Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: Too many chips made in Asia
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When Gerald Marcyk was running Intel components research back in the 2001 Intel was already considering using EUV lithography for the 45nm technology node that would come out 2007. It turned out that the switch to EUV could be delayed and delayed again. Intel thought they could get away with it this last time and it was a wrong decision.
EUV is super hard. There is only one company that can make EUV lithography machines, Dutch company called ASML. TWINSCAN NXE:3400B costs ~$120 million https://www.asml.com/en/products/euv-lithography-systems/twi...
Intel, Samsung and TSMC invested billions into ASML in 2012. In exchange Intel got 15% ownership, Samsung 10% and TSML 5% if I remember correctly. They don't have any significant ownership anymore.
Intel first started cheaping out as far back as 2003-2005.
157i could've been almost as good as EUV, at much lower cost, but Intel fully consciously decided to forego it because "nobody can beat us on 193i yet," and of conern that 157i consortium will give superior litho to potential competitors.
IMHO banning sales of ASML's product to China is chest thumping protectionist nonsense - if you're worried about the rise of China's military then you should be tangling their economy up more with that of the West so that they have more reasons not to go to war rather than driving them to be self sufficient.
A country is free to develop all those technologies locally and not face US export control, but that's such a difficult task that nobody has achieved it.
The US can simply put an offending company on a black list and every financial institution will drop them.
Short term gain always beats strategic defeat.
> This kind of theft
You called what they did “reverse engineering.” But then you next called it theft.
Why?
Reverse Engineering is not theft. It’s a follower route, where you build the same thing that someone else had built. You don’t even need their blueprints. You can just work off of their output, and work backwards.
One famous reverse engineering company was Compaq, which reverse engineered the IBM PC, with the nod from Microsoft to make their own PC compatible clone. Was this also theft? And was this also a crime in your worldview?
Another example is the atomic bomb. Once America proved that a nuclear fission bomb was possible, then it was only a matter of time before another country reproduced it.
China can and should do clean room reverse engineering for whatever technology they want to, and sell the resultant work back to the US (contingent on other IP restrictions of course)
And the US and Netherlands are well within their rights to block equipment equipment to China on grounds that it will be used by a unfriendly military.
The atomic bomb example is not just about "the principle has been proven", it was also a story of Soviet Union spies within the Manhattan Project.
Military power, like all other things, is based on economic might. If you want to slow the rise of China's military while it remains a totalitarian system then allowing further economic integration between the West and China is a silly idea compared to using sanctions to decouple two economies over time.
Though the rise of China's military is definitely not the reason why economic decoupling and sanctions should be deeply considered.
It would take years (even decades) to duplicate ASML machines. At least in the absence of unprecedented tech transfer (most likely through hacking and HumInt work). It's no where near a foregone conclusion that banning ASML exports won't slow down SMIC's attempts to build leading edge nodes that get used to supply China's military.
That's not really how things work. You become powerful first through economic hegemony, and then you can assert military might.
That might have worked in the past but doesn't anymore as China actively counters this.
Selling them such machines will just bring short term production benefits to china and potentially gives them a chance to have it a bit easier to copy the technology.
But long term China will have it's own production methods and for it's military they will only use this sources. Currently they are at 28nm as far as I know. Which might be still quite a bit away from stat or the art but is already fairly useful for many use cases.
> tangling their economy up more with that of the West so that they have more reasons not to go to war
This strategy failed, China wasn't interested in becoming like the West. We're in a new cold war, it's time people wake up to this new reality.
Globalization is fine in some areas but when a generation can live off of pizza and burgers and yet have never tasted an Italian pizza or non-McDonalds style burger the world is a much poorer place. Everyone is turning into Americans. Asian Americans, Scandinavian Americans, etc.
For what it's worth, after chain restaurants become too dominant, the next level seems to be hipster burger joints, microbreweries and fusion cuisine restaurants.
America is far from perfect, so many things are broken it is insane, but to prefer to have a stronger Russia or China is bewildering to me. Everything that is bad about America is equally bad or worse in both of those places plus an undeniable loss of liberty. Cronyism, inequality, racism, imperialist tendencies, environmentalism, etc.
I'm not blind to the problems America has, but I've also lived in China and it boggles my mind that people think this way.
