) process is better than a custom ASIC. Then there's only a small sliver left where you truly gain from very custom military processes. That's why the DoD basically paid for that TSMC 5nm fab in Arizona; getting all of those chips destined for defense applications fabbed on US soil again.