Well good to know the chips won't stick to anything since they're made out of anti-seize grease.
this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust
silicon – 28.2% of earth's crust; 7,200,000 tonnes extracted per year
bismuth – 0.0085% of earth's crust; 10,200 tonnes extracted per year
doesn't it say "molybdenum disulfide" in the text?
molybdenum - 1.2 ppm (0.00012%); 227,000 tonnes extracted per year
The techradar text says bismuth; the azernews.az text says molybdenum
Silicon is used for way more than just chips though, I'd be surprised if it's more than a percent
This is the first thing that came to mind when reading the article. Replacing silicon with bismuth sounds like a downside.
Industrial diamonds made with almost everything which contains Carbon.
And yet Pepto Bismol is found in huge quantities on every drugstore shelf in the world. How will they ever find enough?? 😂
Sounds like total incompatibility. It will take decades before we could even think about incorporating non binary based systems into our workflow.
I don't think decades, but some years for sure.
so, if i understand this correctly, it can do stuff like fast and cheap imprecise arithmetic of floating point numbers by doing something like converting the signal to a continuous (non-binary) voltage, then doing some analogous circuitry, then converting the signal back to digital?
It seems to be an AI accelerator. Without reading the source, to me seems that that's the game. Interesting.
yeah because AI does a lot of floating-point calculations, and precision is famously not very important there (i.e. google replaced all floating point numbers in their AI models with 8-bit precision fixed-point numbers and the performance is just as good).
It's only a matter of time until somebody figures out how to mass produce a computing substrate that will make silicon look like vacuum tubes. We don't need to discover any new physics here. Numerous substrates have been shown to outperform silicon by at least an order of magnitude in the lab. This is simply a matter of allocating resources in a sustained fashioned towards scaling these proofs of concept into mass production, something planned economies happen to excel at.
The United States outsourced our manufacturing, including our manufacturing design and development skill, to China many decades ago. My money’s on China.
All hanging off a Dutch company that makes arguably the most complicated machine the human race has ever built. (EUV lithography is absolutely astounding, when you have even a passing understanding of the tolerances required to make it work.)
ASML, manufacturer of photolithography machines.
Only for the highest-end, smallest-process chips, and I doubt they’ll be the world leader for much longer.
But won't you think about the silicon fab duopoly? They are the true victims in this!
They’ll get bailed out. Only losses are socialized.
My heart bleeds for them.
Oh the poor 1% what will they do...
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Won't make any difference if you are still on windows
they'll find a way for telemetry to use half of it and the start menu another quarter
Rewrite entire os to be an electron app
Call it reactOS.
now theyll rewrite the right click menu AND windows explorer in react
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Wom't make a difference with any current OS, none of those would work with the new arquitecture, way different from the current one. One thing is the new hardware and another is the current lack of any soft or OS for it. Not even DOOM would run in it. Maybe in one or two years it would make sense to change your PC.
Another alternative to silice are diamonds, there the chips are with the same arquitecture as those from silice, but with the advantage that they support much more heat to the point that they don't even need refrigeration, apart the electric apabilities of diamond is way better as those from silice, that permits a way higher speed and stability. The price isn't much higher as the one from normal chips with sythetic diamonds. They are already in use, even with manufactories in Spain.
New materials doesn't mean new architecture. They can build RISC-V or ARM chips with that.
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“This allows electrons to flow with almost no resistance, like water through a smooth pipe,” Peng explained.
Um actually even smooth water pipes have a lot of tubulance since all materials aren't perfectly smooth so the edges of the pipe have a lot of turbulance which dramatically slows down the water from the theoretical maximum.
Now I wonder what would happen if you coated together a super hydrophobic layer.
I'm all for overthrowing the monarchy but my laptop is already full of demons but I do not want them to have a drug problem too that's be unhealthy I hear
dang I never thought of that. I always assumed silicon was basicly the end, except for quantum computers which aren't very useful for most computing.
Never assume something is the end. There is always something better. It is just one breakthrough away.
—me encouraging our locksmith after we've accidentally triggered the prison alarm
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