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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The total voltage or amperage of the battery pack does not mean anything for the battery cells. You can put more cells in series and get a higher voltage at lower current, or more in parallel and get a higher current at a lower voltage. But all individual cells will run at the same voltage in either configuration (iirc between 3 and 4V), and the current per cell will also be the same for a given load regardless of the situation.

    The main thing a higher battery pack voltage accomplishes is that the cables connected to the battery don’t need to be as thick, as the required thickness of a cable depends only on current, not voltage.



  • It’s not easy to scale up chip production, because it relies on extremely precise machines, which take a long time to build, and many different steps on the way from raw materials to a finished chip.

    If you’d want to set up a new RAM chip factory with competitive performance, it’d be an investment of over a billion USD at the bare minimum, and it’d take a few years to set up all the processes because the first chips can roll off the assembly line.

    If the bubble popped by then, then your new factory would probably run at a loss because it’s nearly impossible to complete with companies who have had decades to optimise their production processes.

    Even if the bubble didn’t pop by then, then the next problem will likely be the wafer supply. Because just like how there are only a few companies with the infrastructure to build modern, high-performance computer chips, there are only a few companies with the infrastructure to build silicon wafers of a high enough quality to build those chips with. And they have only just enough capacity to supply their current customers.

    So to then solve the wafer problem, someone needs to be willing to invest at least a few hundreds of millions of USD to build a new factory for those, which again would struggle to complete in a post-scarcity market. And wafers are far from being the only resource with that issue.

    TL;DR: It’s be a huge investment and a huge gamble, and would likely end up just moving the problem anyway.