It would be a sad thing but not as sad as everything else that would happen in a war.
Could they eventually replicate a CMOS technology? No one doubts this, but the latest lith process took how many years to develop, and only one company makes those machines anywhere in the world? Nearly microscopic molten tin droplets being flattened mid-air so that it can radiate a particular wavelength of UV?
That's not something they'll have up and running again in 6 months, and if it were lost, regression to other technologies would be difficult or impossible too. We might have to start from scratch, so to speak.
Vacuum tubes are still made. They’re used extensively in instrument amplification.
But I think this bolsters your point!
Another view on this topic is https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law
If Taiwan ceased to exist, that would put us a decade back.
The gap isn't a decade, more like 12-18 months.
Also, TSMC has 5nm production in the US. There are actual people with know how of this process in the US.
Other companies are using the same equipment (Samsung and Intel) but TSMC has deeper expertise and got more out of the same equipment so far.
The nvidia dgx b200 is already selling for half a million. The nearest non tsmc produced competitor doesn’t come close. Imagine no more supply!
TSMC is running a successful business but they're not the only customers of ASML.
The few industries that push computing out of need would suffer. Certain kinds of research, 3D modeling.
But most of what we use computers for in offices and our day-to-day should work about as well on slightly beefed up (say, dual or quad CPU) typical early ‘90s gear.
We’re using 30 years of hardware advancements to run JavaScript instead of doing new, helpful stuff. 30 years of hardware development to let businesses save a little on software development while pushing a significant multiple larger than that cost onto users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
Its so easy to think of them as lasting forever
Something would need to happen to stop / prevent production for about 30 - 60 years.
Thats roughly equivalent to the Saturn V engine, and Codename FOGBANK which are the 2 examples of technologies that had to be reverse engineered after the fact.
Hypothetically we might choose to stop making new ones if demand dried up significantly.
It could be the case that we finally hit a sold wall in CPU progress, cloud providers demand something they dont have to replace every few years, and the result is some kind of everlasting gobstopper CPU.
Then as failures fall off, so does demand, and then follows production.
A pretty large drop in global population might see the same result. Labor needs to be apportioned to basic needs before manufacturing.
we already had a sci-fi story, where humanity forgot all beatles songs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JlxuQ7tPgQ
If you turn off any manufacturing line, your company forgets really quickly how to make what that line made. GE discovered this when they tried to restart a water heater line in Appliance Park.
Remington apparently has no idea what the blueing formula was they used in their original 1911s.
Colt lost the ability to handfit revolvers.
generally the true problems in life aren’t forgetting how to manufacture products that are the key to human life.
You can replace known likely culprits preemptively, assuming you can get parts. But dendritic growths aren’t yet a problem for most old stuff because the feature sizes are still large enough. No one really knows what the lifetime of modern 5/4/3nm chips is going to be.
Really depends on brand and purpose but consumer hardware switches do die pretty frequently.
But if you bought something like a C2960 fanless switch I would expect it to outlive me.
So, no.
> Z-Day + 15Yrs
> The “Internet” no longer exists as a single fabric. The privileged fall back to private peering or Sat links.
If you can't make CPUs and you can't keep the internet up, where are you going to get the equipment for enough "private peering or Sat links" for the privileged?
> Z-Day + 30Yrs
> Long-term storage has shifted completely to optical media. Only vintage compute survives at the consumer level.
You need CPUs to build optical media drives! If you can't build CPUs you're not using optical media in 30 years.
> The large node sizes of old hardware make them extremely resistant to electromigration, Motorola 68000s have modeled gate wear beyond 10k years! Gameboys, Macintosh SEs, Commodore 64s resist the no new silicon future the best.
Some quick Googling shows the first IC was created in 1960 and the 68000 was released in 1979. That's 19 years. The first transistor was created in 1947, that's a 32 year span to the 68k. If people have the capacity and need to jump through hoops to keep old computers running to maintain a semblance of current-day technology, they're definitely f-ing going to have been able to repeat all the R&D to build a 68k CPU in 30 years (and that's assuming you've destroy all the literature and mind-wiped everyone with any knowledge of semiconductor manufacturing).
Storage. You only need a few hundred working systems to keep a backbone alive. Electron migration doesn’t kill transistors if they are off and in a closet.
