Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤'s Reviews > Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Image: An ASML advanced lithography machine which patterns millions of microscopic transistors, each much smaller than a human cell, onto chips using extreme ultraviolet light. Source


Chip:
noun  "a small piece of semiconducting material, usually silicon, with millions or billions of microscopic transistors carved into it." Also known as a semiconductor or integrated circuit

In the summer of '21, I went with my partner to the local Toyota dealership to purchase a new car. I expected her to drive off the lot with one, just as I had done in the past when purchasing new vehicles. It was her first "new" vehicle and we were both thrilled for her to get it....

......only to be told at the dealership that she would have to wait until one was made! What?!

The car she picked was a popular one, including the color. Why weren't there several shiny, new ones on the lot, waiting to be adopted?

We had noticed when we pulled in how few cars there were and that most of them looked used, but didn't pay too much attention to it.

Now the dealer told her it would probably be 3-4 weeks until she could drive home with "Bianca". He opened his computer and found one of her model and color, hybridized. He then "purchased" it for her, telling her the date it would be built, 3 1/2 weeks hence.

So weird, I thought. Why are they doing it this way now?!

When I asked the dealer, he mumbled something about there not being enough chips and cars need "a chip" (*ha, haa!!). He didn't elaborate when I asked further questions; I don't think he knew more than that. 

If only I'd had this book then, I would have understood.

Wow, did I learn a lot from it. My head is reeling with all the new information. Those five stars I gave it? They aren't enough. The best books for me are the ones in which I learn new things and this one? I think my brain needs an upgrade with a better memory chip and processing unit to store and make sense of it all.

Author Chris Miller relates the history of computing and how the chip, especially the general processing unit (GPU), revolutionized computers and brought about those ubiquitous and ever more powerful handheld ones most of us can't live without. 

Many of the terms were new to me, most I'd heard but only had a fuzzy idea of what they meant. I did a heck of a lot of highlighting in this book (thank goodness for chips and tablets to read on; had I done this to the library's copy, I might be out of a job).

There is a lot of tech science and a lot of geopolitics. You can't have one without the other when it comes to modern technology. 

The author traces the history of chips, and discusses the various people who made breakthroughs in their design and production, making ever smaller and more powerful chips. Sixty years ago, a cutting edge chip had a mere FOUR transistors. Today they have 11.8 billion.

Look at your phone. It most likely has 10 or more chips. Each of those chips have 11.8 billion transistors. I'm not a math whiz but I can say without a calculator that that's a hell of a lot of transistors.

Mr Miller also discusses the history of various tech companies, such as Samsung (started out as a dried fish and vegetables company!), Qualcomm, Intel, and TSMC.

Taiwan now leads the world in chip production, especially high end chips. Taiwan "produces 11 percent of the world’s memory chips. More important, it fabricates 37 percent of the world’s logic chips."

Because of that, "China’s ruling party has no higher goal than asserting control over Taiwan". It may be a small country, but Taiwan has become a very important one. The chips produced in its TSMC manufacturing company cannot currently be built anywhere else in the world.

China"now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends on oil" and "is devoting its best minds and billions of dollars to developing its own semiconductor technology in a bid to free itself from America’s chip choke. If Beijing succeeds, it will remake the global economy and reset the balance of military power."

I did not realize how these tiny bits of silicon run our modern world, how reliant we are upon them, and how both the US and China (among other countries) are desperate to control their production. 

I found all of this utterly fascinating. The way chips are made is incredible and I was thrilled to learn about it. And the way these tiny chips affect everything in our lives, including our ability to drive off the lot with a new car, is incredible. 

I started making a list of all the items in my home which have chips in order to figure out how many chips we "own". However, as that list grew and grew, I realized I didn't need to look up how many chips each of those products have to know that there are at least hundreds of them in our home. And many more outside in the driveway. 

To anyone wanting to learn more about chips, how they're made or the importance of them to governments around the world (including why Russia hasn't been able to overtake Ukraine), I highly recommend this book. 

*That "ha, haa" when the dealer said cars need "a chip"? There are often over a thousand chips in modern cars. Not one. 1,000!