7 ms·

This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. What situation would everyone lose the ability to make any CPU, worldwide, and we don't have a much much bigger problem

This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. What situation would everyone lose the ability to make any CPU, worldwide, and we don't have a much much bigger problem then how to run AWS?

Animats 1y ago
A war in Taiwan?
- spencerflem 1y ago
  Chips are made elsewhere too. At worst, we (civilization) would lose the cutting edge if that happened. It would be a sad thing but not as sad as everything else that would happen in a war.
  - PlunderBunny 1y ago
    We would go back to brick phones, with gears stuck on the side. Awesome!
- bgnn 1y ago
  Well, we stil have enough know-how outside Taiwan on everything to produce any semiconductors. A bigger world war is most likely what it takes to bring the supply chain to a halt. Even then, nobody magically forgets these things.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
    Not magically, they forget naturally. No one human knows the whole sequence, from start to finish, no one can really write it down (or shoot a how-to video). Distributed, institutional knowledge is extraordinarily brittle.
    - bgnn 1y ago
      I agree, forgetting happens naturally. For example, it would be pretty difficult to produce vacuum tubes now. But I doubt this is applicable for CMOS technologies. Most of the steps down to finfets (TSMC 16nm) are rather well known. Yes we don't know the exact recipe of TSMC, Samsung or Intel, but it's not like alien technology. I read technical papers from all these fabs regularly and it's more open than what would people expect. Of course they keep their secrets too, for the cutting edge. There's so much knowhow out there that it's quite probable we can get there again in a short time if TSMC vanished fron earth all of a sudden.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
        It's not just about secrets... it's about how many techniques and processes simply aren't documented. There's no need (someone knows how, and is in the business of training new hires), no capacity (they're not exactly idle), and no perception that any of this is important (things have kept working so far). Could they eventually replicate a CMOS technology? No one doubts this, but the latest lith process took how many years to develop, and only one company makes those machines anywhere in the world? Nearly microscopic molten tin droplets being flattened mid-air so that it can radiate a particular wavelength of UV? That's not something they'll have up and running again in 6 months, and if it were lost, regression to other technologies would be difficult or impossible too. We might have to start from scratch, so to speak.
      - insaneirish 1y ago
        > For example, it would be pretty difficult to produce vacuum tubes now. Vacuum tubes are still made. They’re used extensively in instrument amplification. But I think this bolsters your point!
        grues-dinner 1y ago
        There's a guy who makes them in his garage. They're not really conceptually hard to make as such, they're just fiddly, delicate, labour-intensive and mostly replaced by astoundingly cheaper and often better (outside of a few niches) solid state options. If there were some kind of interdiction on silicon (an evil genie or some kind of Butlerian Jihad perhaps?), the market would remember and/or rediscover the thermoelectric effect and throw money/postapocalyptic bartered goods at glassblowers pretty sharpish. If that status continued, I'm sure we'd see developments in that space in terms of miniaturisation, robustness, efficiency, performance, etc., that would seem as improbable to us as a modern CPU would seem to someone in the no-silicon timeline. You may never get to "most of a teraflops in your pocket, runs all day on 4000mAh and costs three figures" but you could still do a meaningfully large amount of computation with valves.
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    I kinda doubt it. The theoretical knowledge is there, but there’s a huge gulf between that and all the practical knowledge/trade secrets held by TSMC. Another view on this topic is https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law
