The world is one bad decision away from a silicon Ice Age (opens in new tab)

Israel specialized in startups on the design side, and they absolutely dominate. Mellanox and annapurna labs come to mind. On the manufacturing side there's pretty much just Intel, which has 10nm node and beyond inside the borders and formerly owned mobileye. On the process side there's orbotech, which has a majority in their part of the market.

Other than Taiwan itself, it's hard to think of any "small" nations with a comparable density of semiconductor expertise.

A dishwasher with a WiFi chipset is not a durable good. Nor is a fridge with a touchscreen, an oven with Bluetooth.

You know what is durable? The simple and straightforward electromechanical mechanisms we used for three centuries before integrated circuits.

One can find plentiful examples of midcentury and older appliances still in service without major maintenance. It's tough to find a modern appliance in service for more than a decade.

The inability to sprinkle magic obsolescence silicon dust over everything will only lead to an increase in quality and durability.

The mechanical timer in a 1980s washing machine will never have a firmware update blocking you from using it. A 1950s fridge runs perfectly fine essentially forever without a cloud API and a goddamn app.

This hypothetical situation is only bad because you've accepted consumerism and forced obsolescence as the norm. These situations are much worse than not being able to buy a $1600 phone every year.

You should be indignant about the unimaginable amount of resources we throw into landfills because the manufacturer decided that you should buy a new one. You should absolutely not be indignant that you can no longer buy shit to throw away.

Do you repair your appliances or do you throw them away and have a new one shipped from the other side of the planet? Do you see the problem?

As others have stated, there's fabs all over the world. They're insufficient in quality and quantity to satisfy current demand at current prices but they're there and can do a lot of it, especially as demand and requirements get reduced to meet what's available.

Don't get me wrong, it would suck, but probably suck less than when everything shut down for covid.

>Car manufacturing grinds to a halt.

>New appliances cannot be manufactured

Until they figure out how to repeal the laws that mandate the features/specs that require the semiconductors in the types and volumes that would be a non-starter.

Maybe your washer doesn't need to detect how much stuff you put in and second guess your water setting?

What are the statistical odds a $15k Nissan Kix being sold in the desert will ever benefit from ABS?

>no new iPhone for five years. No new electronic hardware at all

It's not absolute like that. It's more like move the decimal one place on everything and that makes whole classes of products non-viable.

>New appliances cannot be manufactured. What does the [severe reduction in proportion to their semiconductor and irreplaceable foreign part contents] absence of new durable goods do to the economy?

Fixed for realism.

Demand is elastic to some extent. Prices go up. Industries shrink, alternatives grow.

In any case, it's a relative transfer of wealth and power from most of HN to their plumber and landscaper and those otherwise less affected.

In this case it means a shorter war so it would be a net positive

There are literally hundreds of semiconductor fabs of various types and process nodes spread all around the world ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... ) and the most common chips are fabricated on older, larger process nodes anyway.

Well if a US - China war starts, I don't think cell phones or cash registers will be very high on my priority list. Even it stays "reasonable" (just the US and China, no nuclear weapons), the effect on the world will be so bad that I may not be so concerned by the price of new shops or cars

(Sorry for the digression, but your username really does check out in a discussion about CPUs.)

> Except everything that runs on electricity has a CPU nowadays

This is true but it totally misses the real point.

The point is that most "smart" devices could be perfectly functional and usable with a Z80 or a 6502 or some other simple 8-bit chip controlling them, if the code were kept very small and simple.

The bigger point is that we in the modern Western world don't do this, because we've got lazy and it's easier to stick in an Arm core and do it in very inefficient software. Such as something running in Javascript on an entire embedded Web browser, such as all electron apps, which embed Chromium.

Worse still, these days, quite possibly vibe coded so even the person who nominally wrote it doesn't know how it works.

There are 2 logical corollaries to this:

1. We can make computer-controlled devices without tiny fast 64-bit chips and GPUs, but we are ill-prepared for it. The world will be able to make chips without TSMC, but it will hurt, because we have got slack and lazy.

2. China can make its own chips now, and thanks to FOSS, China has state-of-the-art software stacks that the rest of the world developed it and gave to it for free. It has x86 chips, such as Zhaoxin, but it also has Loongson and so on, and GCC can generate code for them.

So China can make its own computers without the aid of the global chip market. But the rest of the world can't so easily.

Got it, thanks for the explanation! I thought he was talking about some dirty bomb delivered by he B2s

No. It means bombs. It means bombing the fabs to stop them falling into Chinese hands.

Thank you!