Except everything that runs on electricity has a CPU nowadays; the world as it is cannot function without computing. Your bank, your (municipal) government, airplanes, ships, satellites, televisions, the cell network, cash registers, you get the picture.
I realize the CPU's that requires won't implode on day one, but computing becoming unaffordable or even economically unfeasible will have disastrous knock on effects.
There are literally hundreds of semiconductor fabs of various types and process nodes spread all around the world ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... ) and the most common chips are fabricated on older, larger process nodes anyway.
Those are facts, but the industry remains fragile. It didn't take much during Covid, and the Nexperia supply shock combined with DRAM shortages are doing a number on automotive right now.
And I imagine the chips manufactured on older larger process nodes would be subsumed to replace newer ones where possible, which cascades. But that's just conjecture on my part.
Well if a US - China war starts, I don't think cell phones or cash registers will be very high on my priority list. Even it stays "reasonable" (just the US and China, no nuclear weapons), the effect on the world will be so bad that I may not be so concerned by the price of new shops or cars
> Except everything that runs on electricity has a CPU nowadays
This is true but it totally misses the real point.
The point is that most "smart" devices could be perfectly functional and usable with a Z80 or a 6502 or some other simple 8-bit chip controlling them, if the code were kept very small and simple.
The bigger point is that we in the modern Western world don't do this, because we've got lazy and it's easier to stick in an Arm core and do it in very inefficient software. Such as something running in Javascript on an entire embedded Web browser, such as all electron apps, which embed Chromium.
Worse still, these days, quite possibly vibe coded so even the person who nominally wrote it doesn't know how it works.
There are 2 logical corollaries to this:
1. We can make computer-controlled devices without tiny fast 64-bit chips and GPUs, but we are ill-prepared for it. The world will be able to make chips without TSMC, but it will hurt, because we have got slack and lazy.
2. China can make its own chips now, and thanks to FOSS, China has state-of-the-art software stacks that the rest of the world developed it and gave to it for free. It has x86 chips, such as Zhaoxin, but it also has Loongson and so on, and GCC can generate code for them.
So China can make its own computers without the aid of the global chip market. But the rest of the world can't so easily.
Taiwan is also one of the world's major sources of passive components. They're not as irreplaceable there, but even devices without "tiny fast chips" would be affected by a war there.
I realize the CPU's that requires won't implode on day one, but computing becoming unaffordable or even economically unfeasible will have disastrous knock on effects.