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China’s new silicon-free chip beats Intel with 40% more speed and 10% less energy
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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They're not just bismuth! They're bismuth and selenium with some oxygen mixed in (to connect those elements together, I think).
The reason I point this out is because this means that not only can the chips of the future perform blazingly fast calculations they can also cure your tummy ache and prevent dandruff!
Once this technology becomes mainstream it'll be bismuth as usual. We'll all be getting down to bismuth.
A whole new era of puns is upon us! The product of the selenium.
inb4 Trump claims the chinese are putting mind control chips in American shampoo
Nah. It'll be to make them transgendered.
Don't forget Selenium is also essential to defeat alien organisms!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcEavABwwqg
Would using bismuth in chip production affect the price of medicaments?
quick lookup showed pure bismuth at $300/kg. That is not too expensive to make chips, but it would divert demand away from other uses, and we're gonna need a bigger mine. China will find a way, and likely cost reductions will result from volume.
Still, this is a couple of years (wild optimism and resources devoted to it) at least away from Chip products.
Silicon is like $3/kg (and that's the higher price, it's actually cheaper than that outside USA). I'm not sure if we could sustain the same level of manufacturing using bismuth without side effects. One of the best things about silicon is that it's the second most abundant element in Earth's lithosphere (the first being oxygen).. I don't think the "line must go up" attitude around pushing for Moore's law is a worthy effort. I'd rather we pushed for software to be more efficient, I don't feel my PC is significantly faster than it was 10 years ago, despite its Hz having doubled.
I could understand using this for specialized applications, but I'm not convinced it should be something that should be made as widespread as silicon tech, so I don't think this should really be seen as a replacement for it.
I understand more bismuth mining would be needed to support price stability, but scale could mean lower prices. China has special needs in that innovation is required to escape US tyranny of global IP.
Yes, I understand that more mining could be done, but what I was saying is that I don't think it could be sustained to the level of silicon. Bismuth is a rare mineral, and 100 times more expensive than silicon.
China is the world's largest market for semiconductors (50% of the chips in the world are traded there), if they want to use locally produced bismuth chips they would only be able to tackle a very small fraction of that. Either they are only used in special applications (like some particular specialized hardware at smaller scale) or it would be impossible, the Earth does not have enough resources to produce bismuth chips at the same scale as silicon. So I'm not sure if it could work as serious competition to silicon.
But we'll see, maybe I'm wrong.
Not an expert, but high purity bismuth seems 6x more expensive than high purity silicon. I could be wrong.
It would be for ultra premium performance chips, which China has a low share currently.
And it's Wednesday, so it's Bismuth Time