Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest Podcast. Recently, John Dickerson spoke with author Chris Miller about how Moore’s Law is changing everything we know about the chipmaking business and his new book, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology.
This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
John Dickerson: Remind people what Moore’s Law is. And it feels like a short way to tell this story is essentially, everyone involved in the business of making chips, trying to follow or fulfill the promise of Moore’s Law, and that led to offshoring, the innovation , the fact that we are in this concentrated position that we are in today.
Chris Miller: Gordon Moore was an early engineer in the chip industry, he would later go on to co-found Intel. And he noted in 1965 that the number of components on each chip was doubling every year or so. And that means the chips double in strength every year or two.
And that dynamic continues to this day. Over the past few decades, every two years, chips have doubled in strength. And what that means is that the chip industry is growing faster than any other part of the economy.
And I want to think, how does it compare to other sectors of the economy? What if airplanes flew twice as fast every two years, and that rate of change was constant over the last century? It’s impossible to imagine, but that’s why remembering data in certain types of devices costs less than a million of what it did 50 years ago because of that exponential rate to grow.
I’ve always thought that the idea is that you always go for cutting-edge chips, and that you don’t use anything that doesn’t cut right. And so, I’m interested to know about different types of chips that are useful and different types of things.
But essentially, following Moore’s Law means trying to fit more things into a smaller space, more powerful things into a smaller space. Which requires unique design skills. I mean, it’s hard to understand sometimes how small the etchings you’re talking about are.
If you go into an Apple Store today and buy a new iPhone, the main chip in that iPhone has 15 billion tiny transistors etched into it. And so, to fit 15 billion devices on a chip the size of your fingernail, each of them is about the size of a virus. And it is done with absolute precision.
I love it, I think it’s the ASML machine that can hit a golf ball and hit the moon.
That’s right. They can hit a golf ball sitting on the moon, which fires a laser from Earth.
Oh my God. All right. So, this idea of concentration, why has the industry become so concentrated?
There are two main reasons. The first is that if you produce more chips, you can get economies of scale, costs are lower because you can buy machinery more efficiently, get materials more efficiently. So, the cost is about it.
But the second is, the more chips you produce, the more you can refine your production processes and improve your technology. And so today, it is no coincidence that TSMC, the Taiwanese company we are talking about, is the largest chip-maker in the world and the most advanced chip-maker in the world. Because they get data from every chip they make, and then use that to make the next chip even more consequentialism.