I don't agree at all that the things that are bad in the US are as bad or worse with those countries, first of all because it is a misunderstanding that it is "in the US" because the problem I was referring to with the US is outside the US.
The US is doing everything it can to control and dominate the world and we need a counterweight to stop this ASAP. It does much more harm than good. What happens inside US borders is another matter. The problem is when the US can do as it pleases which is basically what it is like today. I dislike Russia too but if Russia makes the US pause before invading a country or the PRC did the same it is a win in my book. The US is an extreme aggressor and someone need to force its fleets back where they belong and stop its political steamrolling.
Besides the problem of using its military to "make right" we are also seeing a death of culture because of Americanization. If half of huge US businesses were exchanged overnight to other strong nations businesses the world would become a better place. McDonald's and Disney doesn't belong outside the US as the dominant local business. Local burger and movies does. We live in a time where many children think American food and films are the norm, instead of something foreign, new and exotic as it should be. Every culture is becoming one culture. It smells a lot like something PRC does that the US is extremely critical about but is doing much more itself..
Of course I'd rather see the EU as a power that could put the US in its place but I'd also rather see Russia or PRC doing so if the alternative is no-one doing it.
ETA: Saying imperialist tendencies are worse in Russia and PRC than the US is mindboogling. Russia and PRC does a lot of bad things but they are light-years behind the US in imperialism.
Russia, in the last decade, annexed a region of another country. China is in the active process of annexing a region of the South China Sea for resources and using its newfound economic strength to project its power via the Belt and Road initiative.
I think you're focused on avoiding cultural hegemony to the actual detriment of the liberty of mankind. These are not countries that even pretend to have liberty as a core tenet - being an outspoken critic in both places is dangerous, Russia even flexed its power and killed people in the UK!
I'd rather eat McDonalds for the rest of my short, fat life than be at risk for being killed for being an outspoken critic of the government.
Or Robert E Lee: “it is good that war is terrible, otherwise men would grow fond of it.”
Your fondness seems obvious though. I think I will go with a current colloquialism: “Just stop.”
Austria-Hungary even produced steel and guns for their future enemy, the Royal Navy...
I hear the last thing standing in their way is the light source from Cymer (sp?).
It's likely the semiconductor industry will have moved on by then.
But this systems are not easily produced neither fastely so between ordering them and getting them over a year might pass.
More importantly just having them doesn't allow you to actually use them properly. They are in a way quite a "raw" tool and the exact details of how you use them make major differences. And even if you know the best way to use them, that still doesn't mean you know the best way to create chips with them. Because chip layout (in it's details) has to be designed to fit the production process. Not doing so will lead to bad yield and or bad max. perf clock etc. Sometimes just improving how you layout some things while still using the EUV system the same way can make a major difference.
So it's not easy at all to switch.
I'm still positive they will long term manage to do so.
But it will take some time.
Which is why some parts which are not to much of their core business but can largely profit from TSCMs manufacturing process will be produced by them. And maybe as a bonus they will learn a trick or two from TSCM.
Much of the industry was hoping something better would come along. But so far, it hasn't.
[1] https://strobe.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/STROBE_ASML-E...
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2008/081022/full/news.2008.1185....
Too bad we can't make x-ray leds.
Personally, I'm surprised that there aren't ways to generate this energy by nonlinear mixing of light from two lasers that are separated by the desired frequency.
If you have two lasers at about 700nm and 1000nm, and they 'start' at a synchronized point, then 7mm (7000nm) of emission later they'd have a repeat of the cycle begin again.
During that cycle the interference pattern would probably have an interesting shape, but I very much doubt it'd be useful for semiconductor production. Maybe a math or physics graduate could elaborate on if there's a name for this kind of pattern and if there are any uses I'm not aware of.
Actually most consumer oriented lasers (for example green lasers) work like this, but I don’t know if it works for frequencies as high as soft x-rays.
Corporations love excuses to differentiate (read: charge more, especially for local captive customers) for products. Big Pharma uses all sorts of US government programs to run interference for them - patents, import/export restrictions, legal buying requirements, etc - all to charge more for the US version of products they sell dirt cheap elsewhere.
Whatever "National Security" effect was present causing manufacturing to move overseas was dominated by maximizing profits: wringing savings out of the supply chain and lower labor costs. The result was predictable.
