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.
Or do you mean the circumstances that would lead to this (nuclear war perhaps) would make us toast
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.
That's an Anglo-Saxon black legend. How do you think boats and trebuchets were made? Navigation in the ocean without trig? Astrolabes? Yeah, sure. Year 600 wasn't the same as 1200.
Read about Alphonse X. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_X_of_Castile
As long as the algorithmic complexity of food logistics is O(n) or better with respect to population size, I guess.
We did that during a period of peculiar circumstances that won't ever be replicated. Relatively large, distributed population with many different ecological environments that we were already pre-adapted to. A far smaller single-point-failure population that can't just go out and hunt for its food among the vast wildlife might have it pretty rough if industrial civilization were to falter.
Scary how high up this tightrope is.
But tbh I don't see it as at all likely short of something like nuclear war that would be the much bigger problem.
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)
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
Another view on this topic is https://gwern.net/slowing-moores-law
It would be a sad thing but not as sad as everything else that would happen in a war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
> 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?
Let's assume we go back to the pre-transistor era—1946 and earlier, the world then was a very different place but it was still very modern.
It's too involved to list in detail but just take a look at what was achieved during WWII. The organization and manufacturing was truly phenomenonal. Aircraft production alone during the War was over 800,000 aircraft, manufacturing aircraft at that rate has never been equalled since, same with ships.
We developed huge amount of new tech during the War including the remarkably complex atomic bomb and much, much more.
And we did all this without the transistor, integrated circuit, CPUs, internet and even smartphones!
Now consider the planning and organizational difficulties of D-Day—probably the most complex and logistically difficult understanding ever—without the aid of modern communications, the internet and smartphones, etc.—all of which depend on CPUs. Right, that happened too, and it was a total success.
I wonder how a generation brought up during the post-silicon era would cope if all that were no longer available. It could happen if we had another Carrington Event or one that's even bigger (which has occurred), or say with nuclear EMP events.
WWII Aircraft production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_produc...
WWII Military production: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_W...
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.
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.
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.
There could be https://global.canon/en/technology/nil-2023.html &
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoimprint-lithography
There also is https://www.searchforthenext.com &
claiming to not need that ASML high-end stuff at all, to be competitive.
As reported around 2019 amongst many others like here:
https://eepower.com/new-industry-products/search-for-the-nex...
Maybe it's vaporware, because I'm unaware of anything 'big' produced there. Maybe it's only lack of funding,lack of trust because non-standard and 'unproven', inertia? Who knows?
And finally the forgotten minimal.fab by Yokogawa https://www.yokogawa.com/industries/semiconductor/minimal-fa...
https://www.minimalfab.com/en/ with no outrageous claims about structure size equivalence, but way faster turn-around times for prototyping, and none of the usually necessary investment in all that clean-room tech.
And not to forget the push and incentive China got as 'development help' to be independent :-)
I'm sure they're up to many interesting things in the near future.
Remember the first 32-bit cpus were manufactured on >1um processes. Never mind 8-bitters or KB-sized memory chips.
Also note that IC designs, assembly programming & more, can be (and has been) done by hand. Having any kind of compute, no matter how slow by today's standards (couple MHz) helps a lot. Same for basic applications like text processing, spreadsheets, small databases, software development, etc etc.
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.
Generators are just big coils of copper. Substations too. Solar won't work without silicon, but anything with a spinning coil of copper would. Voltmeters would need replacing with the old analog versions and humans would need to manually push switches to keep power levels constant, just like in the '50s.
I work in a medical lab. The company bought a new automated coagulation analyzer. The old machine was shut down (proper shut down procedure) and kept in storage in case it was needed. They should have replaced the wash fluid with water. This procedure isn't documented because nobody expects that kind of machine to just sit unused for a long time. After a few months we needed to start it again (can't remeber why, I think there was a delivery problem with the reagents for the new analyzer). We couldn't. The washing fluid dried and detergents and other chemicals it contained solidified inside the valves, just like it happens with an inkjet printer if left unused. They were all stuck. Repair would have been too expensive and it was scrapped.
I saw this happen with a haematology analyzer too. It was kept as a backup but wasn't need for a few months. I was able to resurrect that one after several hours of repeated washing.
An electrolyte analyzer is even worse. Keep it turned off for only a few hours and the electrodes will need to be replaced.
I don't think any other advanced industrial machine is any different. They can't be just left unused for a while and then expect them to work. It's even more problematic if the shut down procedure isn't done right (exceeding the documented requirements) or not at all.
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).
There's enough information on machine tools and the working of iron to make all the tooling and machinery required to start an assembly line somewhere.
After all, there was an assembly workshop turning out the Antikythera mechanism, there was a user guide on it. Obviously it wasn't the only one produced at the time.
It is not obvious at all to me. Where are the others like it found?
My daily driver laptop is a 2012 Thinkpad I literally pulled out of a scrap heap at my local university but it refuses to die. Moore's law has slowed enough that old hardware is slow but still perfectly capable to run 99% of existing software.
Already existing machines would give us at least one or two decades to restart manufacturing from zero and that is more than enough time to avoid existential problems.
And most computers are under-utilized. The average gaming PC is powerful enough to run the infrastructure for a bunch of small companies if put to work as a server.
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!
generally the true problems in life aren’t forgetting how to manufacture products that are the key to human life.
