Chip War

America-centric as expected and can't resist the urge to bring up Moore's Law at every opportunity but otherwise a good history of the micro-chip and it's profound effect on geopolitics. Some observations:

• The steady state that we have reached is one where foundries manufacture chips primarily for fab-less companies, it's easy to imagine an alternative reality in which chip design and manufacturing is done by a limited pool of massive companies
• None of this is possible without the funding, direct or otherwise, of nations
• Chips are becoming more and more specialised for a single use case rather than being 'general purpose'
• Catching up to the incumbents in the race for more advanced chips is basically impossible at this point

Simultaneously fascinating and extremely dry. The chip making supply chain is just as complicated as the chips themselves, and the TL;DR of this book is that the world’s dependence on Taiwan is a bigger risk than most people realize.

The book can be summed up in this quote:

"After a disaster in Taiwan, in other words, the total costs would be measured in the trillions. Losing 37 percent of our production of computing power each year could well be more costly than the COVID pandemic and its economically disastrous lockdowns. It would take at least half a decade to rebuild the lost chipmaking capacity. These days, when we look five years out we hope to be building 5G networks and metaverses, but if Taiwan were taken offline we might find ourselves struggling to acquire dishwashers." (Chris Miller, Chip War)

Well paced, I found this one easy to breeze through

We're fucked!

Really incredible and fascinating book. I loved learning about the history of the development of chips. While I thought I didn't like non-fiction, this changed my mind. The way it is written is really engaging and I never felt like I was being bored with history. Makes me want to become a semiconductor engineer. I found it so interesting how much intersection there is between engineering and politics. Its cool to see people theorize implications of technology that doesn't even exist yet, but predict will exist and then prepare for it like Qualcomm packing more data into radiowaves. Overall really fantastic book, would definitely recommend it to anyone!

Will not only change the way you see technology, but also the world. 5/5

It makes a convincing case that we should all be paying attention and that free market ideals conflict with national security. Ultimately, I enjoyed the Acquired podcast episode about TSMC more. Maybe I would have rated this higher if I had not previously listened to that episode.