    - squigz 1y ago
      There are other semiconductor manufacturers, right? Certainly it would be catastrophic to the industry, and would likely set progress back a while, but it would hardly be insurmountable. This discussion also assumes TSMC wouldn't sell/trade knowledge/processes, or they'd not be stolen, which wouldn't be crazy, given the hypothetical war in the region
    - chasil 1y ago
      Intel still knows 14nm quite well, and would likely sell access to the line if asked. If Taiwan ceased to exist, that would put us a decade back.
      - bgnn 1y ago
        Samsung is just tiny bit behind TSMC. The gap isn't a decade, more like 12-18 months. Also, TSMC has 5nm production in the US. There are actual people with know how of this process in the US.
        voidspark 1y ago
        All of their photolithography equipment is manufactured in the Netherlands by ASML https://www.asml.com/en https://www.asml.com/en Other companies are using the same equipment (Samsung and Intel) but TSMC has deeper expertise and got more out of the same equipment so far.
    - bgnn 1y ago
      I might be biased, being an insider of semiconductor industry, to think that there gulf isn't that huge. Virtuakly everything is known down to what, 28nm or so. That's still a fairly good process and pretty impossible to forget.
- starspangled 1y ago
  No, that won't do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
MostlyStable 1y ago
This reads to me as mostly just an interesting way to teach about expected hardware lifetime assuming we were trying as hard as possible to keep things going. There is an entire genre of speculative SF that posits one major change and tries to think through the repercussions of that change. Often, the change itself is not very sensible, but it's also not the point.
- spencerflem 1y ago
  I do think its interesting that digital records may not survive any sort of truly world war. Its so easy to think of them as lasting forever
  - stevenwoo 1y ago
    We don't have enough time with digital data but it seems extremely doubtful anything digital would survive as long as the Herculaneum scrolls that were buried in mud that was on the front page last week, that's longer than almost any civilization has continuously existed (the exception only being ancient Egypt?) but maybe humans will turn it around in the near future and obliterate that record.
protocolture 1y ago
My guess: Something would need to happen to stop / prevent production for about 30 - 60 years. Thats roughly equivalent to the Saturn V engine, and Codename FOGBANK which are the 2 examples of technologies that had to be reverse engineered after the fact. Hypothetically we might choose to stop making new ones if demand dried up significantly.
- bell-cot 1y ago
  Short of asteroid Dino-Doom v2.0 hitting the earth, how could CPU demand fall so low that we don't make any new ones?
  - protocolture 1y ago
    Some kind of demand reduction. It could be the case that we finally hit a sold wall in CPU progress, cloud providers demand something they dont have to replace every few years, and the result is some kind of everlasting gobstopper CPU. Then as failures fall off, so does demand, and then follows production. A pretty large drop in global population might see the same result. Labor needs to be apportioned to basic needs before manufacturing.
    - grues-dinner 1y ago
      The whole of human civilization would need to be completely moribund before every manufacturer stops designing and making new weird industrial/embedded CPUs for little niches. And because they go into things like dishwashers and cars (and missiles) and stuff that dies for other reasons than chip failure, you always need some supply of them. Though I guess if we end all wars and make stuff so good that you literally never need a new widget ever and all industry just stops, then I suppose there is such a thing as a perfect design.
NooneAtAll3 1y ago
I don't think it's that bizarre we already had a sci-fi story, where humanity forgot all beatles songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ
M95D 1y ago
Unabomber2 ? How many people know how to make a CPU?