> You need CPUs to build optical media drives! If you can't build CPUs you're not using optical media in 30 years.
You don’t need to make new drives; there are already millions of DVD/Bluray devices available. The small microcontrollers on optical drives are on wide node sizes, which also make them more resilient to degradation.
> they're definitely f-ing going to have been able to repeat all the R&D to build a 68k CPU in 30 years (and that's assuming you've destroy all the literature and mind-wiped everyone with any knowledge of semiconductor manufacturing).
If you read the post, the scenario clearly states “no further silicon designs ever get manufactured”. It’s a thought experiment, nothing more.
This kind of just breaks the thought experiment, because without the "why?" of this being vaguely answered, it makes no sense. How do you game out a thought experiment that starts with an assumption that humanity just randomly stops being humanity in this one particular way? What other weird assumptions are we meant to make?
Also, the 10k years lifespan for MC68000 processors seems suspect. As far as I can see, the 10,000 figure is a general statement on the modelled failure of ICs from the 60s and 70s, not in particular for the MC68000 (which is at the tail end of that period). There are also plenty of ICs (some MOS (the company, not the transistor structure) chips come to mind) with known-poor lifespans (though that doesn't reflect on the MC68000).
It ain't ever going to happen because people can write these things called books. And computer organization and architecture books already exist and there are many 10k's copies of them. What should be captured in modern computer organization books is applied science aspects of the history until now and the tricks that made Apple's ARM series so excellent. The other thing is TSMC needs to document fab process engineering. Without the capture of niche, essential knowledge they become strategic single points of failure. Leadership and logic dictate not allowing this kind of vulnerability to fester too deeply or too long.
The problem wouldn’t be missing CPUs but infrastructure. Power would be the big one, generators, substations, those sorts of things. Then manufacturing, lot of chips go there. Then there is all of healthcare.
Lots of important chips everywhere that aren’t CPUs.
CPUs exist at the center of such a deeply connected mesh of so many other technologies, that the knowledge could be recreated (if needed) from looking at the surrounding tech. All the compiled code out there as sequences of instructions; all the documentation of what instructions do, of pipelining, all the lithography guides and die shots on rando blogs.. info in books still sitting on shelves in public libraries.. I mean come on.
Each to their own!
vardump•5h ago
Perhaps there should be more research how to make small runs of chips cheaply and with simple inputs. That'd also be useful if we manage to colonize other planets.
spencerflem•5h ago
Or do you mean the circumstances that would lead to this (nuclear war perhaps) would make us toast
vardump•5h ago
spencerflem•5h ago
But tbh I don't see it as at all likely short of something like nuclear war that would be the much bigger problem.
vardump•5h ago
spencerflem•5h ago
I don't think it'd be the end of life as we know it.
alabastervlog•2h ago
It’s the ones in factories, power systems, and transportation equipment, among other things.
squigz•4h ago
I think you also should realize much of the world continues on without bleeding-edge technology - homes are still built, crops are still harvested, and the world goes on.
conductr•5h ago
We've had this happen before of course. There's a ton of things ancient civilizations were doing that we are clueless about. So clueless, that one of the leading theories is that they must have been aided by aliens.
AlienRobot•5h ago
spencerflem•5h ago
cranky908canuck•3h ago
squigz•5h ago
throw0101d•5h ago
Civilization is a continuity of discrete points of time.
We were able to enter (so-called) Dark Ages where things were forgotten (e.g., concrete) and still continue because things were often not very 'advanced': with the decline of Rome there were other stories of knowledge, and with the Black Death society hasn't much beyond blacksmithing and so was able keep those basic skills.
But we're beyond that.
First off, modern society is highly dependent on low-cost energy, and this was kicked off by the Industrial Revolution and easy accessible coal. Coal is much depleted (often needing deeper mines). Then next phase was with oil, and many of the easy deposits have been used up (it used to bubble up to the ground in the US).
So depending on how bad any collapse is, getting things up without easily accessible fossil fuels may be more of challenge.
Legend2440•5h ago
vardump•5h ago
spencerflem•5h ago
kimixa•3h ago
kimixa•2h ago
Would be a pretty solid intermediate step to bootstrap automation and expansion in the cases where the supply of the "best" fabs is removed (like in a disaster, or the framework to support that level of manufacturing isn't available, such as your colony example)