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- Chip War_ The Fight for the World's Most C - Chris Miller
- This on the explosion of digital computing will be useful when talking about the explosion of digital manufacturing.
- 'Real men have fabs' is a parallel to self hosting. As the cost of self fabrication at a certain technological level comes down, and the know-how becomes wide spread, self-manufacturing will catch up. All technologies are this way. They are technologies because 1) they don't work in a fool-proof manner, and 2) because they still require significant capital investment. Capitalism is possibly a necessary engine of innovation but not necessary to meet an increasingly complex set of societal needs.
Chip War_ The Fight for the World's Most C - Chris Miller
This on the explosion of digital computing will be useful when talking about the explosion of digital manufacturing.
“In the next ten years,” Mead predicted in 1972, “every facet of our society will be automated to some degree.” He envisioned “a tiny computer deep down inside of our telephone, or our washing machine, or our car” as these silicon chips became pervasive and inexpensive. “In the past 200 years we have improved our ability to manufacture goods and move people by a factor of 100,” Mead calculated. “But in the last 20 years there has been an increase of 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 in the rate at which we process and retrieve information.” A revolutionary explosion of data processing was coming. “We have computer power coming out of our ears.”
Mead was prophesying a revolution with profound social and political consequences. Influence in this new world would accrue to people who could produce computing power and manipulate it with software. The semiconductor engineers of Silicon Valley had the specialized knowledge, networks, and stock options that let them write the rules of the future—rules everyone else would have to follow. Industrial society was giving way to a digital world, with 1s and 0s stored and processed on many millions of slabs of silicon spread throughout society. The era of the tech tycoons was dawning. “Society’s fate will hang in the balance,” Carver Mead declared. “The catalyst is the microelectronics technology and its ability to put more and more components into less and less space.” Industry outsiders only dimly perceived how the world was changing, but Intel’s leaders knew that if they succeeded in drastically expanding the availability of computing power, radical changes would follow. “ We are really the revolutionaries in the world today,” Gordon Moore declared in 1973, “not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago.”
'Real men have fabs' is a parallel to self hosting. As the cost of self fabrication at a certain technological level comes down, and the know-how becomes wide spread, self-manufacturing will catch up. All technologies are this way. They are technologies because 1) they don't work in a fool-proof manner, and 2) because they still require significant capital investment. Capitalism is possibly a necessary engine of innovation but not necessary to meet an increasingly complex set of societal needs.
“Real men” might have fabs, but Silicon Valley’s new wave of semiconductor entrepreneurs didn’t. Since the late 1980s, there’s been explosive growth in the number of fabless chip firms, which design semiconductors in-house but outsource their manufacturing, commonly relying on TSMC for this service. When Gordon Campbell and Dado Banatao founded Chips and Technologies, which is generally considered the first fabless firm, in 1984, one friend alleged it “wasn’t a real semiconductor company,” since it didn’t build its own chips. However, the graphics chips they designed for PCs proved popular, competing with products built by some of the industry’s biggest players. Eventually Chips and Technologies faded and was purchased by Intel. However, it had proved that a fabless business model could work, requiring only a good idea and a couple of million dollars in startup capital, a tiny fraction of the money needed to build a fab.