A tech news sub for communists
All this crazy stuff from China's R&D makes me happy to live. It's not just bismuth, either, they're doing several different kinds of chip experiments. They recently got a carbon nanotube ternary processor working.
Indeed, they're taking a broad spectrum approach to developing next gen chips here. It's kind of similar to the way China started investing into alternative energy as well. Instead of fixating on a single approach, they develop solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, and so on. If China manages to make a different computing substrate commercially viable, that's going to be huge. We're basically reaching the limits of what you can squeeze out of silicon now, so there's nowhere left to go. Even a naive chip on carbon nanotubes or bismuth could make silicon based chips obsolete overnight, and then there would be decades of improvements ahead.
It's also the sort of thing that can only be done with state level funding. The amount of initial resources that has to be devoted to this is huge, and no company is going to bother making such an investment over a long period needed to bring this tech to life. So, the west is structurally unable to match what China is doing here.
...I know how to solve the gamer problem. Tell them that they should support Marxism-Leninism and China because that's the only way they're going to be able to game at 8k 480fps.
The article says the transistors are made of bismuth. Isn't bismuth expensive?
It is now: China restricts metal exports in response to US tariffs. Why they're important.
China produced 80% of the world's bismuth [in 2023]. The metal hasn't been commercially refined in the U.S. since 1997.
It probably helps that like 70% of the world's bismuth comes from china