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Pretty good Solarpunk prompt with some medium-hard sci-fi thrown in.
Forgot? Have you seen what’s needed to make CPUs? Clean Room Manufacturing is a fragile thing.
Developing countries often need a lot of help just getting to ISO Class 7, which is what’s needed to safely make cough syrup.
Injectable drugs are ISO Class 5. CPU manufacturing is ISO Class 1 and 2. In some post-apocalyptic scenario, depending on the scenario, it would be decades or generations of work to get semiconductor manufacturing back. Even if you have an abandoned factory sitting right there. It would potentially be decades to get back to making anything safely injectable. Supply chains involved with specific parts and inputs. shudder
No, it wouldn’t. It’d take decades to get back to nano-scale modern CPUs, but not CPUs in general. The smaller the CPU the more it matters to be clean. If you could measure by atoms, then yeah, any stray atoms could matter. If you’re measuring something that can be seen with the naked eye then you could probably do it in open air and not have an issue.
Actually, using intel as an example, any CPU that is not a I9 is a failed CPU.
The I3, I5 and I7 are I9 with complete sections of the prossessor fucked up, doing CPUs are difficult also in perfect conditions.
It’s not just the manufacturing of that one thing that is under consideration. There’s an entire supply chain that gets you to that point where you finally have the inputs needed to enter the lab and make the product. There’s likewise a whole bunch of supply chain needed to get an ISO Class 5 clean room, which is what’s needed for general microprocessors. Even if you’re only talking about a clean work box on a bench top.
Who is mining the cobalt and aluminum and making the glass and plastic tools needed to stock the lab where you’re making 1980’s style microprocessors? Who is making a pure silicon ingot you’ll slice to get a wafer? What will you use to slice the ingot for the wafer? How will you polish the wafer to microscopic levels of flatness? Who is making the oscilloscopes that test the processors to see if they work? Who is making the glass for the lenses for high-power microscopy you need to work? Where will you get the bulbs and needed for the photolithography stage? Where will you get the tiny tiny tiny wires that connect the pins to the chip? How will you purify and process refined silicon dioxide? Sure, the stuff is everywhere, but think through how you go from a piece of quartz on the ground to a material you need to layer on a wafer (where you gonna get the wafer??) and what machines and processes are needed for that. And on and on and on. One of those things missing means you can’t move forward.
And depending on the scenario, each of those things needs to be local to you as well.
This is Carl Sagan “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe” level picking the process apart. Everything is connected, and we don’t always appreciate how much things are inextricably tied to what we use on a daily basis.
There’s also a book from 2016 called “When the Trucks Stop Running” that is fearmongering oil industry hype, all about how important oil is to fueling heavy machinery. (Spoiler, it’s not as important as they make it out to be) But the real lesson of the book is how many rarely seen or talked about corners of the supply chain are fundamental to keeping huge numbers of industries running, and how fragile many advanced technologies are to supply chain interruption.
Right, and so I’m saying that forgetting how to make CPUs as a premise seems far-fetched when the actual fact of the matter than we can easily lose the ability to make CPUs with only a few significant supply chain losses. A total societal collapse isn’t necessary. A single catastrophic natural disaster that only directly impacts one part of the world might be enough.
On the other hand, we don’t need nanoscale transistors to achieve most of the usefulness of CPUs. Most of that high-tech performance is wasted on things of questionable usefulness for society. The C64 CPU had an 8 micrometer process that likely does not require ISO class 1 or 2.
Heck, vacuum tubes can be used to make a computer, and they’re relatively easy to make. Even further, purely mechanical computers exist, and they can do serious complex calculations
You can make vacuum tubes all day. You can even make transistors and integrated circuits at home.
But the definition of “computer” here is a glorified calculator.
A TI-81, the graphing calculator from the 1980’s, used a chip that had 8500 transistors. So if you’re planning to, say, build a dam and need to know how thick the cement should be to account for the pressure from the volume of water when the lake is full - unless you want to do all that engineering calculus yourself (I promise, it sucks) then you might want some more advanced computational power. Sure, dams were built when this was all done by hand. Dams also collapsed and washed towns away sometimes. Something I haven’t heard of happening in a while.
As nice as it is to think about going back to an analog world, things like knowing what the climate is doing, medical advancements, sharing video and images, etc. save lives and advance medicine. No one is making a COVID vaccine without sequencing the genome of a virus. Pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, cars with increased fuel efficiency, electric vehicles, solar panels - all perfectly good reasons to enjoy modern microprocessors.
You’re moving the goal post. You went from being able to manufacture CPUs in general to manufacturing modern CPUs that can replace current workloads.
Sure, we’d have to decrease reliance on them for a while, but we be able to manufacture some computers without really any delay, while we build back to modern capabilities.
It may not be the most competitive fab on the market, but Hacker Fab is already within reach of a well-funded makerspace. I haven’t read up on their cleanroom procedures, but I assume all the costs of that are included in their breakdown.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be competitive with TSMC sub-3nm. CPUs at 1000nm can still be incredibly useful.
Yeah, but look at how much other stuff that is highly-manufactured goes into that process? It’s not about just the end product, it’s about the entire supply chain needed to get the stuff to make the 1 product.
Forgot? Have you seen what’s needed to make CPUs? Clean Room Manufacturing is a fragile thing.
Developing countries often need a lot of help just getting to ISO Class 7, which is what’s needed to safely make cough syrup.
