I know it’d be expensive, but I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram. They’ve certainly got the money to get it started, they are getting heavy into hardware that they can use it in, and they could sell it as well.
I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
In a nutshell this is impossible because of how the global supply chain works. Specifically how most of the hardware engineers/factories are in Taiwan, and how the technology to make chips is proprietarily owned by a company in Norway.
Like the whole reason China wants Tiawan in the first place is the same reason they can’t just bomb them into submission… Their population of highly skilled hardware engineers that fundamentally make the global chips supply chain possible is impossible to replace.
And China also can’t really invade because all the facilities that make the silicon are rigged to self destruct if China puts boots on their soil, at least last I heard.
I mean, it would bring global tech to a standstill. It would be a significant problem. Once existing stuff broke, there would be no replacement. I know very little about chip manufacture, except that the lithography machines are fantastically complex and costly. It would probably take years to spin up new production.
This seems like a pretty solid mutually assured destruction deterrent and doesn’t even involve nukes.
You have clearly and concisely explained the exact reason the US wouldn’t and couldn’t allow China to invade Taiwan (well, wouldn’t under a rational administration).
The actual process of creating semiconductors is basically:
Etch a stencil that has the pattern you want.
Place the stencil over a piece of silicon.
Bombard the silicon and stencil with radiation so that the chemical properties of the silicon change exactly under that stencil.
Repeat the process with multiple other stencils, so that the resulting silicon has basically shapes of wires and logic gates that can perform different functions with the electricity running through those shapes.
In recent years, step 3 has gotten so complicated, based on needing to create radiation of exactly a particular wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light focused exactly on the silicon (and the mask/stencil above it), because that wavelength allows for the smallest possible features on the silicon. So they take purified tin, melt the tin into molten liquid, and ejecting the molten tin in a liquid jet downward into a vacuum at exactly the right speed to where it forms into droplets of the exact size for the machine (about 50 μm), then blasts each droplet, mid-fall, with a 1.6kW laser that heats it up so hot that it vaporizes and ionizes into plasma at the exact position where a system of highly polished and precisely positioned mirrors focuses the UV radiation evenly onto the silicon surface.
Oh, and the machine makes one tin droplet every 1/50,000 of a second, so in any given second it ionizes 50,000 droplets in the stream.
The machine costs something like $300 million, and requires full time experts to make sure that it’s working correctly.
Everything else in the fabrication facility is similarly complicated, which is why a fab represents something like $30 billion in total costs over its lifetime.
I know it’d be expensive, but I wonder if it’d be worth it to valve to start producing ram. They’ve certainly got the money to get it started, they are getting heavy into hardware that they can use it in, and they could sell it as well.
I don’t know if there’s a shortage of raw material or if no one wanted to invest in more manufacturing when AI could crash within a short time.
In a nutshell this is impossible because of how the global supply chain works. Specifically how most of the hardware engineers/factories are in Taiwan, and how the technology to make chips is proprietarily owned by a company in Norway.
Like the whole reason China wants Tiawan in the first place is the same reason they can’t just bomb them into submission… Their population of highly skilled hardware engineers that fundamentally make the global chips supply chain possible is impossible to replace.
And China also can’t really invade because all the facilities that make the silicon are rigged to self destruct if China puts boots on their soil, at least last I heard.
Would be brilliant
I mean, it would bring global tech to a standstill. It would be a significant problem. Once existing stuff broke, there would be no replacement. I know very little about chip manufacture, except that the lithography machines are fantastically complex and costly. It would probably take years to spin up new production.
This seems like a pretty solid mutually assured destruction deterrent and doesn’t even involve nukes.
You have clearly and concisely explained the exact reason the US wouldn’t and couldn’t allow China to invade Taiwan (well, wouldn’t under a rational administration).
Manufacturing their own sticks would onlympush the problem to the price of RAM chips.
The resources it takes to start manufacturing modern RAM chips is such that THE ENTIRE FUCKING NATION OF CHINA is finally getting around to it.
I know Valve is a big company, but that’s a pretty bite to chew and swallow.
My undiagnosed adhd brain: how difficult can in be
The actual process of creating semiconductors is basically:
In recent years, step 3 has gotten so complicated, based on needing to create radiation of exactly a particular wavelength of extreme ultraviolet light focused exactly on the silicon (and the mask/stencil above it), because that wavelength allows for the smallest possible features on the silicon. So they take purified tin, melt the tin into molten liquid, and ejecting the molten tin in a liquid jet downward into a vacuum at exactly the right speed to where it forms into droplets of the exact size for the machine (about 50 μm), then blasts each droplet, mid-fall, with a 1.6kW laser that heats it up so hot that it vaporizes and ionizes into plasma at the exact position where a system of highly polished and precisely positioned mirrors focuses the UV radiation evenly onto the silicon surface.
Oh, and the machine makes one tin droplet every 1/50,000 of a second, so in any given second it ionizes 50,000 droplets in the stream.
The machine costs something like $300 million, and requires full time experts to make sure that it’s working correctly.
Everything else in the fabrication facility is similarly complicated, which is why a fab represents something like $30 billion in total costs over its lifetime.
That’s freaking crazy