[nebula8804]

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.

[fancyfredbot]

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

[nebula8804]

Well we have cool projects like CollapseOS the problem is that there is so much undocumented silicon out there that cant be used without massive efforts. I know several "gold scrappers" and its such a shame that they trash great classic chips just go get back a bit of metal. So much effort went into making those chips and its just a shame that many can't be reused. While lack of cheap electricity prevents open design from being reused, there is an even bigger world of undocumented chips that are trashed as well.