The writing’s on the wall if the US AI bubble pops. China ain’t buying NVIDIA for obvious reasons, at least not without steep discounts. I’m also curious how would TSMC be affected. I’ve no idea how much of their output is AI-related. If significant, it would be interesting to see how they fill that capacity if the AI demand drops off a cliff. Whether they’d fuck the sanctions and make Chinese CPUs and GPUs for example.
TSMC is all that stops the invasion of Taiwan. If TSMC is not relevant even for a moment, China will invade to end their civil war. You can count on NK invading SK at the same time and taking Samsung.
China already has domestic incentives in place for home grown GPUs. They will likely displace Nvidia entirely within 5-8 years.
Ultimately, a unified architecture will win. The reason CPUs cannot handle the load of AI is due to the L2 to L1 cache bus throughput. It requires a major redesign, but it is a solvable problem. The real problem is that that kind of redesign takes the full 10 year hardware design cycle time to create from scratch.
AI is still not going away in the long term. The present world is just like the early days of the microprocessor. The 6502 was little more than a toy. It is still in all western digital hard drives. The fundamental architecture is still the same in all CPUs. It was the systems we built around them that made them useful. A base inference model is primitive. The AI that owns the future is agentic systems.
I don’t think invasion’s on the cards. There’s too many cons and not many pros. Instead, I think in a TSMC irrelevance scenario, or otherwise lack of demand from the west, Taiwan’s gonna start getting a lot closer to China peacefully if China replaces that demand. China can play a very long game given its socioeconomic infrastructure. That’s my bet at this point. You could very well be right of course.
AI is still not going away in the long term. The present world is just like the early days of the microprocessor. The 6502 was little more than a toy. It is still in all western digital hard drives. The fundamental architecture is still the same in all CPUs. It was the systems we built around them that made them useful. A base inference model is primitive. The AI that owns the future is agentic systems.
Probably. There are definitely useful models that solve problems much better than previous algorithms.
The military analysts point to the age bubble in China as the tell for Taiwan. They really can’t play the long game because of the population bubble. Most project that peak invasion opportunity is around 2027 and the risk goes down substantially after 2030 and then 2035.
We are less than 10 years away from the final fab node. The exponential growth is over. It actually already is over as the people on the bleeding edge are already at the end.
Most people are ignorant of the implications here. Silicon chips are the only time in human history when a civilian industry grew faster than the largest military could finance. There is no replacement. We will return to the ways of 80+ years ago. The next major age of technology is biological, but we are still centuries away from that future.
We are less than 10 years away from the final fab node
Beyond fab nodes, there are things like advanced packaging approaches, BPD.
New nodes will probably start to offer more modest gains (while costs will start growing beyond the current 20-30% increase per node), but that doesn’t mean there won’t be improvements in leading edge semi-conductor performance.
The importance is on exponential growth beyond that of military spending. The leader of the global economy has massive overall implications on geopolitics.
I’ve seen that analysis and it makes sense under the population bubble hypothesis. I think the population problem is overstated though, because it’s actively being solved through automation-driven productivity improvement. Robotics use is exploding in China.
The writing’s on the wall if the US AI bubble pops. China ain’t buying NVIDIA for obvious reasons, at least not without steep discounts. I’m also curious how would TSMC be affected. I’ve no idea how much of their output is AI-related. If significant, it would be interesting to see how they fill that capacity if the AI demand drops off a cliff. Whether they’d fuck the sanctions and make Chinese CPUs and GPUs for example.
TSMC is all that stops the invasion of Taiwan. If TSMC is not relevant even for a moment, China will invade to end their civil war. You can count on NK invading SK at the same time and taking Samsung.
China already has domestic incentives in place for home grown GPUs. They will likely displace Nvidia entirely within 5-8 years.
Ultimately, a unified architecture will win. The reason CPUs cannot handle the load of AI is due to the L2 to L1 cache bus throughput. It requires a major redesign, but it is a solvable problem. The real problem is that that kind of redesign takes the full 10 year hardware design cycle time to create from scratch.
AI is still not going away in the long term. The present world is just like the early days of the microprocessor. The 6502 was little more than a toy. It is still in all western digital hard drives. The fundamental architecture is still the same in all CPUs. It was the systems we built around them that made them useful. A base inference model is primitive. The AI that owns the future is agentic systems.
I don’t think invasion’s on the cards. There’s too many cons and not many pros. Instead, I think in a TSMC irrelevance scenario, or otherwise lack of demand from the west, Taiwan’s gonna start getting a lot closer to China peacefully if China replaces that demand. China can play a very long game given its socioeconomic infrastructure. That’s my bet at this point. You could very well be right of course.
Probably. There are definitely useful models that solve problems much better than previous algorithms.
The military analysts point to the age bubble in China as the tell for Taiwan. They really can’t play the long game because of the population bubble. Most project that peak invasion opportunity is around 2027 and the risk goes down substantially after 2030 and then 2035.
We are less than 10 years away from the final fab node. The exponential growth is over. It actually already is over as the people on the bleeding edge are already at the end.
Most people are ignorant of the implications here. Silicon chips are the only time in human history when a civilian industry grew faster than the largest military could finance. There is no replacement. We will return to the ways of 80+ years ago. The next major age of technology is biological, but we are still centuries away from that future.
Beyond fab nodes, there are things like advanced packaging approaches, BPD.
New nodes will probably start to offer more modest gains (while costs will start growing beyond the current 20-30% increase per node), but that doesn’t mean there won’t be improvements in leading edge semi-conductor performance.
The importance is on exponential growth beyond that of military spending. The leader of the global economy has massive overall implications on geopolitics.
I’ve seen that analysis and it makes sense under the population bubble hypothesis. I think the population problem is overstated though, because it’s actively being solved through automation-driven productivity improvement. Robotics use is exploding in China.