I see Intel's complaint about this a way to drum up or steer business their way, hobble their competitors that rely on Asian chip manufacturing, seek future government intervention to help them - or accomplish all of the above.
What many people which push it don't seem to realize is that such approaches undermine national and personal security and any benefits gained for it are likely outstripped by the long term drawbacks.
Drawbacks like making it easier for foreign actors to enact industry espionage or find ways to influence or blackmail people.
The idea of a government accessible backdoor which can't be accessed by foreign powers is just ridiculous. Especially if the access doesn't require physical access to the devices in question.
World War 2 was the most obvious example.
Spend-spend-spend should either be done through secured loans, or by the government receiving equity.
Insisting on stimulus of private industry without equity or interest is a great way to socialize losses and privatize gains, as they say.
According to the article Alcoa operated them as a contractor starting in 1956 but but later bought it outright from the govt in 1982.
The government can later sell the stake to a private party to balance out the books.
Occasionally I think about the tradeoff between municipal purchases that support the community (with expanding degrees of community) or which are the best for the task. Prior to EVs, for example, should parking enforcement be performed in a Prius to maximize long term TCO or should it use a GM/Ford/Dodge and keep money in the US.
At least in the US we've found that major global competitors control relatively critical roles in production of goods in the medical space. Who is responsible for quantifying the risk of being cut off from components?
Yeah, I'm showing my age but I'm reminded of a comparative ethos regarding developers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs
National security is not really a valid concern but could maybe be used to justify divestment from China. But that just means diversification of import partners. We could be building fabs in Mexico like we do with the auto industry. Or, as he's actually suggesting, europe.
I've been reading quite a bit of Dr Deming's thoughts recently and he had the view point that there should be corporation through out the supply chain, not just trying to squeeze every last penny. He felt it would be better for market and society as a whole.
All we seem to care about in the US is "jobs". Generic jobs. Working class low wage jobs. Whatever jobs gets the public off a politician's back.
Not a lot of focus on whether those are useful jobs in long run, or strategically important jobs. Or we seem to end up after "spend spend spend" with some new financial derivative products, people employed to buy/sell them to each other (paid handsomely), and people who are left on the sidelines who didn't get to participate mostly.
At least other countries (I'm looking at Asia), less free and dictatorial they may be, decide what industries to make a strategic national priority and go after it.
If Intel were to double down on their own fabbing and become a reasonable alternative to TSMC I think that would be great for everyone.
I remember years back when AMD became competitive with intel and then intel turned around and came out with fast cpus, and we had all kinds of choices.
I think the PC is a really good thing we don't want to lose it. When we have competition it is better for customers with more choices, and employees who actually have to compete, and there are standard interfaces new companies can develop for.
Honestly, what I worry about is Apple and their spiral into themselves and their closed ecosystem.
I think Apple was at their best when the adopted the PC architecture and interoperability made everything better.
Not so much in x86/x86_64 though. This ISA is a minefield of patents if you want to do anything state-of-the-art. AMD and Intel have mutual licencing agreements with each other, which prevents any upstarts from competing with them. Any competitors will have to license ARM or invest into RISC-V.
Pure and simple that is how you succeed.
That whole Intel diversity programme came from BK. And look at what it has done to Intel in that 4 years.
[1] Intel to Outsource Some Key CPU Production for 2023 Chips to TSMC https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-to-outsource-some-ke...
The company has to react both tactically and strategically. Short term, they may have to use overseas production while the domestic capability improves.
Second, every wafer that Intel fabs at TSMC is a wafer that AMD cannot fab at TSMC. Intel plays defense on pricing and supply by producing with TSMC.
Not to mention the greater market awareness that Intel gains by being a client of its competitor.
Eh, the whole set of FAANG plus Intel itself is based on American West Coast, and this guy's take is that so many chips being made in East Asia is not "palatable" for the world?
There's nothing wrong with saying "That's a large pie they're eating and we want a bigger slice for ourselves." We could do without this kind of self-serving pseudo-cosmopolitanism.
I would even say it is even more heavily dependent on the cellphone than the west.
But at the end of the day, that IS reality, and it's a systemic threat to both Europe and the US. The fact it's self-serving doesn't make the statement any less factually accurate or important.
