We’re witnessing the American domination of tech coming to a rapid end it would seem. Chinese AI will dominate the landscape it seems
They’re not just bismuth! They’re bismuth and selenium with some oxygen mixed in (to connect those elements together, I think).
The reason I point this out is because this means that not only can the chips of the future perform blazingly fast calculations they can also cure your tummy ache and prevent dandruff!
Once this technology becomes mainstream it’ll be bismuth as usual. We’ll all be getting down to bismuth.
A whole new era of puns is upon us! The product of the selenium.
inb4 Trump claims the chinese are putting mind control chips in American shampoo
Nah. It’ll be to make them transgendered.
Don’t forget Selenium is also essential to defeat alien organisms!
Would using bismuth in chip production affect the price of medicaments?
quick lookup showed pure bismuth at $300/kg. That is not too expensive to make chips, but it would divert demand away from other uses, and we’re gonna need a bigger mine. China will find a way, and likely cost reductions will result from volume.
Still, this is a couple of years (wild optimism and resources devoted to it) at least away from Chip products.
Silicon is like $3/kg (and that’s the higher price, it’s actually cheaper than that outside USA). I’m not sure if we could sustain the same level of manufacturing using bismuth without side effects. One of the best things about silicon is that it’s the second most abundant element in Earth’s lithosphere (the first being oxygen)… I don’t think the “line must go up” attitude around pushing for Moore’s law is a worthy effort. I’d rather we pushed for software to be more efficient, I don’t feel my PC is significantly faster than it was 10 years ago, despite its Hz having doubled.
I could understand using this for specialized applications, but I’m not convinced it should be something that should be made as widespread as silicon tech, so I don’t think this should really be seen as a replacement for it.
I understand more bismuth mining would be needed to support price stability, but scale could mean lower prices. China has special needs in that innovation is required to escape US tyranny of global IP.
Yes, I understand that more mining could be done, but what I was saying is that I don’t think it could be sustained to the level of silicon. Bismuth is a rare mineral, and 100 times more expensive than silicon.
China is the world’s largest market for semiconductors (50% of the chips in the world are traded there), if they want to use locally produced bismuth chips they would only be able to tackle a very small fraction of that. Either they are only used in special applications (like some particular specialized hardware at smaller scale) or it would be impossible, the Earth does not have enough resources to produce bismuth chips at the same scale as silicon. So I’m not sure if it could work as serious competition to silicon.
But we’ll see, maybe I’m wrong.
Yes, I understand that more mining could be done, but what I was saying is that I don’t think it could be sustained to the level of silicon. Bismuth is a rare mineral, and 100 times more expensive than silicon.
Not an expert, but high purity bismuth seems 6x more expensive than high purity silicon. I could be wrong.
they would only be able to tackle a very small fraction of that.
It would be for ultra premium performance chips, which China has a low share currently.
And it’s Wednesday, so it’s Bismuth Time
Am I stupid or is a transistor a very different thing from a chip? Like, a chip has lots of transistors on it, but comparing them is still rather non-sensical…?
it’s more accurate to say that the transistors are etched from (or carved out of) the chip than saying that there are transistors on the chip and the size & number are indicators of the technology that has been invented, manufactured, and employed to create them.
every level that we scale to represents the bleeding edge of real world scientific capability for a company and a country and our capitalist society makes these endeavors profitable at the cost of our privacy, security, health and environment.
Sure, but so it’s still non-sensical to compare a transistor to a whole chip. That’s like saying a trumpet is louder than an orchestra.
- No, it just isn’t.
- If we’re somehow talking about an orchestra made up of lots of trumpet players being louder than a traditional orchestra, like alright, but then we still gotta figure out what it actually looks like in an orchestra. Does this new transistor actually use less space, for example? What’s the price for it? And so on…
the analogy to an orchestra could only work if the trumpets were molded out of the orchestra and the orchestra only consisted of trumpets; then comparing a single trumpet would make sense since you’re comparing it to other trumpets in different orchestras.
Again… I didn’t even read the article but “[redacted to remove bias] University researchers have developed [better] than leading [whatever].” is definitely interesting yet also pointless. Of course research is important, even fundamental, to the production process… but it’s not a fair comparison because production, at scale, and economically reliable requires a LOT more constraints!
So the research, regardless of the source, is welcomed but comparing to production rather than comparing to other research labs pushing limits on the same dimensions is not useful.
PS: for my starting “Again” see my post history.
Edit : AFAICT “outperforms the most advanced commercial chips from […] Belgium’s Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre.” IMEC doesn’t do commercial chips, just research.
Meh, recently a korean team was in the news for curing cancer. Reality is of course that they simulated a single protein in a precursor pathway… etc… which could possibly contribute into a future concept for a treatment against certain types of cancer.
