Comment by protocolture
2 months ago
My guess:
Something would need to happen to stop / prevent production for about 30 - 60 years.
Thats roughly equivalent to the Saturn V engine, and Codename FOGBANK which are the 2 examples of technologies that had to be reverse engineered after the fact.
Hypothetically we might choose to stop making new ones if demand dried up significantly.
Short of asteroid Dino-Doom v2.0 hitting the earth, how could CPU demand fall so low that we don't make any new ones?
Some kind of demand reduction.
It could be the case that we finally hit a sold wall in CPU progress, cloud providers demand something they dont have to replace every few years, and the result is some kind of everlasting gobstopper CPU.
Then as failures fall off, so does demand, and then follows production.
A pretty large drop in global population might see the same result. Labor needs to be apportioned to basic needs before manufacturing.
The whole of human civilization would need to be completely moribund before every manufacturer stops designing and making new weird industrial/embedded CPUs for little niches.
And because they go into things like dishwashers and cars (and missiles) and stuff that dies for other reasons than chip failure, you always need some supply of them.
Though I guess if we end all wars and make stuff so good that you literally never need a new widget ever and all industry just stops, then I suppose there is such a thing as a perfect design.