Also with tensions rising there it is not good if 80% of the chips are being made in a war zone. And bad for everyone but China if China takes control of Taiwan.
I don't think any of these are value statements?
how tables have turned
Basically, do the right thing when it's easy to do, or even better, it directly benefits you.
I'm not an Intel hater, but this lack of ownership and deflection isn't something I like to see in CEOs.
Let's see Intel really take that gigantic mountain of cash they have and actually execute on this. Then we'll see.
Spending more cash isn't the problem. I know it's easy to blame the bean counters for everything, but in the chip-making business, today's problems are created 5 years ago, and if Bob did a good job, we'll see it years after his departure.
I think for many, they view Intel based upon how well they do running computer games and think the stock resolves around that when we have learned that their income streams are more widely spread.
As for alternative to TSMC, that gets down to getting ahead on nodes or when nodes get to a stage that they won't get any smaller. Also the work with IBM is interesting and whilst IBM left the FAB industry, they still do research and that combination may help Intel catchup or surpase the current cutting edge TSMC offer.
I do feel what Intel is going for is opening up their 14nm(insert plus signs to taste) as they shift their core onto the 10nm. They had a lot of investment in 14nm and milked it well, but now they have the opportunity to open that up and gain value from that instead of the usual retooling one node into a new node and some node changes will be more impacting and might well be the case. Let alone the downtime and then to get the plant particle free after all the work - very costly. So to cash in on that as is more and just build new plants from scratch can for the accountants become very much the right direction to go and that is how it seems to be. More so when politically getting subsidies to build new plants over retooling an existing one can make that option even cheaper.
However it is being driven, it's good for Intel and the industry as a whole as more choice. Equally I'm very interested in how Intel and IBM will collaborate and have a good feeling about all this.
The fab business isn’t great, tbh, because most of the money is in the value add.
Both sides will arm for war, mostly as a deturant and bargaining point.
Espionage at a corporate and nation state level will be used to erode the value of the problem; probably by every advanced nation state.
The other 21st century and beyond area of competition will be energy tech (of all sorts), because of that old science fiction meme of the only two things an advanced species need being space and energy.
Because of Arm's model there are many diverse ARM SoCs, and ARM is the leader in everything from wireless keyboards up to the fastest smartphones. ARM is also in the fastest supercomputer. In the areas of desktops and servers, ARM will keep gaining popularity because there will be many new ARM-based designs for every 1 produced by Intel or AMD. Intel will never catch up when they are competing against many excellent companies that are all sharing some of their code.
All those foundries based on old processes should be churning out at least equivalent (if not more capable) chips.
Heck, forget ESP32, is there a ESP8266 equivalent that's entirely made in the USA? Would love to use that instead - for many reasons.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/40_nm_lithography_process
Probably the only reason that line is still running would be validated long term stability products, or niche hardware designed with special application compatibility (E.G. radhard, higher end mil / aerospace concerns, maybe automotive).
Semiconductor tooling is rather expensive and I imagine that updating this to a more modern line would require overhauling and re-balancing many systems. It might help someone not familiar with the industry to imagine each technology node as an entirely new model of car.
But it's cheap, and MOQs are still achievable for mortals.
This is why.
There are way more reasons older litho processes persist beyond just them still making tons of money. 40nm for a microcontroller is rather impressive, given that the most are made with anything up to 180nm.
It takes more effort to design a chip with scaling down of geometries, lead times, and test samples are getting longer to get. Mask sets get more expensive. Less fabs are available to produce the chip. Some devices become unavailable at lower geometries.
And so on, and on...
If you are talking about ESP32 modules, there are still options but they are typically a bit more expensive, like $1-2 more last time I checked. However, there are ARM based wifi/bt modules that you can get as cheap as $1.50-$2.00 for an FCC certified one. Check out Fanstel BlueNor [1] as an example. The huge advantage being you get to use ARM tools instead of the Xtensa stuff, which depending on your workflows can be a definite plus (though I believe they recently added xtensa support in LLVM, so that might be a bit of a moot point).
They are definitely going to be difficult to compete with on the new ESP32-C3 line price-wise once they ramp it up though. At the end of the day though the ESP offerings have a bit of tradeoffs when you look at battery life and performance compared to other offerings. I believe they are working or may have fixed the power usage/sleep problems though on the C3s.
