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Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

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Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#551
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Taiwan is taken off the board for semiconductors, or if all semiconductors have to go through China, that means the entire US military (and all western militaries) are dependent on a geopolitical rival. To allow that would be nothing short of giving away the game.

This is what I don't get. I thought military and aerospace used decades old cpu designs on decades old fab technology for the radiation hardness? Not saying they couldn't benefit from an upgrade, but it's not like Lockheed is putting Nvidia GPUs in fighter jets, right? It doesn't seem like a deal breaker to use a 14nm node compared to a '5nm' node (or whatever is the latest TSMC process). Seems like a weird line to d…

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Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#552
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it do little to diversify these fabs? The current situation is that if China invades Taiwan, the entire Western world is compelled to engage militarily over Taiwan's high end chip fabs. It cannot be overstated how much we depend on that, if TSMC operates in other countries, we don't HAVE to engage in WW3.

The western world would not be compelled to engage militarily over Taiwan. We'd only need to provide money and weapons to Taiwan (rank #21 military in the world) to hold off China (#3) indefinitely given the fact that Taiwan is incredibly difficult to invade due to the barrier the mountain ridges form around it and the narrow straight leading to it for a sea attack. It's a natural fortress. Look at the ongoing failur…

Whoever ends up controlling Taiwan will have a lot of destroyed factories on their hands. Losing 90% of advanced integrated processor output is world changing by itself. Besides the fact that military analysis done by us news spectators is a vain exercise.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Tbh its constantly surprising why Americans view the CCPs zero-covid policy as a failure. Even the most pessimistic reports (based on actual facts, not tabloid-driven wishful thinking) acknowledges that China has avoided at least 2 million+ deaths through their zero covid policy. Is the right to life no longer a human right? Or have a lot of us so internalized anti-China propaganda that we're no longer able…

Sweden did not enforce any lockdowns and managed to have a lower death rate than France which enforced many punitive measures on its population. I therefore hardly think your reports are true, or right. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

Are you honestly comparing France's relatively lackadaisical lockdowns to that of China (where entire cities experienced total lockdowns, with households only being allowed to send out 1 person to get food)?

And using Covid deaths per million global stats:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

The data on the linked page above shows that China has a Per Capita covid death rate of 10.8 per million, while that of France is 2,115.56 deaths per million. Even if you were to take the side of the tin-foil hat conspiracists and multiply China's covid death rate by a factor of 10, France would still have a covid death rate that's 20 times (20 TIMES!) that of China.

The only Western country with a lower covid death rate than China is New Zealand, which has an astonishingly low covid death rate of 0.2 deaths per million - solely because for much of the duration of the pandemic, NZ literally shut itself off from the world, and only opened up a few months ago.

The remaining countries with low covid related death rates are poor African & Asian countries - either due to a nonexistent medical infrastructure that does not permit them to keep accurate infection/hospitalization/death records or because the vast majority of poor countries have a significantly young population with relatively robust immune systems due to repeated exposure to illness causing pathogens.

The other wealthy/developed countries on that list that are nearest to China are the UAE & Qatar, both with 236 and 238 covid related deaths per million respectively, Japan with 250 covid deaths per million, and Singapore with 252 deaths per million.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#554

We've reached or are approaching "peak tech". The other day we were discussing Pablo Azar, "Computer Saturation and the Productivity Slowdown" (Federal Reserve Bank of New York Liberty Street Economics, October 6, 2022) [1] Simply reinventing systems and deliberately obsoleting stuff to create fake demand is over. The metaverse isn't hoing to happen. People are fatigued with tech. We're entering a different era in wh…

My laptop is a 1000x the power of the one I had 15 years ago yet I am still stuck with the same hourglass due to shit, bloated and over-complex software stacks. Tell me I'm at peak tech when this is no longer the case.

I'm with you. The previous sentiment is similar to 35mb of RAM is all you'll ever need. Instead computers are a "build it and they will come" paradigm. Hardware innovation happened in the US when it was cheap and accessible. Not it happens in Shenzhen, where it is cheap and accessible. Programming innovation accelerated when computers became cheap and accessible. I don't see us slowing down anytime soon because you can literally put a computer in anything, and people are trying. Cheaper and more powerful chips just means we can expand into more domains.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My laptop is a 1000x the power of the one I had 15 years ago yet I am still stuck with the same hourglass due to shit, bloated and over-complex software stacks. Tell me I'm at peak tech when this is no longer the case.

