this post was submitted on 21 May 2024
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Ok winnie the pooh, like they are going to tell you
"The whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"
You need to watch Dr. Strangelove or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb by Stanley Kubrik friend.
Or, this sounds like tactical planning in case of an invasion, to prevent access of valuable resources to the invaders. Making it "need to know" makes perfect sense.
Probably wiping process control code from the systems that contain tons of fiddly hard to find constants and other information.
Well that's less fun than detcord or mission impossible style self-immolating electronics.
What would be better is polluting the software with invalid but still plausible constraints, so the chips would seem OK and might work for days or weeks but would fail in the field... especially if these chips are used in weapon systems or critical infrastructure.
I'm really hoping for thermite. A lot of thermite.
They could probably overload the circuitry to make it unusable. Or use like, IDK, mini explosives?
I would like to think we're further away from losing most modern technology than the world's only chip factory getting struck by lightning but the world is a fickle place I guess
There are something like a hundred chip factories across the world. TSMC itself has around 20 (mostly in Taiwan). One dying would definitely raise prices, but we won't be losing 'most modern technology'. And of course they'd have lightning cables; they aren't idiots.
They develop IC on iPhones?!!
Yes, TSMC makes the chips for iPhones, as well as Snapdragon processors used by many (but not all) high-end Android phones. Samsung has their own factory in South Korea, and Huawei has theirs in mainland China. Further, low-end smartphones and most dumbphones use Unisoc chips that are made in China.
As for desktop computers, Intel has factories in the US, and AMD (GlobalFoundries) in Germany and Singapore.
First of all, it's not the "world's only chip factory". Maybe for some bleeding edge node like 2 nm, but most photolithography systems use larger feature sizes. Secondly, lightnings haven't been an issue anymore for more than a hundred years now.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fire-destroys-ovhclouds-sbg2-data-center-strasbourg/
🤷
What happened if... purely hypothetically... China develops competitive chip fabrication plants that exports at scales rivalrious to Taiwan.
And then fear of an invasion provokes detonation of Taiwan's own facilities.
Wouldn't this turn China into a domestically source monopoly of high end chips?
It's easier said than done. A few key pieces took decades to figure out and even now many can only be produced by one or two companies, like ASML.
Not about actually needing a reason to invade, it's about the implication
The US will rebuild their chip manufacturing somewhere else
lol, where?
We are nowhere near supplying chip demands for the US domestically, lol.
They have some parts of the supply chain in ROK, and they could move to Vietnam but they would likely want to be further away from China
It’s extremely inconvenient but it’s more convenient than going to war with China
But Intel has long since fallen behind the pack of semiconductor manufacturers. If they could just do their own Taiwanese foundry, they'd have done it by now and reaped comparable boosts in revenue.
As it stands, China is the majority manufacturer of semiconductors - responsible for more than half of all chips produced - because they're building foundries far faster and at higher quality than their American peers at Intel.
Taiwan is the only country keeping pace with China. Losing them would only strengthen the Chinese export market.
The Rise of China GPU Makers: AI and Tech Sovereignty Drive New GPU Entrants
Taiwan is part of the US’s chip manufacturing supply chain
They already are, Intel is building new foundries in NA with government funding specifically for the purpose of not relying on Taiwan for chips. The problem though is TSMC has the smallest and most efficient chip dies, so everyone wants those chips, Intel still has a ways to catch up.