Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology Paperback – 31 Aug. 2023

Perhaps a dry subject but presented in a very interesting way. Very well written.

A well researched and exciting narrative history of semiconductor manufacturing by US corporations that is very entertaining. Almost a non-fiction thriller in fact !However it is a very US centric. This is surprising on two counts: the youth of the author and the sheer international scale of chip manufacturing.Prepare to read for example that the US was the sole actor in the first Iraq war, that ARM was created by an ‘Apple startup’ , that it was ‘hard to understand’ why the UK (amongst others) resisted Trump’s invocations to ban Huawei (is the author aware of how the world outside the US views Donald Trump ?) or how strange it is that a small country like the Netherlands should be an exclusive manufacturer of Advanced Semiconductor Photolithography.The narrative seems to cast the US as the universal inventor of all semiconductor things good and largely dismisses the successes of US allies in the same field by either: not mentioning them, attributing their successes to IP theft, market dumping or rare chance.For example, the home of ARM is a reliable ally of the US and ten times as many ARM processors as x86 chips were shipped globally in 2021.Yet the ARM story was not told in the book in anything like the fond detail that was lavished on American innovators. One has a high index of suspicion that that is because that success didn’t happen in America.There are other similar omissions: Open Source Software’s impact on chip consumption has been profound. Open Source Software is not an American corporate invention but it did do the world a favour by breaking the Intel/Windows corporate monopoly. That was a profoundly good thing that allowed the global explosion of cheap consumer mobile processors running on batteries. The only real mention of this in the book is to view this within the lens of a US corporate failure.I would say that a future edition of this book needs these points addressing and quite possibly a fairer narrative attributed to the Asian players as well.By the way: my family is half American (and half not).

The book is the product of brilliance, meticulous research comprising both original sources and an extensive net of roughly one hundred interviews and a nearly phenomenal ability of the author to present complex issues with crystalline clarity.To appreciate the significance of the conflict, one has to realize that the future of war will be defined by computer power.And to appreciate the enormous evolution of chips suffice it to say that an Apple iPhone 12 is powered by an A14 processor chip with 11.8 billion transistors carved into its silicon while only sixty years ago the number of transistors on a cutting-edge chip was just four.It was Gordon Moore that noticed in 1965 that the number of components that could fit on a chip and consequently computing power was doubling every two years; the prediction that the computer power would grow exponentially was called 'Moore's Law'.At the core of computing is the need for many millions of 1s and 0s. The entire digital universe consists of these two numbers. Every button on an iPhone, every email, photograph, and YouTube Video - all of these are coded, ultimately, in vast strings of 1s and 0s. But these numbers do not actually exist. They are expressions of electrical currents, which are either on (1) or off (0). A chip is a grid of millions or billions of transistors, tiny electrical switches that flip on and off to process these digits, to remember them, and to convert real world sensations like images, sound, and radio waves into millions and millions of 1s and 0s.The cost of processing and remembering 1s and 0s has fallen by by a billionfold in the past half century.The evolution of chips was shaped by economics, the military, space, politics, geopolitics, and globalization.The term Silicon Valley was coined in the seventies to reflect the nearly absolute dominance of California in the sphere of chips.America may have lost the war in Vietnam but won the subsequent peace by integrating South East Asia in chip production. To this day, however, while semiconductor supply chains requires components from many cities and countries, still almost every chip made has a Silicon Valley connection or is produced with tools designed and built in California.It has, however, to be noted that Taiwan's TSMC fabricates the chips that provide 37 percent of the world's new computing power each year while it builds almost all the world's most advanced processor chips; two South Korean companies produce 44 percent of the world's memory chips; and the Dutch ASML builds one hundred percent of the world's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines without which cutting edge chips are impossible to make.The book was one of the more important books I have read in recent years in both content and delivery.

Great book covering the history of chips in the modern world up to current. Dives into how microprocessors started, why different players exist and which ones don't anymore, how they evolved and why they're so important. It brings excellent perspective on one of the challenges with globalisation.

What a ride! This book was an eye-opener. The writing style is very professional, the text packed with lots of useful information and the structure of the book itself helps the story unfold neatly. The author skillfully shows how the roots of the digital revolution began in the US and how the combination of valuable human capital and competition (again in the US) made possible all the subsequent advances. One of the key ideas here is that nowadays chips are more important than machine guns and the country who has the most advanced chips also has the best military technology. The US (and by extension the free world) still has the upper hand but competition from China is fierce.

A good read, well paced, informative – AI is now with us and this book was just before the revolution it’s bringing. Nonetheless this is an excellent book and an essential insight into why Taiwan is so crucial in current geopolitics to say nothing of the history of chip making. Really enjoyed this book.

The book tells a surprisingly exciting tale of the most important technology of todays: semiconductors.The drama unfolds between visionary physicists and businessmen, nimble startups and industry behemoths, backwater countries and geopolitical superpowers.Must read!

Great read