When it is all said and done though, I think the ESP32-C3 is going to probably take over the sub $1-2 IOT space, at the end of the day batteries are cheap and if you are designing your product to be plugged in... who cares.
What personally burns me with Espressif is they charge so much for their ICs. Like sometimes the modules are cheaper than the bare chips, even at 1k quantity, which is kinda irritating when you are space constrained.
Let me introduce you to this little thing called an H1B visa...
This isn't a one year project, this could be a 25 year project to get the entire pipeline from raw resource to a piece of silicon.
In my opinion the potential for a greater Pan-American economy is the number one counterargument to Chinese global dominance. We have almost everything we need, right here in the Americas.
https://www.tmf-group.com/en/news-insights/business-culture/...
https://www.tmf-group.com/en/news-insights/articles/2018/jun...
There's a threshold where it becomes near impossible to do business. I've seen laptops intended for employees... "disappearing" in customs. When a complaint was made, the reply was to not make a fuss, otherwise more laptops would sprout legs and run away.
Corruption also tends to come with lots of bureaucracy. At every level you have palms to grease. Things tend to take a while unless said palms (which sometimes change often) are properly and generously greased. Then you have different government agencies competing to get the... "funding" - and your company is caught in the crossfire. Good luck getting the components you need imported in a timely manner. That is, until you have finished setting up your... uh, "supply chain"? Which can take a while, because it's obviously all behind the scenes. Hope you have a good "guide".
In the end, you have a government that's working _against_ your company. They will (ironically enough) want to extract maximum value from you and your company. If the place is bad enough, your competitors won't be playing in a fair field either. It's not only how much you can offer, but who you know and what sort of dirt you have on them.
When corruption is really high, neither the police or the justice system will be fair to you. You better hope you have identified everyone that needs palm lubrication - otherwise, you know that particular judge you forgot about? Your competitor has them in their pocket.
Since the police in really corrupt places tend to be ineffective, another way a competitor can cripple your operations is to make you vanish. If it is a place where violent crime is common(not a bad assumption), then it was just another unfortunate statistic.
You don't really want that kind of "opportunity". It's not worth it to decrease taxation. If anything, you will be taxed just as much, except that's now off the books.
Not only you need stockpiles of cash, but you also need to understand the dynamics of the place you are trying to get into. Otherwise, you are just a wealthy(and clueless) mark.
Of course, said company would have to be based entirely in the target country. It couldn't be US-based with a foreign branch, otherwise anti-corruption laws would apply.
Source: born in a pretty corrupt country. Seen a fair amount of shady crap. Trust me, you don't want to deal with that stuff.
Brazil and Argentina feed China, benefit from China’s presence re: the US, and Buenos Aires is as far away from Miami as London is. Throw in the guay’s cause geography, and Bolivia because Bolivia, most of South America’s productive land isn’t counter arguing.
Because any reasonably committed extent of that economy ends at the Amazon, it’s just NAFTA + Colombia + Peru + Chile. Colombia’s a great get and arguably already in progress, but Chile is tiny and Peru is far.
The rest is some of the most picturesque, violent, non trivially developed (expensive!) tropical geography on earth that’s been in the pits for centuries even by extractive colonial standards for a reason, with the Caribbean part anchored by Cuba and Venezuela.
Total population addition less than Mexico, spread across a region the size of Australia, with the “easy” wins a 1000 miles away tucked into the Andes.
Our passenger rail sucks and our people are expensive. But significant manufacturing remains in the USA (yes, we manufacture more today than ever before, despite the hoopla about outsourcing). There's a reason for that: USA has some pretty good advantages if you know what to look for.
A lot of it is just arguing with ourselves over what to do. But if a consensus is reached, Americans can get it done pretty quickly. There's just so much discussion / debate / noise now.
Can't wait for when US will finally go 110% on green energy and dumping fossils.
Profit / rent-seeking and protectionism are the downfalls of my country (America). I identify that as the root fault of all of our social ills and inability to get work done outside of crisis and people with the right kind of crazy middle-finger to typical business interests drive to be the real life versions of our best superheros. I really do hope Elon Musk gets our species to building-across-the-street backup replication level.
There have been projects focused on securing Humanity's technological knowledge in case of a worldwide calamity like GitHub storing all its source code in microfilms, but I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization.
it "just" takes some years and heaping piles of money to replace them. though probably more if you're trying to replace them all at once, as there aren't a lot of folks who make the equipment to rebuild the fabs.
