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0 pointsDylan168072mo ago0 comments

It's really easy to set up a manufacturing process for basically anything if you can spend 100x per unit compared to the big optimized factories and you don't mind the product being a lot slower.

The clean room isn't the hard part about being competitive. It's using advanced lithography to cram billions of cells into a single chip. If you want make DDR2 chips on a 90 nanometer process, that is accessible to a whole lot of companies, but nobody will buy the product. And in the micrometer range you can DIY like this guy.

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5 comments · 1 top-level

INTPenis2mo ago· 4 in thread

Nobody will buy the product?

I'm an infrastructure architect and work with health care, local tax agency, they're all getting 25-30% inflated bills now for new hardware.

And what happens when smaller companies have to repair or scale their infrastructure and can't get affordable RAM?

I'd say if people aren't desperate already, they're about to be.

Dylan16807OP2mo ago

> Nobody will buy the product?

Correct, nobody will buy your 1GB stick of DDR2-speed RAM for the $100 it cost you to produce it.

> And what happens when smaller companies have to repair or scale their infrastructure and can't get affordable RAM?

That situation sucks but bringing up more obsolete fabrication isn't going to help. They can't compete with modern chips even when those modern chips have a 5x price penalty.

INTPenis2mo ago

Ok sorry I misread you saying that it was easy with nm manufacturing but nobody will buy the product, you said it's easy to manufacture micrometer DDR2 speeds.

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nebula88042mo ago

In one of Dwarkesh's interviews, he mentioned that China is trying to replicate the entire stack. Ironically now that they have mastered all pieces of the stack for older nodes, they actually have an advantage in a collapse scenario. The US does not appear to have the ability to do all steps in the stack for any node. They still rely on other western countries that could go offline. China despite being behind does at least have top to bottom capability for older nodes. Combine that with their rock bottom electricity prices and they have a unique card that they can play.

Just imagine if electricity costs were trending towards 0. Instead of e-waste run all those machines till the chips burn out.

fancyfredbot2mo ago

Lucky for America, in the case of civilizational collapse there will be a lot of spare semiconductors thanks to almost everyone being dead!

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