This doesn't make a ton of sense to me. What situation would everyone lose the ability to make any CPU, worldwide, and we don't have a much much bigger problem then how to run AWS?

Animats 1y ago

A war in Taiwan?

spencerflem 1y ago
Chips are made elsewhere too. At worst, we (civilization) would lose the cutting edge if that happened. It would be a sad thing but not as sad as everything else that would happen in a war.
- PlunderBunny 1y ago
  We would go back to brick phones, with gears stuck on the side. Awesome!
bgnn 1y ago
Well, we stil have enough know-how outside Taiwan on everything to produce any semiconductors. A bigger world war is most likely what it takes to bring the supply chain to a halt. Even then, nobody magically forgets these things.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
  Not magically, they forget naturally. No one human knows the whole sequence, from start to finish, no one can really write it down (or shoot a how-to video). Distributed, institutional knowledge is extraordinarily brittle.
  - bgnn 1y ago
    I agree, forgetting happens naturally. For example, it would be pretty difficult to produce vacuum tubes now. But I doubt this is applicable for CMOS technologies. Most of the steps down to finfets (TSMC 16nm) are rather well known. Yes we don't know the exact recipe of TSMC, Samsung or Intel, but it's not like alien technology. I read technical papers from all these fabs regularly and it's more open than what would people expect. Of course they keep their secrets too, for the cutting edge. There's so much knowhow out there that it's quite probable we can get there again in a short time if TSMC vanished fron earth all of a sudden.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
      It's not just about secrets... it's about how many techniques and processes simply aren't documented. There's no need (someone knows how, and is in the business of training new hires), no capacity (they're not exactly idle), and no perception that any of this is important (things have kept working so far). Could they eventually replicate a CMOS technology? No one doubts this, but the latest lith process took how many years to develop, and only one company makes those machines anywhere in the world? Nearly microscopic molten tin droplets being flattened mid-air so that it can radiate a particular wavelength of UV? That's not something they'll have up and running again in 6 months, and if it were lost, regression to other technologies would be difficult or impossible too. We might have to start from scratch, so to speak.
    - insaneirish 1y ago
      > For example, it would be pretty difficult to produce vacuum tubes now. Vacuum tubes are still made. They’re used extensively in instrument amplification. But I think this bolsters your point!
      - grues-dinner 1y ago
        There's a guy who makes them in his garage. They're not really conceptually hard to make as such, they're just fiddly, delicate, labour-intensive and mostly replaced by astoundingly cheaper and often better (outside of a few niches) solid state options. If there were some kind of interdiction on silicon (an evil genie or some kind of Butlerian Jihad perhaps?), the market would remember and/or rediscover the thermoelectric effect and throw money/postapocalyptic bartered goods at glassblowers pretty sharpish. If that status continued, I'm sure we'd see developments in that space in terms of miniaturisation, robustness, efficiency, performance, etc., that would seem as improbable to us as a modern CPU would seem to someone in the no-silicon timeline. You may never get to "most of a teraflops in your pocket, runs all day on 4000mAh and costs three figures" but you could still do a meaningfully large amount of computation with valves.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  I kinda doubt it. The theoretical knowledge is there, but there’s a huge gulf between that and all the practical knowledge/trade secrets held by TSMC. Another view on this topic is https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law
  - squigz 1y ago
    There are other semiconductor manufacturers, right? Certainly it would be catastrophic to the industry, and would likely set progress back a while, but it would hardly be insurmountable. This discussion also assumes TSMC wouldn't sell/trade knowledge/processes, or they'd not be stolen, which wouldn't be crazy, given the hypothetical war in the region
  - chasil 1y ago
    Intel still knows 14nm quite well, and would likely sell access to the line if asked. If Taiwan ceased to exist, that would put us a decade back.
    - bgnn 1y ago
      Samsung is just tiny bit behind TSMC. The gap isn't a decade, more like 12-18 months. Also, TSMC has 5nm production in the US. There are actual people with know how of this process in the US.
      - voidspark 1y ago
        All of their photolithography equipment is manufactured in the Netherlands by ASML https://www.asml.com/en https://www.asml.com/en Other companies are using the same equipment (Samsung and Intel) but TSMC has deeper expertise and got more out of the same equipment so far.
  - bgnn 1y ago
    I might be biased, being an insider of semiconductor industry, to think that there gulf isn't that huge. Virtuakly everything is known down to what, 28nm or so. That's still a fairly good process and pretty impossible to forget.
starspangled 1y ago
No, that won't do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

MostlyStable 1y ago

This reads to me as mostly just an interesting way to teach about expected hardware lifetime assuming we were trying as hard as possible to keep things going. There is an entire genre of speculative SF that posits one major change and tries to think through the repercussions of that change. Often, the change itself is not very sensible, but it's also not the point.

spencerflem 1y ago
I do think its interesting that digital records may not survive any sort of truly world war. Its so easy to think of them as lasting forever
- stevenwoo 1y ago
  We don't have enough time with digital data but it seems extremely doubtful anything digital would survive as long as the Herculaneum scrolls that were buried in mud that was on the front page last week, that's longer than almost any civilization has continuously existed (the exception only being ancient Egypt?) but maybe humans will turn it around in the near future and obliterate that record.

protocolture 1y ago

My guess: Something would need to happen to stop / prevent production for about 30 - 60 years. Thats roughly equivalent to the Saturn V engine, and Codename FOGBANK which are the 2 examples of technologies that had to be reverse engineered after the fact. Hypothetically we might choose to stop making new ones if demand dried up significantly.

bell-cot 1y ago
Short of asteroid Dino-Doom v2.0 hitting the earth, how could CPU demand fall so low that we don't make any new ones?
- protocolture 1y ago
  Some kind of demand reduction. It could be the case that we finally hit a sold wall in CPU progress, cloud providers demand something they dont have to replace every few years, and the result is some kind of everlasting gobstopper CPU. Then as failures fall off, so does demand, and then follows production. A pretty large drop in global population might see the same result. Labor needs to be apportioned to basic needs before manufacturing.
  - grues-dinner 1y ago
    The whole of human civilization would need to be completely moribund before every manufacturer stops designing and making new weird industrial/embedded CPUs for little niches. And because they go into things like dishwashers and cars (and missiles) and stuff that dies for other reasons than chip failure, you always need some supply of them. Though I guess if we end all wars and make stuff so good that you literally never need a new widget ever and all industry just stops, then I suppose there is such a thing as a perfect design.

NooneAtAll3 1y ago

I don't think it's that bizarre we already had a sci-fi story, where humanity forgot all beatles songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ

M95D 1y ago

Unabomber2 ? How many people know how to make a CPU?