Technology

So, it's obviously nothing like an across-the-board replacement, but you can make useful chips that aren't the latest and greatest.

If you want to do performance-competitive CPUs or competitive signal-processing for radars or whatever, then it won't work.

But let's say that you want to make a voltage-regulator chip (something that I know we have put on sanctions lists for Russia). Power supplies need those, so you're gonna pretty universally want them. That doesn't need to be particularly high resolution.

Think of all the problems that automakers had due to COVID-19 chip disruption. That was mostly over old, low resolution chips...but they had to have them to ship cars. The article specifically mentions auto manufacture.

Microcontrollers do a lot of work in consumer electronics. Probably have one in your microwave oven. Not very fancy, but it lets you plonk logic in in software.

Russia can probably smuggle in some chips. But that's expensive (because criminals are going to want a premium for their risk) and risky. Let's say that you're trying to buy sanctioned CPUs in Kazakhstan from sketchy parties.

Maybe one of those parties is a (comparatively) upstanding smuggler getting you the real thing and just charging you an arm and a leg.

Or maybe it's from some enterprising party selling counterfeits, because now the original manufacturer isn't gonna be working with you to verify that the stuff is authentic, and that knockoff doesn't have the same testing and has some problems.

Or maybe the person you've run into is with the CIA and intending to poison your sanction-busting smuggled supplies of chips with backdoored or sabotaged versions.

Russia will source what it has to from the black market, but the less stuff in their supply chain that comes from the black market, the better-off they are.

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.... And they're able to make chips good enough for their military.

Russia's military is in large parts only slightly refurbished soviet gear. For a T72 or even T90, a 90s era chip is still good enough.

Why do you think they dismantled all those washing machines? The microcontrollers in there aren't high tech at all.

Fun fact about tamigotchis, a couple years ago I was looking up if they still made them and I ran across something talking about the tech in modern versions and apparently the newest version of them at the time was running a variant of the MOS6502 microprocessor. This is the same microprocessor that Commodore used a variant of in the Commodore 64.

In fairness, that was a pretty solid era. It wasn’t peak tech but I’d be ok going back.

It was probably a mistake for society to advance beyond the era when computers weren’t super portable and phones were just “smartish.” Like that BlackBerry era where you could communicate and get news if you needed it but it was enough of a hassle that you usually just waited until you were at home or the office to get caught up.

Sure but weren't they raiding washing machines to get chips for their tanks? This is a pretty big step to avoid embargos and pretty significant that they need to do it.

AKSHUALLY (not sticking up for Russia here), it's mostly dependent on how much energy they want to waste. They could make massive dies of whatever if they can power it. Probably with oil. It'll never be up to par with "modern" tech, but this is one of those things that seems to unlock a modern society.

If they can source materials, and improve on the process to be competitive, it's another dumb fucking race that humanity has to endure.

And all the Furbys their little hearts desire!