RE: just looked again1 May 2022 12:03
@Captainswag semi conductors are the gold of the future, there was an international shortage of them before covid and made worse now by this war, for example many car manufacturer's have been removing the all bells and whistle features from their cars as plants are stacking up with unfinished cars due to massive chip shortage, the tech industry is also suffering hugely with huge price increases in GPU graphical processor Units, and CPU’s for mobile devices (laptops etc), even Intel have been reintroducing older design processors to try and fill the gap and keep up but there is still a massive supply demand shortage. This is only going to increase as the years go on because there are very few factories around the world that can produce the wafers that the chip core\die is built on.
There are in reality only 3 countries that can produce wafers for chips, USA (IBM Intel) South Korea (Samsung, Hynix) and Taiwan (TSMC)
TSMC is the worlds biggest plant in Taiwan, China have chucked trillions into trying to start their own chip plants and failed so far to get one going thats producing and keeping up with any of the others.
Russia have also had been craving to be self-sufficient in their own CPU manufacturing, they produced their own version called the Baikal range of CPU, it’s a proper fully functioning Processor based on old technology bought from British based firm ARM technology, we are talking tech at least 6 years behind the current being produced by the big 3, its performance is also on par with 6 year older CPU’s and poor in todays comparisons, the ARM cortex design was really for the mobile and tablet market not desktop CPU’s and servers. Other than that anything Russia has tried to produce has been light years behind any of the big 3.
The problem is with creating wafer industrial plants is they are very expensive to make, they also take a lot of time to build, if you are to design your own from scratch by the time you have designed it, produced it and built it the technology is already out of date, its also hugely expensive, we are talking upwards of 10 billion dollars just to get started.
Semi conductors are the trump card in any negotiations, without them you will never properly be part of the modern world and will always be playing keep up, the USA wants it kept that way to and this one of the reasons why they are prepared to do go to war with China.
This whole thing with Putin and Xi Jing Ping being friends is a smoke screen, China do not trust Russia and never have, the only thing they have in common is they share their dislike for the same enemy and have the same problem mentioned above.
Its more entwined than we think this war and under the surface if we scrape back the layers we can find many reasons such as above for Putin hatred of the West.
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