> It would take years to get more than half of a century of accumulated knowledge just from patents, and that's not even counting industrial secrets and all the economical machine needed to support such an industry.
sounds like you're more concerned about loss of the personnel and records, rather than the buildings.
> I can't think of any project entirely focused on building from scratch and kick-starting the industrial motor of modern civilization.
i mean, "world peace" is generally concerned with preventing it from being destroyed in the first place.
conventional wisdom is that taiwan bases a chunk of their national security on nobody wanting to see TSMC ruined.
You can't buy an economy. You'll need a petrochemical industry for example for all the insulators and other substances that go into the making of chips and you'll need mines for precious metals or recycle them from scratch and of course an energy industry. Just those few examples are their own are giant economical pyramids on their own rights, and would be very hard to replace even if most relevant university graduates made it alive to this point.
> sounds like you're more concerned about loss of the personnel and records, rather than the buildings.
I don't know you say this, I was more focused on the process as a whole on a macro scale.
> i mean, "world peace" is generally concerned with preventing it from being destroyed in the first place.
I never mentioned war in particular. Could be a solar flare, an asteroid, a plague (and look how we were prepared for this one).
That's a national defense-scale ambition, and it is akin to asking, "what are the minimal constraints to reproduce X tech tree with Y years steady state sustainability?" You're basically asking what it takes to establish an independent human colony without support from home.
The Long Now project is addressing a small sliver of the question by looking into what it takes to long-term sustainably perform some acts of information storage and dissemination.
Folks into preparedness kick the can on the problem, assuming some certain level of infrastructure remains to pick over the remains of to rebuild/restart. The ones who can hold out for 10-20 years independently before rebooting over the remains of civilization are considered extremely well-funded and hardcore, but their generations-spanning outlook is pretty dim. Even the primitive skills-oriented teams have no good solution to how to pass those skills onto future generations, other than bigger communities to spread the information loss risk, and these teams are typically too small (a couple dozen at most) to look into that direction for a solution.
But no one to my knowledge is working on the overall tech tree problem. Our entire civilization runs as a proprietary binary blob, with no reproducibility in the event of a DR incident.
Even if you "just" "settle" for "only" a 1940-era tech base, we're probably looking at a minimum 45.3M people to participate. The 1939 "Census of Manufactures" identified 453 separate industry classifications. Guesstimate 100,000 absolute minimum number of people per classification, and that's going to be a lowball number of active participants. Toss in dependents and families, plus ancillary support and we're probably around 60M minimum? US 1939 population was 130.9M, so I'm guesstimating we can't get away with less than 50% to create a sustainable "reaction", 66M in round numbers. I'd probably peg it around 75-80% for robustness, and take all the information encoding technology we have today to increase the density of knowledge and know-how per worker to increase the robustness and recovery speed simultaneously instead of decreasing the number of people in the enterprise. Even with the benefit of perfect 20/20 hindsight of what worked and what did not in the past 80 years, it will likely still be a long slog.
To give you a concrete glimpse into what "from scratch" entails, just look at the Gingery book series of what it takes to go from charcoal and scrap metal to a basic machine shop. Getting charcoal from bio-matter is a pretty straightforward task, if you've practiced it before. If you want to extend "scratch" to pulling ore and refining it, now the effort level gets to pretty large scales. Then coming up with refractory-grade clay. Don't forget how to feed yourself in the meantime. The complexity scale just to get beyond subsistence level from scratch is quite harrowing.
Civilization is the most complex artifact the human species has created to date. Re-creating it from scratch would be a pretty tall order that no one has yet to offer even a proof of concept upon. I do welcome discussion on how to solve this with alternatives.
The point is that it's not totally from scratch and there's a very good proportion that can be passed on easily and a lot of trial & errors and research doesn't have to be done again.
Mathematics can be learned with only books, important concept such as calculus doesn't have to be rediscovered. Major scientific discoveries don't have to be reinvented. Hard learned mistakes can be learned from History without making them. Prospected resources location can be saved and are static by nature.
Also assuming that nothing whatsoever will remain is unlikely. Any such project should provision a set of plans to accommodate multiple level of destruction from the Bronze Age to pre-WW2 technology.