There's no way this is true. You simply aren't accurately remembering the actual experience of using that laptop 15 years ago. For starters, the laptop 15 years ago was using a spinning rust hard disk, so everything was much slower compared to today's lightning fast SSD. I remember when it used to take minutes to boot up a laptop and launch a few applications, and it took almost that long to resume from hibernation.…

I think they are in agreement and retorting the gp who said we are at peak computing. Clearly we aren't if their programs are not launched instantly. Clearly there is room for improvement.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused by this take. Who is threatening Japan with cruise missiles? Certainly not China or Russia. North Korea, perhaps. The primary reason that we're concerned about semiconductor fab concentration in Taiwan is that China has consistently stated that it is going to invade Taiwan at some point (and that could be 2049 or in a few years for all we know). This is completely outside of any hypothetical scenarios of…

> I'm confused by this take. Who is threatening Japan with cruise missiles? Certainly not China or Russia. North Korea, perhaps. Countries that have actively threatened Japan with nuclear bombs: China, Russia, North Korea, and the US (which literally dropped a bomb but have yet to make threats since).

Okay? Put some dates on those, because you know damn well WWII is irrelevant to the question of current threats.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#557
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is bonkers, indeed! Yet, it is EXACTLY what Xi repeatedly said in his new-term-inauguration speech The dictator of China has effectively declared, as publicly as possible, and very specifically, that he intends to invade Taiwan if it does not willingly abandon it's democracy and come under China's rule He obviously thinks he can get away with doing so without consequences, including those you suggest. Yet, lea…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning

That's great — China issued over 900 "Final Warnings" about US military presence in the Taiwan Straits, and zero of them had any follow-through.

That gives us good reason to hope that China will keep behaving that way. We can keep up the deterrence, China can keep on blustering, and nothing bad actually happens. That would indeed be a great result.

Indeed, seems like a most likely scenario.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#558
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is bonkers, indeed! Yet, it is EXACTLY what Xi repeatedly said in his new-term-inauguration speech The dictator of China has effectively declared, as publicly as possible, and very specifically, that he intends to invade Taiwan if it does not willingly abandon it's democracy and come under China's rule He obviously thinks he can get away with doing so without consequences, including those you suggest. Yet, lea…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning

Except, PRC "Final Warnings" has preluded actual war or near actual war with every NPT nuclear state, a few times when PRC wasn't (or not meaningfully) a nuclear power herself, on issues much less important than TW, when PRC was much more militarily weak than it is now. This includes USSR skirmishes (hence why the Soviet meme is stupid), US+UN in Korea, threatening UK over HK handover, secretly shelling French in Vietnam, multiple TW strait crisis. To add insult to injury, with respect to source of this meme, PRC "final warnings" throughout this period shot down 5 U2s, that's 3 more than USSR. So not only was PRC following up with warnings, but they managed to do so more successfully than USSR.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#559
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that that is anti-vaxxer slang, I think it is just a Britishism. Indeed I believe their govt calls it a jab.

May be cultural differences then. In the US and Canada the anti vaxxers will pejoratively refer to the vaccine as “the jab” or taking it as “getting the jab”

All sorts of people have called getting a vaccine "getting the jab" for decades. It isn't some secret code for "I don't believe that vaccines are safe"

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#560
post #493
post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My laptop and iPhone are fast enough… I can’t believe some people would risk a nuclear war over not having the latest iPhone next year.

The latest electronic gadget is NOT what it is about It is whether the democracies of the world will abandon democracy and allow dictators to take over their societies by threat of force or force. If we are not both better armed, better prepared, and willing to fight, we might as well hand over the key to Putin, Xi, and Un, and live under their dictatorships. If we want freedom, we must risk war, and if the threat is…

I agree with you. But people don't care about democracy and freedom anymore. Not like they used to, anyway.
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