[PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

There's far too much focus on the saving power mantra.  People don't realize
we are 10, maybe max 20 years away from cheap photovoltaics.

A generation from now people will be wondering why our generation was so
hyper focused on "green power"  The only thing people will care about for
power consumption is handheld mobile.

And the software and hardware industry simply does not want the average
person doing any kind of data processing on their handhelds.  They want the
average consumer's handheld to be a stupid terminal that sends as much data
as possible about whoever is carrying it around back to the Robot Overlords.
Geolocation data, yes.  Biometric data, yes.  They want to know how fast you
go, they want to know if you break the speed limit, they want to know if
your blood pressure is high.  They want to know if you are boffing that cute
married chick you met in accounting, how often, and where.  They want to
know how much marijuana you smoke and where you buy it.  They want to know
if you exercise or not, they want to know what you watch, how much porn you
consume, what type it is, if you like girl on girl or guy on guy.  They want
to know every last thing about you.

And every single mobile "advance" that has happened in recent years is
designed EXACTLY to this goal.  They believe "all your data belong to us"
and they are building giant server farms that will digest that data and sell
it to governments, religious institutions, insurance companies both auto and
health, and law enforcement.  And they will make sure your tax dollars will
fund all of this stuff.

I am NOT betting against power-hungry chips.  Any chips that do more work,
more sorting through the data, looking for bitcoin primes, looking for
groups of people who like gay porn or shop at Nordstrom, and do it faster -
our Robot Overlords will gladly pay whatever power costs are.

Eastern Oregon is desert, full of wheat fields that were marginal producing
30 years ago but due to global warming today, are almost worthless.  Those
will be paved over by fields of cheap photovoltaics and electrical power
will be cheap, abundant, and feeding data centers full of computers that
will be digesting your data and selling it to the highest bidder.

THAT is the future that the computer industry has planned for us.

Ted

-----Original Message-----
From: Keith Lofstrom <keithl at keithl.com> 
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2025 6:55 PM
To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at portlandia-it.com>
Cc: 'Off-topic and potentially flammable discussion'
<plug-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org>
Subject: Re: [PLUG-TALK] U.S. manufactured motherboards ... and growth

On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 09:07:53PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> There's zero chance that any Trump tariffs are going to stimulate the 
> growth of on-US-soil chipmaking.
> 
> Any investor looking to drop 4-6B into a fab is going to expect at least a
> decade of returns.   Probably longer.  Their fab will start out making
CPUs
> then as time passes and newer CPUs are made with newer tech they will 
> make cheaper CPUs that get used in DVD players and Microwaves and so 
> on and so on until a decade after construction they will be wringing 
> the last drops out of their investment making chips for garage door
openers.

This isn't how bleeding edge chip factories (like Intel D1X) work.
IF Intel factories continue to work.  Today, Intel's products are "too
capable" and much too expensive for the desktop or (more
importantly) the "palmtop".  Intel business is the tippy top end, which must
grow huge and fast if they are to survive.

There are plenty of "upper middle" companies like TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor
and clones) that make phone chips. 

The feeble chips in DVD players and microwaves are made in bottom-tier
low-tech fabs using hand-me-down equipment (which might have been Intel fab
equipment two decades and four owners ago).  Piper Cub vs Airbus 380.

In 2025, the glamor market is megascale Artificial Intelligence
- whatever that really means.  It will soon be big POWER THRIFTY artificial
intelligence, because the limit to A.I. growth is the cost of gigawatts, not
gigaflops.  Intel's processes make very small transistors, which do not need
many femtojoules to switch, but they must switch zillions of times per
second to earn their exorbitant production cost.  Switching is not
thermodynamically thrifty.

Data centers locate in Oregon because our power is cheaper than elsewhere,
but it won't be for long, bidding for a fixed energy supply.  Sometime soon,
Oregon residential customers will notice their electric rates are rising and
their air worsening (due to coal-fired generation) and realize that
politicians pander to employee-lite server farms rather than households and
"people employers". 

I imagine an election-winning slogan like "watts to the people, not to
computers taking their jobs".  Not entirely accurate, but when did accuracy
matter in politics?

Anyway, Intel's current products are overpriced for consumers (who consume
handhelds), and too power hungry for the tasks current data centers perform.
That said, Intel's superb chip technology can enable new kinds of data
centers using new sources of energy - which is what I hope to discuss with
them.

As a chip designer and avid "Intel watcher", with a wife who worked for
Intel 34 years ago, I can extrapolate where they are, and as an outsider I
can see beyond the grindstone in front of their noses.  There are vastly
more opportunities than they seem to be aware of.  I'll help them so I don't
pay taxes for food stamps for their laid-off employees.

Those employees are who I care about, not the suits in the C-suite.  MANY
decades ago, Howard Vollum (co-founder of
Tektronix) took me aside and explained that my job was NOT to create
brilliant inventions, but to create profitable products that could be
produced with pride by thousands of Tektronix factory employees, earning the
money that paid their mortgages.  Not many "Howards" these days.

Note that Howard did NOT explain that many oscilloscopes were sold to
measure nuclear weapons tests, or that the scopes were disposed of after one
test because they were radioactive, or that the part that turned radioactive
was the decorative chrome trim around the case, which could have been
discarded and the scopes used again. 

With thousands of families to feed, compromises are made. 

Intel has similar problems and obligations, and no doubt some unnecessary
"chrome trim" that pays mortgages in expensive Washington county.  I hope to
turn that chrome trim into job security for Intel employees, like my wife
used to be.  BTW, her next "job" was medical school, a demanding task that
demanding Intel prepared her for.
I hope that Intel will be "preschool" for thousands more like her, decades
into the future.

----

Regards the Trumpies, the drunken sailors will have hangovers sooner or
later.  As an engineer who designs for production by well-equipped PEOPLE,
my job is not to wave fingers at them and tell them "I told you so", but to
design the products and tools and procedures they will need to earn a salary
in the future.  MAGA hats aren't safety equipment, and slogans don't create
silicon chips.

Regards computers, my concern is watts.  I figure a watt of extra average
power consumption costs me $20 per decade (including summer air
conditioning).

My previous 24 port gigabit switch (2 or more wired ports in every room,
many in the office and "bit shop") consumed 16 watts idle.  I recently
replaced it with a 24 port TP-Link ($86 from Amazon) that consumes 6 watts,
saving $200 per decade.

I worry that the TP-Link will Phone Home To China with some of my packets.
I will soon deploy a better firewall computer, and will log the IP addresses
it talks to.  I hope a paranoid PLUGger can suggest a list of worrying IP
addresses to compare those log files to.

----

If you made it down this far ... Cisco/Linksys SRW2024, free to good cause.
I cleaned out the crud that caused fan noise.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com