Having some kind of roadmap with essential milestones like making concrete and the Haber process will save a lot of time. Disseminating the information in different ways such as stone tablets (like the Voyager Golden Record) to micro films could be done in a large scale for redundancy and could also be done for relatively cheap.
The catch is there is a world of difference between what is in written form and operational practice, and yet another world of difference in operational practice at scale. Most of what is unwritten in civilization are operational practice, and doing so at scale; most of that is encoded behind commercial enterprises' walled gardens of information.
As a concrete example, figure out what it would take to reconstruct the melt blown material manufacturing equipment. Or what it would take to construct an MDX lab. Or "just" a machine shop like Fireball Tools' capabilities. That kind of knowledge is extremely slow to percolate into an information transmissible form, if it ever makes it there. We don't have mind state capture and replay, unfortunately.
There is lots of material on an even "lower" tech base-oriented activity, small-scale farming and/or ranching. And out of the tens of thousands of people in the developed world every year who want to take the plunge to grow their own food, there is insufficient "cookbook" recipes they can follow to enable them to easily do so, and of the many who do take the plunge, most do not stick it out past five years.
People get a taste of this dynamic anytime they venture into hobbies that require some form of self-sufficiency, like hiking, camping, blue water sailing, and so on. The logistical tail to support those activities to where they can "launch" is quite extensive.
I agree infrastructure-damaging incidents are extremely unlikely to uniformly take out all supply chains across the board. But planning-wise, there is no way to tell which parts of infrastructure would be adversely affected. The best we have been able to do as a species is to route around the damage on a best effort basis, relying upon the diversity/redundancy of sourcing and logistical alternatives, like with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Suez Canal backlog.
As a "DR plan for civilization" posture however, that is insufficient. Like Microsoft Word, such a planner has to cater to lots of different scenarios (users), each with its own unique set of induced infrastructure gaps (requirements), ending up with a Franken-plan (Microsoft Word). It's not an easy or compact problem to solve as far as I can tell, though I'd be happy to be shown wrong. If we ever want to make off-world settlement a reality in the far future, then we have to solve this problem to some degree.
The thought has occurred to me that making such a plan too compact holds within it a dark pattern: if it is too accessible to too-small an entity, then it encourages elites with sufficient resources and megalomania to pursue their own ideations of a world created in their own image. I suspect without humaniform robots and GAI however, that won't become a possible reality. I believe the scale and complexity of mind states to transfer around (densities of which are limited by human lifespans and in the base case, available energy) to accomplish the goal dictates pretty large population requirements out of reach of all but combinations of developed-world nation-states.
It isn't all dire. We've solved this before, up to around the 17-18th century, arguably tapering off the competence around the 19th century. We haven't dusted off the outdated DR plan and updated it for our new "platform".
But I don't see why they would do it unless there was supplier issues.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/jobs-cook-iveblevins-the-rise-o...
Mr Intel chief there seems to have gone suddenly patriotic since they can't compete on technical merits at the moment.`
As for intel they need to get back on their game for leading edge nodes/processes.
I don't like nationalist arguments, but I do think it is a bad idea for critical tech to be concentrated in a single place. It would be good for there to be advanced manufacturing sites on all six populated continents owned by different countries.
past that, I don't really understand what there is to explain. if it would be good for everyone to have $1000, it would be even better (as an individual) to have $10000. assuming you care about money/chips/whatever. if you don't it obviously doesn't matter.
edit: ah, I see what you are really asking is "why should we care who wins a power struggle among the world's elite?". I guess maybe we shouldn't, but personally I'd rather be on the winning team, even if I think the "teams" are silly.
I am not convinced we even benefit much from these kinds of antics. We have a few more consumer goods, but fundamental goods (education, housing, medicine, food) are sky-high in price, there are few worker protections, and huge portions of the budget are dedicated to illegal military adventures. I think cooperating and sharing technology widely leads to a richer world.
There's a reason for this. Every time you pay money that goes into the community there's a higher chance for local prosperity.
If we start eating beets from China some beet farmer may be rich and his family will definitely be happy. But why not buy local beets that enriches our communities.
