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The dead end of chips: Manufacturing semiconductors consumes as much energy as entire countries
(english.elpais.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Technology
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Okay. What are we supposed to do, not use chips? They're kind of a main character of the 21st century.
This would be a great application of those nuke plants fuckin' Google and Amazon want to build.
All of these articles treat energy usage like a massive crime, but miss/ignore that the world's energy use needs to go up as we increasingly turn to electric alternatives. The problem truly lies in how we generate electricity, not how we use it.
So the actual answer to your question is intense and rapid investment in sustainable, non-carbon energy production. An infrastructure revamp to rival any other in history. It would've been far better to do so decades ago, but that's no longer an option. Anything else is just half measures we can't afford.
We could start by not requiring new chips every few years.
For 90% of the users, there hasn't been any actual gain within the last 5-10 years. Older computers work perfectly fine, but artificial slow downs and bad software cause laptops to feel sluggish for most users.
Phones haven't really advanced either. But apps and OSes are too bloated, hardware impossible to repair, so a new phone it is.
Every device nowadays needs wifi and AI for some reason, so of course a new dishwasher has more computing power than an early Cray, even though nothing of that is ever used.
Tech companies are terrified of becoming commodities, even though a good chunk of them basically are at this point.
Intel would probably be in a better spot if they'd just leaned into that rather than try to regain the market dominance they once had.
Same for cars.
Why do we need a new model every year?
Automotive design has been functionally complete since decades ago.
Yeah sure and we might as well sell fans that can go on for decades while we are at it /s
Simple, we should all become Mentats!