Technology

The USA had trouble with fabs and the supporting infrastructure safety needed to transport the extremely hazardous chemicals. It happened to be convenient to outsource the fabs. It is all primarily funded by US based venture capital. These are not the nations in control of these assets like some kind of independent thing. If you look at how the transfers happened, it was all essentially done so that the US stays in control.

I spent a few months going down the rabbit hole of the computer history YT channel's verbal history interviews. I'm aware that those likely had quite the American bias and all, but in aggregate there are a lot of stories describing how this played out from the people that were involved. There were also several interviews I watched that go into various military aspects that are quite interesting. It has been around 8 years since I went down that rabbit hole. So my memory is tinted. I'm good at remembering my abstracted simplifications but not the specific details.

My total understanding of hardware is kinda frozen around some parts of an ISA. Like I built Ben Eater's bread board computer, but I struggle between pipelines and out of order instructions, branching in FORTH/assembly, and wtf is going on with C, up until I get to Python which I can read and bash scripts like I prefer. I'm not quite as naive as I like to play, but pretty damn close.

I figure RISC-V will still play the baseline in the future. If new nodes are not possible, the present model of royalties will not hold up. Standardization will be good for everyone. The last time I watched a RISC-V conference was probably around 2021, but it looked really solid then. Most of the old guard like Intel were major financial contributors to RISC-V at that time.