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A half-hour power outage at Samsung’s fab near Pyeongtaek, South Korea, disrupted production and damaged tens of thousands of processed wafers. Media reports claim that the outage destroyed as much as 3.5% of the global NAND supply for March, which may have an effect on flash memory pricing in the coming weeks.
The outage happened on March 9 and lasted for about 30 minutes, according to a news story from Taiwain-based TechNews that cites further South Korean reports. The report claims that the outage damaged 50,000 to 60,000 of wafers with V-NAND flash memory, which represent 11% of Samsung’s monthly output. The report further estimates that the said amount equates to approximately 3.5% of global NAND output, but does not elaborate whether it means wafer output or bit output.
Samsung uses its fab near Pyeongtaek to produce 64-layer V-NAND chips used for various applications. The fab is among the largest flash production facilities in the world and therefore any disruption there has an effect on the global output of non-volatile memory. Meanwhile, since production lines have not been damaged and the fab is back online, the significance of such an effect is limited.
Source: TechNews
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 19 2018, @11:15AM (7 children)
I do wonder whether anyone in e.g. military intelligence has ever done a "tech tree" type analysis. For example,
"Say we are at war with X. Can we still build our radios/SAMs/jet fighters"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 19 2018, @11:27AM
Say... what?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 19 2018, @12:24PM (5 children)
The exact phrase to google for is "Defense National Stockpile Center"
Typical of the military, the word is singular, so there are more than a dozen unclassified storage sites.
Everyone knows the gold is at Ft Knox, but the location of a truly vast pile of tungsten is somewhat more secretive beyond a general sorta "could be these couple places". (Note, also cross reference with conspiracy theory about the bars in Ft Knox being gold plated tungsten...)
The real problem is lead time anyway. If you need indium to make LCD displays for a F-22, unless the war is more than a decade long, the process to ship a wartime ready F-22 is so long that it doesn't really matter other than restocking for the next war.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 19 2018, @01:00PM (4 children)
> the process to ship a wartime ready F-22
I guess the military budget goes up a factor 10 during wartime, so one can expect production times to ramp.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday March 19 2018, @01:34PM (3 children)
It's always wartime.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday March 19 2018, @02:28PM (1 child)
Welllll.... there's wartime, and then there's police action but we're calling it a war, and then there's total air superiority vs an actual air war which we haven't significantly had since Vietnam or Korea.
Been a long time since a significant number of AG or AA missiles took out a significant number of American jet targets. Wikipedia lists 375 destroyed helicopters in Iraq from the start of the war up to 2010, but only 70 due to hostile fire, and of those 70 looks like almost all small arms / RPGs.
Subjectively the USA loses about one plane per month due to normal losses from training. Military aircraft training for military missions are not quite as safe as airliners, and stuff is always happening, and as long as the death rate from drunk driving on post is like 100 times higher than the death rate from training, it doesn't really matter (law of large numbers, one accident seems like one too many, but ya got 1.2 million active duty military personnel so there's always going to be "weird accidents" happening all the time, yet thats still measured in the parts per million range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_military_aircraft_(2010%E2%80%93present) [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday March 19 2018, @04:26PM
Good point.
I really meant total war as in WWIII, which is the imagined scenario whereby significant technologies become unavailable. Regional wars I think can be managed (oh dear Korea went SNAFU, well we can source stuff from Japan instead with small cost increase), although I guess there is some risk even there.
E.g. Say Russia moves on Eastern Europe and China moves on Korea and Japan; can we still build computers?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 20 2018, @12:44AM
Welcome welcome honored guest to our humble country. Be assured you are safe here. We will not steal from you, enslave your daughters, sell your sons, rape your women or murder you, so long as we are not at war.
Of course, you must realise, offendi, that here it is brother against brother, brothers against the family, family against our cousins, extended family against extended family, family against the community, community against everyone.
If you are not one of us, then you are against us.
But, o offendi, you are safe here. We are not at war.
This is how it is everywhere we are. The world belongs to us. God has stated it is so.