All this difficulty with high end smartphones and gaming consoles is completely insignificant compared to the 'normal' economic damage a war would cause.
I missed some announcement though that Qualcomm is moving more towards using Samsung.
> All this difficulty with high end smartphones and gaming consoles is completely insignificant compared to the 'normal' economic damage a war would cause.
This 'difficulty' would set Moores Law back more than half decade outside of Intel and Samsung smartphone chips. The next smallest large scale node being 12nm at Global Foundry and keep it frozen there for at least 2-3 years in total leaving as decade behind Moore's Law. You underestimate how much damage that causes. Even if China completely wipes out Taiwans 1% share of GDP that impact is miniscule compared falling 10 years behing on Moore's Law.
Embedded doesn't care all that much. Servers can scale horizontally. What's left is various consumer products, and even here you can easily make a smartphone on 12nm, it would just be slower. Hmm.. Maybe VR and locally-run ML must have a tiny node size. Hardly big markets. For all else, there'd be a temporary efficiency loss, but we'll make do and catch up within a decade. You could argue delaying the future would have a running effect, but it seems to me mostly leisure activities would be affected and investment/production would be fine?
The Moore's law effect is insignificant compared to the damage of a conflict between the world's #1 manufacturer and #1 consumers.
I could not tell if it was a tongue in cheek statement, but if not, can you explain why falling 10 years behind on Moore's law would be such a big deal.
And all of this happening across almost all industries simultaneously? That's not a recession event - that's a depression event.
why would (non-autonomous) car need state of art chips?
I'm guessing they have some less modern stuff. Maybe.
But. BUT.
UMC is kinda an unsung player here to some extent. They are another Taiwanese Fab, and do a lot of the older process stuff.
I'm guessing that whatever plans Taiwan's government has for TSMC Facilities in a Kobayashi Maru scenario with China, UMC probably gets some version of it as well.
Lets also assume that if things get to that state with Taiwan/China, at minimal we'd probably have a larger embargo against China (another source of such chips) and there's a possibility of trade disruption with other Asian players like South Korea.
I find the focus on chips bewildering, since there are so many more critical issues like 'how do we prevent a stock market run and the crash of every company which outsourced manufacturing to China?' or (if you live in China) 'where do I get a food ration card?', if this gets real bad. Semis are merely an annoyance.
Do we have the technological capability to recycle old semis to work with current systems to keep things running? Do enough people have this skillset? I'm sure we figureit out, but I doubt it there are enough people to really get it moving. With a severe lack of chips we'll see systems falter or all out crash as components wear out and can't be easily replaced. I think you're underestimating how much runs on what Taiwan produces and I don't think "economics" can bring more production online in a meaningful time frame.
It's understandable HN community would focus on semis, but compared to 'financial crash worse than 2008' and 'Would all people be able to get food next month?' semis aren't that important. Semi production would be a slow long-term crisis we would be able to adjust to if we could handle effectively the initial very big short-term crises resulting from a massive war.
As Keynes put it: "In the long run we're all dead". If we couldn't handle the initial short-term economic crises we'll have bigger problems than long-term semi production adjustment. If we can, we could handle adjusting semi production and use. It's not that it isn't an issue, it's just way less important and less difficult than the other issues.
TSMC has a big volume and an edge in node process. However, the vast majority of chips in use are in embedded usecases. Most non-general-computing hardware containing chips doesn't need 4nm. It would chug just fine with two decade old chips. Even military hardware uses very outdated chips.
Catching up to a modern semi fab would cost time and money, but making more outdated chips isn't that much of a problem. There's a certification issue, but in such a scenario surely certification would be relaxed.
As for general purpose computing, servers always have the option of scaling horizontally. The biggest issue would be with phones and tablets. Unfortunate, but tiny compared to the other costs of war.