• yardratianSoma@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    3 hours ago

    I mean, when LLMs go out of style, at least we’ll have a bunch of cheap gpus and components to buy when it inevitably floods the used market after the current generation get superseded, coupled with multiple chip fabs going online, it will eventually be raining chips.

    • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      9 hours ago

      Oh they want to… There are quite a few chip fabs around the world… there are very few that can manufacture at this size, along the bleeding edge of the numerous technologies necessary to do so.

      Having the knowledge required to build the fab, the actual hardware required to manufacture them, and the skilled personnel to operate it all are hard to do. This is not something that you can toss together in a cave from scraps like Iron Man.

      And a lot of that is by design with companies and governments trying to guarantee sovereignty by tightly controlling where these can be manufactured. The idea that enemies are less likely to try to take over/colonize a smaller country (like Taiwan) if the global chip manufacturing apparatus can be destroyed in minutes to prevent it from falling into enemy hands.

    • chaogomu@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      6 hours ago

      Another factor here is that to make the most advanced chips, you need something called eleven 9 silicon. That’s silicon that’s 99.999999999% pure.

      We can only artificially manufacture up to nine 9 silicon.

      Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there’s only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.

      That’s why the US gets to say who can even attempt to manufacture advanced chips.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        3 hours ago

        Eleven 9 has to be mined, and there’s only one spot in the world were it exists. A little town in North Carolina.

        What

        Silicon wafer production just started with metallurgical grade quartzite and then chemically processed into high purity. The input material is usually around 98% purity.

        • chaogomu@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 hours ago

          https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pure-silicon/

          As I said, we can make nine 9 silicon. But not eleven 9. China makes billions of nine 9 silicon chips per year. But they can’t make eleven 9. Everyone is trying to create lab made eleven 9, it might not be possible. The natural stuff formed over hundreds of millions of years with basically no exposure to water. Which means no contaminates.

          So yeah, we’ve not succeeded in recreating that.

          • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            6 minutes ago

            https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-science-of-ultra-pure-silicon/

            As I said, we can make nine 9 silicon. But not eleven 9. China makes billions of nine 9 silicon chips per year. But they can’t make eleven 9. Everyone is trying to create lab made eleven 9, it might not be possible. The natural stuff formed over hundreds of millions of years with basically no exposure to water. Which means no contaminates.

            So yeah, we’ve not succeeded in recreating that.

            That’s not what is in the article you linked.

            The very best Spruce Pine quartz, however, has an open crystalline structure, which means that hydrofluoric acid can be injected right into the crystal molecules to dissolve any lingering traces of feldspar or iron, taking the purity up another notch. Technicians take it one step further by reacting the quartz with chlorine or hydrochloric acid at high temperatures, then putting it through one or two more trade‑secret steps of physical and chemical processing.

            The result is what Unimin markets as Iota quartz, the industry standard of purity. The basic Iota quartz is 99.998 percent pure SiO2. It is used to make things like halogen lamps and photovoltaic cells, but it’s not good enough to make those crucibles in which polysilicon is melted. For that you need Iota 6, or the tip‑top of the line, Iota 8, which clocks in at 99.9992 percent purity—meaning for every one billion molecules of SiO , there are only 80 molecules of impurities. Iota 8 sells for up to $10,000 a ton. Regular construction sand, at the other end of the sand scale, can be had for a few dollars per ton.

            You wrote

            The natural stuff formed over hundreds of millions of years with basically no exposure to water. Which means no contaminates.

            From the article:

            It took some 100 million years for the deeply buried molten rock to cool down and crystallize. Thanks to the depth at which it was buried and to the lack of water where all this was happening, the pegmatites formed almost without impurities. Generally speaking, the pegmatites are about 65 percent feldspar, 25 percent quartz, 8 percent mica, and the rest traces of other minerals.

            The quartz they produce has a structure that makes it easier to clean so, when making the quartz crucibles for manufacturing silicon wafers it is the best choice. But the purity isn’t eleven 9s, the highest quality is 99.9992% purity.

            Silicon wafers are made out of even more pure silicon (9n), which is melted in the nearly pure quartz crucibles. The Spruce Pine quartz is for making the crucibles, not making the wafers.