You information economy peoples are SCREWED:
http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law"
the semiconductor industry is amazingly centralized: <14 companies make up the majority of global manufacturing. Much of the industry (like AMD or ARM) does not actually possess manufacturing facilities; they focus on research, design, and licensing."
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The costs they bear to build each chip fabrication plant is astounding, and increasing even as revenue growth slows (squeezing out many old companies)6; the basic equipment alone begin in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, lithography machines were $40 million a piece in 2009, and the most expensive single pieces of equipment (like steppers) can reach prices as high as $50 million dollars. The software licensing and engineering costs that go into a cutting-edge processor are equally staggering"
"A fab cost ~$1.5b in 1998, $2b in 2004, $3b in 2007, and $5b by 2010. Jurvetson wrote in 2004 that
Another problem is the escalating cost of a semiconductor fab plant, which is doubling every three years, a phenomenon dubbed Moore’s Second Law. Human ingenuity keeps shrinking the CMOS transistor, but with increasingly expensive manufacturing facilities - currently $3 billion per fab."
"The trend shows little sign of abating for a variety of reasons91011, and vastly outpaces inflation. At current rates,
it is not impossible that the cost of a bleeding-edge chip fab may pass the $100b (inflation-adjusted) mark somewhere in the 2020s or 2030s"
"This leads to an interesting question: if a chip fab were destroyed, how well would the company weather it? It is difficult to answer this, but I will note that Intel’s 2010 revenue was $54b, TSMC’s was $14b and GlobalFoundries’s was $3.5b.
It is not clear that chip foundry companies could survive the destruction of one or two of their fabs now, much less how financially robust they will be after another cost doubling or two."
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The China questionLike any good mercantilist developing East Asian country, China has set its heart on moving up the value chain of chip manufacturing and heavily subsidized local companies31. While it may dominate product assembly and the simplest chip fabrication,
its full-strength processors like the Loongson is far from state-of-the-art (although this may give it an edge in power consumption at supercomputer scale). Asia is a major semiconductor consumer, and a great deal of general manufacturing has already shifted there; both Taiwan and China are potential competitors32.
If we accept the Loongson architect’s projection of parity with Intel etc in 20 years (2031), this means that the current situation of all cutting-edge chip fabs in reach of US power may face a serious barrier: chip fabs located in mainland China. China is one of the few military powers that can give the USAF a run for its money, and the other contender, Russia, is entirely out of the chip fab business. What happens in, say, 2041 with the Chinese chip fabs churning out mature optimized designs? At this point, the WBE Roadmap projections suggest that brain emulation could be feasible by the 2040s and so the target chip fabs may well have all been built in China.
Would China buy into any plan which the West somehow managed to agree on?
I consider the possibility remote for many reasons when I project forward from the China of 2012:
Economic growth is the chief mandate of the Chinese government, and anything that might sabotage that is opposed.
Rent-seeking and corruption are common, particularly with ‘prestige’ projects or extremely large business interests; if chip fab costs are brought under control, they will still be enormous pool of capital backed by even more enormous corporations. Such entities will be able to defend themselves and defeat any such agreements.
International agreements are seen as a tool of an international system stacked against China. Any requests or “meddling” in Chinese affairs is greeted with reflexive nationalism.
Conversely, international agreements are best seen as a form of legal warfare; an exponent of this view was the widely-read 199 text Unrestricted Warfare.
China feels entitled to anything the West did during its own development; if the West could pollute with carbon emissions, China may pollute (one of its main rationale for ignoring things like the Kyoto agreement or sabotaging climate-change talks). A similar argument may be used with chip fabs.
Speculatively, there may be more cultural comfort in China with the possibility of ‘robots’; at least, some Japanese have ascribed Japanese investment into robots as being due to such cultural traits (eg. Murakami 2005), and this may carry over to China. With little anxiety about the issue, why would they bother especially when the costs are so concrete and near?
All of these traits can change, and I fully expect many to change before 2040 (for example, I expect nationalism & xenophobia to decrease as the population ages, and respect for international law will increase as China increasingly becomes the country that benefits from a tidy status quo), but all of them, on top of the original unlikeliness?"
Outcast_Searcher is a fraud.