So at some point Sprouts made the decision to instead of buying beets from a Chinese farmer, they will buy them from a local one. However Sprouts, as a national chain of grocery stores, could have decided one day to just make an extra $1 Billion by selling MOSTLY out of country food. They don't do this for 2 reasons - fear of backlash that all the food is from China and 2 these people do actually understand the local connection.
For some reason this logic does not translate to silicon valley companies. Those companies have made the choice that because of the price difference, it's best to buy it from far away. When you look at everything that's going on in the USA - the deep divides between rich and poor, between left and right - most of that is BECAUSE of economic inequity. If we fix the economic inequity, a lot of political shit will just go away. We have a reason to fight because things AREN'T going so well. Everyone has a different fix.
I personally think the fix is to come up with policy that Sprouts has: BUY LOCALLY GROWN.
The main reason we hear about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is because those rich execs at Walmart and tech companies are paying people in China, India and wherever else they can pay the lowest possible price and resell it to Americans. It makes perfect sense why the 1% is becoming richer and richer. And raising taxes on them isn't the answer - it's to stop the exporting of American dollars to sell shit to Americans. Duh?!
If you wanted to get really out there, I wonder if it would be possible to place certain capabilities under international control. I think this is already the case with the ITER fusion project, we don't usually do this with commodities.
Because every geopolitical competitor is keeping their own secrets. Makes no sense to disadvantage yourself when your peer and near-peer competitors aren't.
I mean, he’s not saying Intel have a better product, because they don’t.
Eh.
To me, this suggests Gelsinger is confident in the company’s ability to get their 7nm-and-beyond processes back on track and become competitive once again.
Or it may suggest that the company wants to say anything to reassure investors that it will change course and stop losing market share. I wouldn't read any particular guarantee into these statements.
I hope for the semiconductor industry’s sake they really are getting 7nm back on track this time, and that this new manufacturing business will be competitive. Perhaps that’s unrealistic to expect given their track record lately, but at least Gelsinger seems to deserve more confidence than Swan.
He didn't. Asia is a continent, and it's no different than saying the biggest consumer of hot dogs is North America.
I'm Asian, fwiw.
Since you missed third grade geography, the other continents in addition to Asia are Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, and recently discovered to be its own continent, Zealandia
Good try though, projecting your own racism onto the topic at hand while simultaneously revealing incredible ignorance
In the US, I think people often use “Asian” to euphemistically refer to people they used to call Orientals. The latter term is considered problematic. The new term hasn’t improved their treatment, though.
I think the "India" prefix in the terminology you mentioned and the fact that euphemistic American "Asian" including only East/Sountheast Asians indicate that there is a widely recognized and practical distinction between the groups, which also aligns with the UN definition, despite both partly sharing the literal expression.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_geoscheme_for_A...
I wonder why that is; while at the same time, Kamala Harris is widely considered the first Asian American Vice President, because her mother is a Tamil American (as am I).
According to...?
And if it's not a continent, what is it?
> “other worlds that don’t speak Indo-European languages”
There are hundreds of Indo-European languages spoken in Asia. One of them (Hindi) is the 4th most common first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish, and English[1]. (I'm actually surprised Arabic isn't higher on that list but maybe the various regional variants count as different languages?)
I'm not sure where you're getting your geography and linguistics information from.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...
“Continent” refers to single contiguous land encircled by seawater, that aren’t islands, at least as I think of the word.
> where you're getting your geography
It’s 7:45 now where I am.
To the best of my knowledge, you are literally the only person who uses that definition. By that definition Asia, Europe, and Africa would be a single continent. North and South America would be a single continent. What school did you go to that they taught you there are 4 continents in the entire world?
Isn't that six? Eurasia, Africa, Australia, North America, South America, and Antarctica, with India noted as "sub-continent" and Asia sometimes distinguished within Eurasia by mountain ridges.
These are joined together by land, and are not individually encircled by sea. The Panama Canal doesn't count, as it is manmade and would silt up if not maintained.
> Eurasia, Africa
Ditto. The Suez Canal doesn't count either.
As for wine, wine isn't as fundamental/crucial to modern civilization as computer chips and oil.
> It also needs more geographically balanced supply. Today there's a heavy bias to Asia. And as we've seen, coming out of some of the disruptions and challenges, the world needs US and European supply in a more balanced way. It's the right thing for the global supply chain requirements, for both commercial as well as for government and defence use as well.