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Asianometry
By Jon YTechnology
Asianometry episodes
- A Good Old-Fashioned American Nuclear Energy DebacleIn the early 1970s, a small agency of about 81 people backed by some of Washington state's local utilities decided to build five nuclear power plants. Simultaneously. And it went about as well as you might think. With the country's biggest municipal bond bankruptcy up until then. And four abandoned power stations. The story of Washington Public Power Supply System’s attempt to pull off America's most complicated construction project is a fascinating mix of civil service, bad estimates, nuclear immaturity, and just plain mismanagement. In this video, a good old-fashioned American nuclear energy debacle.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
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Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
32 min - Disrupting Big Steel: Conquest of the MinimillsI have always found it amusing that the canonical story of technology disruption had nothing to do with silicon, PCs, SaaS, or AI. It involved steel. The late great Clayton Christensen mentioned the minimills in his 1997 book, the Innovator's Dilemma. He wrote that minimill steelmaking was a disruptive technology, one that emerged like the Mongols to take down a complacent empire. Was that what really happened? The whole thing has always fascinated me. In today's video, the conquest of the minimills. A story of pure disruption.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
38 min - Intel Should Second-Source NvidiaIn August 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States Government is considering to take a financial stake in Intel. A bit later, Bloomberg reported that the US Government is looking to take a 10% stake via CHIPS Act money. The Intel situation is fluid. And my style of work is not suited for these strange, 24-second news cycle. Things change on a dime. But I have an idea that I want to write about. One of Intel's problems is that its old monopoly is dying. So to revive it, I think Intel should get access to Nvidia's crown jewels. In today's video, a modest proposal regarding Intel.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
16 min - The Weird OS Built Around a DatabaseIs it a database software? An operating system? It's both. Produced by Richard Pick, nicknamed "Dick", (Yes, I know) Pick OS is older than SQL, UNIX, or CP/M. I have never seen anything like it, and the people who use it tend to love it to death. In today's video, we explore a unique database software plus operating system.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
20 min - The Evolution of Flash MemoryBack in 1987, flash memory cost about $80,000 per gigabyte. Twenty years later in 2007, prices had fallen to just $10 per gigabyte. By 2014, just 27 cents. And then as of this writing, spot prices were quoting just about two cents per gigabyte. That is some insane scaling. Moore's Law might have faltered...in the logic world. But it is still alive and well in flash memory, particularly the variant known as NAND. In fact, one can argue that flash memory - first NOR and then NAND - has been one of the most successful semiconductor products ever made. In this video, the 60-year evolution of flash memory.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
26 min - Nongfu Spring and China's Bottled Water WarsNongfu Spring emerged out of China's Thousand Island Lake to become the country's largest water seller. Today, its founder is China's richest man, more or less, with a fortune valued at nearly $60 billion. The history of Mainland China's bottled water industry is wild with episodes of scandal, health pseudoscience, and random bouts of cancel culture. How much drama can a water company twist open? You might be surprised. In this video, a Chinese water business.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
0 min - The AI Bandwidth Wall & Co-Packaged OpticsOver the past two decades, the semiconductor industry has successfully pushed the limits to deliver more raw compute. A wild success, really. A 2025 Nvidia B200 GPU has 178,000 times more Floating Point Operations Per Second, or FLOPs than a top-of-the-line Intel CPU in the late 1990s. Unfortunately, we don't fully benefit thanks to limits - or "walls", so to say - that keep us from taking full advantage of all that new raw power. One such wall is the memory wall - where semiconductor memories like DRAM have not scaled as fast as the compute has. I have covered this before. But in recent years, another bottleneck has presented itself: One relating to IO bandwidth. In response, the industry has been working on a silicon photonic solution. In today’s video, we talk about a technology trend that has been over a decade in the making: Co-packaged optics.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
18 min - Visa's Debit Card MonopolyVisa Inc is synonymous with the credit card. But for all the oomph that Visa has there, they have the debit card market in an even tighter grip. Depending on what source you use, Visa facilitates 60-75% of debit card transactions in the US. In comparison, they processed "just" 50-60% of credit card transactions. It was not always like this. Visa first entered the debit card industry in the 1970s, but resoundingly failed. But when the late 1980s saw the rise of a potential threat to its formidable US credit card business, Visa adjusted its strategy and swiped into action. In this video, the rise of Visa's debit card monopoly, specifically in the United States.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
32 min - With Directed Self Assembly, the Chips Make Themselves (Kinda)At the 2024 SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Symposium, Ann Kelleher, a top Intel manufacturing executive, mentioned something called Directed Self-Assembly or DSA. In that presentation, she called DSA a key innovation for cost-effective scaling, and said it had to be brought to High Volume Manufacturing. Intel later presented results of a DSA workflow that can "heal" errors in EUV lithography - potentially cutting costs by a dramatic amount. But what is DSA? DSA has been around for over 30 years. It was once positioned to be a replacement for photolithography, but now is seen as a complement to it. But will the fabs adopt it? In today’s video, a bottoms-up way to pattern the ever-shrinking lines of our semiconductors: Directed Self Assembly, or DSA.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
21 min - Whatever Happened to China's Bandit Phones?A phone with flashy bright lights and eight speakers. A phone with a massive battery. Falsely labeled of course. Olympics-branded phones. Cigarette pack phones. And of course, the "Motorpola". The mid-2000s saw the wild and wooly rise of a bandit phone industry in the People's Republic of China. Fueled by incredible consumer demand for mobile phones, a faulty regulatory system and a Taiwanese chipmaker. Whatever happened to those companies? Why couldn't they compete? In today's video, the mid-2000s and the wave of Chinese bandit phones.
Get all episodes of Asianometry, Sharp Tech, Sharp China, Stratechery Updates and Interviews, Greatest of All Talk, and Dithering as part of Stratechery Plus for $15/month or $150/year.
Listen to Stratechery.
Listen to Dithering.
Listen to Sharp China.
Listen to Sharp Tech.
Listen to Greatest Of All Talk.
31 min
About Asianometry
From the publisher's feed
Newsletter for the Asianometry channel. Studies on Asia - Financials, semiconductors, history, demography, development and other stuff.
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