Competition is great, but also in this case geographical redundancy; having the entire world depend on chips produced in one of the world's most likely military hotspots is terrifying.
Still pretty amazing that there's basically one global top-tier chip supply chain, with hundreds of companies, some of which are sole-source at the scale of 6-12mo+. ASML is as much a bottleneck as TSMC.
Yes, this is _one_ of the reasons I think TSMC is fairly safe from doomsday theories like China trying to cut it off from the world. Because that would risk it being cut of from ASML, and they are unlikely to be anywhere close to making their own machines before grinding to a halt.
Short term, it's mutually assured fabrication destruction; Long term, the world needs more redundancy and competition in both areas.
I think the idea was that China cutting off TSMC would prevent TSMC from accessing ASML fab tools and maintenance, which would quickly degrade TSMC capabilities.
Edited to specify China as the one who would potentially cut off TSMC from the rest of the world, which would also cut off ASML->TSMC.
At this time, US sanctions cover even NXT:1980Di (Netherlands will be soon pressured to do the same). That is from 2016 and is least advanced DI ASML still makes.
Well, SMEE is rumored to have 28 nm already. China isn't going to get EUV lithography because the US is not going to give them that. ASML can't sell them those machines because the US controls their EUV license and makes the rules.
But the majority of chips they need can be built on this process if they have it. They don't need ASML if they got here. And they can't have ASML's new stuff.
FWIW, that's about where Intel was 14-15 years ago. That's a reasonable process for lots of logic chips, but not for modern mobile devices or datacenter machine learning engines.
Yep but it's a huge leap forward if indigenous. They can get to 22 nm from there which is enough for the majority of microchips.
ASML is only relevant to them if they need to get to present day GPUs and mobile devices (as you said) and I don't think that's that important for their needs. But even if it is relevant they have no access to ASML tech because ASML only has that because the basic research is US-owned and the USG will enforce their export controls on ASML and will enforce that critical components are made here so playing nice with Taiwan won't get China any closer to EUV lithography.
Not clear to me that it's "indigenous". They're surely buying lots of ASML and TEL and AMAT tools like everyone else is, just not the fancy new EUV stuff they can't get. Absolutely it would be news if China was generating 28nm chips with a 100% domestic industrial base. But I don't think that's the case?
ASML machines can presumably be rendered largely worthless remotely through firmware (or by being forced to operate out of design spec for a while, causing physical damage), and I have to assume TSMC/Taiwan/US have that stuff pre-rigged (physically or software), too.
These are some of the cleanest rooms on the face of the planet. These processes are ultra-sensitive to any kind of physical disturbance, dirt, etc. These individual machines are hand-assembled by ASML on-location.
TSMC under peacetime conditions has issues obtaining acceptable yields on this equipment. In an armed conflict, there will be no operation at all, much less one that requires a Stuxnet-style attack to shut down.
We're going to get that. We only have a handful of nodes left, so every geopolitically relevant region is scrambling to have last leading edge fabs on their soil for defense use cases if nothing else.
My guess is that US, China, and Taiwan will all have essentially equivalent fabs, Korea and the EU will have what look like cheaper versions until everyone figures out that they don't have the yields the promise and so it's actually more expensive but propped up by .gov money (even more than the first group).
I wouldn't be surprised to see another one shared by Brazil, India, South Africa (and maybe Russia) that kind of works, enough for low volume defense projects.
I think it a testament to the collectively perceived value of semiconductors. I'm saying IMO no matter where in the world the fabs were that place would be a military hotspot. the miltary hotspotness will follow the top of the line fabs
additionally, I take it as evidence of the perceived value that people gone to great lengths to avoid widespread proliferation of this techniques because scarcity is a value amplifier. so by keeping it scarce its value increases.
so if I'm correct, if/when there are multiple comparable fabs in multiple parts of the world the geopolitical risks should go down in taiwan
finally, having typed it out, I feel my whole argument is wrong...
> I think it a testament to the collectively perceived value of semiconductors.
Taiwan has been a subject to threat of invasion for a long time before TSMC was a thing.
A short while ago Intel had the best fabs and CPU chips. Nobody thought another country invading USA was plausible.
> so if I'm correct, if/when there are multiple comparable fabs in multiple parts of the world the geopolitical risks should go down in taiwan
No. Taiwan has for decades been a point of geopolitical tension between powers around in Pacific (which currently is US and China). The existence of TSMC makes the rest of the world care more (or scared more), but the PRC isn't just going to give up its decades long goal of taking over Taiwan because there's another TSMC somewhere else (or even in mainland China).
I feel like it would be a lot harder for China's military to target a fab in landlocked Arizona than one in an island nation 100 miles off the coast of Xiamen.
growing up, I remember visiting and touring AMD in high school through some youth technology summit. It felt like AMD were these tiny little Davids against this absolutely enormous Intel goliath. How did the dominance ratio shift so dramatically?
That article is based on ridiculous assumptions of future energy consumption growth, and was probably created as a joke. Which backfired since it got seriously quoted in so many places.
In theory if you used the power and radiated it to space (via laser, RF, etc) you’d be ok. You could even use also use that energy to put into rotational energy to increase the earths rotational speed
Sure. And you will transfer no entropy, so this cannot be used to cool the Earth.
SF authors (like David Brin) have screwed up on this very topic.
Lasers can be used for cooling, by shining a laser on a target carefully set up so that anti-Stokes scattering carries away entropy. The light scattered is quite incoherent, though.
You have to be very careful of Maxwell's Demon when it's a question of entropy: how efficient is that laser? How does the efficiency change when it is in a heat bath of X kelvin?
There may be some neat tricks, this is an area I know I'm not good at, but you have to be very careful.
Great to see Microsoft deploying some of it's capital to develop SMRs, the potential seems great, but governments don't seem to have gone further than nuclear submarines.
Tooting or Elephant & Castle? Even the new design of E&C is terrible last time I looked, as ambiguous and confusing with little time to get into the right place
I agree. It's not too bad heading east to west because there is a seperated cycle path (although, it can cause issues with pedestrians and the bus stops). However, basically any other direction is awful - particularly going from Blackfriars towards Camberwell.
What really frustrates me is E&C has a lot of space. I'm not a city planner but you'd think having the room to fully seperate each form of transport would make it easy to improve.
All you did is kneecapped your app to have lower performance so it fits under your arbitrary limit. Hardly what most people describe as “best” - only useful in small percentage of usecases (like reselling compute)
Gains by what metric? Are you sure you didn't trade in better latency for worse overall throughput? Also, sure you didn't hit one of many CFS overaccounting bugs which we've seen a few? Have you compared performance without the limit at all?
Previously we had no limit. We observed gains in both latency and throughput by implementing Automaxprocs and decided to roll it out widely.
This aligns with what others have reported on the Go runtime issue open for this.
"When go.uber.org/automaxprocs rolled out at Uber, the effect on containerized Go services was universally positive. At least at the time, CFS imposed such heavy penalties on Go binaries exceeding their CPU allotment that properly tuning GOMAXPROCS was a significant latency and throughput improvement."