Injectable drugs are ISO Class 5. CPU manufacturing is ISO Class 1 and 2. In some post-apocalyptic scenario, depending on the scenario, it would be decades or generations of work to get semiconductor manufacturing back. Even if you have an abandoned factory sitting right there. It would potentially be decades to get back to making anything safely injectable. Supply chains involved with specific parts and inputs. shudder
No, it wouldn’t. It’d take decades to get back to nano-scale modern CPUs, but not CPUs in general. The smaller the CPU the more it matters to be clean. If you could measure by atoms, then yeah, any stray atoms could matter. If you’re measuring something that can be seen with the naked eye then you could probably do it in open air and not have an issue.
Actually, using intel as an example, any CPU that is not a I9 is a failed CPU. The I3, I5 and I7 are I9 with complete sections of the prossessor fucked up, doing CPUs are difficult also in perfect conditions.
It’s not just the manufacturing of that one thing that is under consideration. There’s an entire supply chain that gets you to that point where you finally have the inputs needed to enter the lab and make the product. There’s likewise a whole bunch of supply chain needed to get an ISO Class 5 clean room, which is what’s needed for general microprocessors. Even if you’re only talking about a clean work box on a bench top.
Who is mining the cobalt and aluminum and making the glass and plastic tools needed to stock the lab where you’re making 1980’s style microprocessors? Who is making a pure silicon ingot you’ll slice to get a wafer? What will you use to slice the ingot for the wafer? How will you polish the wafer to microscopic levels of flatness? Who is making the oscilloscopes that test the processors to see if they work? Who is making the glass for the lenses for high-power microscopy you need to work? Where will you get the bulbs and needed for the photolithography stage? Where will you get the tiny tiny tiny wires that connect the pins to the chip? How will you purify and process refined silicon dioxide? Sure, the stuff is everywhere, but think through how you go from a piece of quartz on the ground to a material you need to layer on a wafer (where you gonna get the wafer??) and what machines and processes are needed for that. And on and on and on. One of those things missing means you can’t move forward.
And depending on the scenario, each of those things needs to be local to you as well.
This is Carl Sagan “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you need to invent the universe” level picking the process apart. Everything is connected, and we don’t always appreciate how much things are inextricably tied to what we use on a daily basis.
My favorite example: This guy figured it out when thinking through a cheeseburger.
There’s also a book from 2016 called “When the Trucks Stop Running” that is fearmongering oil industry hype, all about how important oil is to fueling heavy machinery. (Spoiler, it’s not as important as they make it out to be) But the real lesson of the book is how many rarely seen or talked about corners of the supply chain are fundamental to keeping huge numbers of industries running, and how fragile many advanced technologies are to supply chain interruption.
The scenario above was not a total sociatal collapse scenario. It was just we forgot how to make CPUs. The rest of the supply chain would still exist.
Right, and so I’m saying that forgetting how to make CPUs as a premise seems far-fetched when the actual fact of the matter than we can easily lose the ability to make CPUs with only a few significant supply chain losses. A total societal collapse isn’t necessary. A single catastrophic natural disaster that only directly impacts one part of the world might be enough.
On the other hand, we don’t need nanoscale transistors to achieve most of the usefulness of CPUs. Most of that high-tech performance is wasted on things of questionable usefulness for society. The C64 CPU had an 8 micrometer process that likely does not require ISO class 1 or 2.
Heck, vacuum tubes can be used to make a computer, and they’re relatively easy to make. Even further, purely mechanical computers exist, and they can do serious complex calculations
You can make vacuum tubes all day. You can even make transistors and integrated circuits at home.
But the definition of “computer” here is a glorified calculator.
A TI-81, the graphing calculator from the 1980’s, used a chip that had 8500 transistors. So if you’re planning to, say, build a dam and need to know how thick the cement should be to account for the pressure from the volume of water when the lake is full - unless you want to do all that engineering calculus yourself (I promise, it sucks) then you might want some more advanced computational power. Sure, dams were built when this was all done by hand. Dams also collapsed and washed towns away sometimes. Something I haven’t heard of happening in a while.
As nice as it is to think about going back to an analog world, things like knowing what the climate is doing, medical advancements, sharing video and images, etc. save lives and advance medicine. No one is making a COVID vaccine without sequencing the genome of a virus. Pacemakers, hearing aids, prosthetic limbs, cars with increased fuel efficiency, electric vehicles, solar panels - all perfectly good reasons to enjoy modern microprocessors.
You’re moving the goal post. You went from being able to manufacture CPUs in general to manufacturing modern CPUs that can replace current workloads.
Sure, we’d have to decrease reliance on them for a while, but we be able to manufacture some computers without really any delay, while we build back to modern capabilities.
To be fair, we can live fine without streaming video and bloated crapware. 1990s hardware is more than sufficient to keep essentials alive.
I was thinking of modern CPUs the whole time and then people are trying to “What-if” their way into whatever they want it to be.
Fine, it’s whatever you want it to be. We’ll be making modern CPUs in a bucket next to the bucket where we recycle paper.
…you say as we both use machines that used a planet’s worth of supply chains and resources to talk to each other.
I could post messages on FidoNet with my 8Mhz Atari ST in 1988 too
It may not be the most competitive fab on the market, but Hacker Fab is already within reach of a well-funded makerspace. I haven’t read up on their cleanroom procedures, but I assume all the costs of that are included in their breakdown.
It doesn’t necessarily need to be competitive with TSMC sub-3nm. CPUs at 1000nm can still be incredibly useful.
Yeah, but look at how much other stuff that is highly-manufactured goes into that process? It’s not about just the end product, it’s about the entire supply chain needed to get the stuff to make the 1 product.