Quotes from Chris Miller

Conway and Mead

paving the way for computer programs to automate chip design.

globalization" of chip fabrication hadn't occurred; "Taiwanization

Mead-Conway Revolution" than the Pentagon.

laissez-faire system works if every country agrees to it. Many governments, especially in Asia, were deeply involved in supporting their chip industries.

Washington kept telling itself that the U.S. was running faster, blindly ignoring the deterioration in the U.S. position, the rise in China's capabilities, and the staggering reliance on Taiwan and South Korea

Intel decided to focus on memory chips, where mass production would produce economies of scale.

Helping companies and professors keep Moore's Law alive, DARPA reasoned, was crucial to America's military edge.

Russia's oil industry would be dominated by Putin and his allies. This policy had clear costs in terms of deterring foreign investment and reducing efficiency

the U.S. barred Huawei from buying advanced computer chips made with U.S. technology. Soon, the company's global expansion ground to a halt.

built by alumni of these DARPA- and SRC-funded programs.

China now spends more money each year importing chips than it spends

Our fundamental problem is that our number one customer is our number one competitor.

Qualcomm—quality communications—betting that ever-more-powerful microprocessors would let them stuff more signals into existing spectrum bandwidth. Jacobs

Semiconductors weren't simply the "cornerstone" of "everything we're competing on," as one administration official had put it. They could also be a devastatingly powerful weapon.

What is plausible is for China to reduce its reliance on the United States in certain spheres and to increase its overall weight in the chip industry, weaning itself off as many choke-point technologies as possible.

We rarely think about chips, yet they've created the modern world.

Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.

DARPA has funded a variety of projects related to developing RISC-V. Chinese firms have also embraced RISC-V, because they see it as geopolitically neutral. In 2019, the RISC-V Foundation, which manages the architecture, moved from the U.S. to Switzerland for this reason.

Putin himself publicly emphasized the importance of political stability to energy investment. "I worked in Saint Petersburg on a great many different projects," Putin explained in an interview in 2000. "If we're going from one putsch to another, and no one knows when the next putsch is coming and how it will end, then who will invest?

produced more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history. Nothing else comes close.

there's now a new instruction set architecture called RISC-V that is open-sourced, so it's available to anyone without a fee.

This was a leap forward in computing—or it would have been, if not for the moths. Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular "debugging" by their engineers. Also like lightbulbs, vacuum tubes often burned

Most of the world's GDP is produced with devices that rely on semiconductors. For a product that didn't exist seventy-five years ago, this is an extraordinary