Comment by asciimov
2 months ago
> … no further silicon designs ever get manufactured
The problem wouldn’t be missing CPUs but infrastructure. Power would be the big one, generators, substations, those sorts of things. Then manufacturing, lot of chips go there. Then there is all of healthcare.
Lots of important chips everywhere that aren’t CPUs.
We had power for a very long time before silicon.
Generators are just big coils of copper. Substations too. Solar won't work without silicon, but anything with a spinning coil of copper would. Voltmeters would need replacing with the old analog versions and humans would need to manually push switches to keep power levels constant, just like in the '50s.
And a spring together with an electro-magnet can be made into a relay. They're big and slow of course, but they do the same thing as a transistor. If you can make metal into a wire you can make them. In the 1940s computers were electro-mechanical.