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0 pointsSlinkyOnStairs3mo ago0 comments

> I realize Intel has done some serious ball dropping over the past two decades but you do realize the US has on shore cutting edge fabs, right?

We could squabble about the finer details of Intel's fab capabilities. They have advanced nodes, but it's irrelevant. They simply do not have the capacity to support the entire demand that is currently supplied by TSMC.

It is not just "high end luxury electronics" that have modern CPUs. It's every bloody server in the cloud. (Have a look at who makes and distributes the mainboards. Same story, substitute Intel for Supermicro.)

The economic impact on this field would be a disaster. Compute becomes much more expensive, SaaS prices will follow, and with that a massive drop in demand.

Not to mention you can kiss the entire AI industry goodbye if the price of GPUs spike.

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fc417fc8023mo ago

I don't think that's an accurate prediction. Currently less than 10 year old hardware gets recycled for pennies on the dollar. That's effectively due to the combination of how cheap and how much better the cutting edge hardware is. If it suddenly became more expensive it would just see slower adoption.

Case in point, this very comment section. The major suppliers have discontinued DDR4 production because it's "obsolete" meanwhile capacity for that exact same technology is coming online in China. What makes sense just depends on context.

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fc417fc8023mo ago

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