[bmenrigh]

Semiconductor manufacturing, especially using EUV, is a staggeringly power-hungry process.

The EUV light production requires more than a megawatt by itself because of all the losses involved.

No doubt this is why they only report on embodied carbon since it’s the one metric they can win on.

[PaulKeeble]

The thing is that anything electrical energy intense is going to become less CO2 producing every year as energy systems transition. Its the use of Iron and other necessary fuel usage that will become the CO2 intense items over the next 5 to 10 years. The energy usage wont be the issue and CO2e for production of any item is going to drop quite drastically.

[im3w1l]

Iron and steel can be made without fossil fuels. It's just more expensive.

[wtallis]

Is anyone using EUV for SSDs? I don't think it's economical for NAND manufacturing. I'm not sure if SSD controllers are using EUV yet; they usually aren't on leading-edge process nodes.

[jillesvangurp]

Not all energy is carbon intensive. Using a lot of power is fine as long as you get the power in a sustainable way. That isn't necessarily true for a lot of current production. But that's changing rapidly. Especially in the parts of the world where this stuff is produced.

[jonathaneunice]

Agree if that power is truly sustainable.

OTOH, if you have solar panels and drive power to the grid, you can sell "credits" to large power users who will use them to "offset" their less-green power sources to appear to get their power in sustainable ways / be carbon-neutral. Kind of an "I'm using dirtier power, but I teamed up with someone who's using fully sustainable power, so it all comes out in the wash!"

[PaulKeeble]

It will certainly become more fine so long as the grid is transitioning to renewable energy sources which almost all countries are doing. In the next decade the intensity of CO2e for electrical energy usage should be considerably lower than it is now and CO2e from necessary fuel usage will begin to dominate in industrial processes. Iron I think will be a big contributor to this since at the moment electrical production is not viable.

[15123125]

The "not all" argument is very lazy of you. All these production plants are on the grid and they use carbon energy. How much is "not all" ?

[eru]

If you are part of a large grid, power is fairly fungible (within that grid).

[estebank]

I think the interaction of "thing is cheap" and "thing is tiny" break all of our heuristics for "thing is difficult and energy intensive to produce".

[amelius]

But a spinning harddrive contains electronics too ...

[PaulKeeble]

A HDD has 1 controller chip and that controller is relatively simple compared to the controller chip on an SSD, its certainly a lot smaller and on a less advanced process because it has to deal with ~200MB/s not 15000MB/s. On top of the controller chip a 2280 NVMe SSD will have 4 or 8 memory chips as well, which are on a recent process and have many many layers stacked together. Then the SSD will also often have a DRAM chip as well. An SSD uses substantially more silicon than a HDD does.

[cheschire]

HDDs use much simpler electronics than SSDs. The controller in a hard drive mostly just moves the read/write head and spins the motor. It doesn’t need to do much processing. These chips are built on older manufacturing processes that are cheaper and less energy intensive.

SSDs though need a fast processor to manage the flash memory for wear leveling, error correction, and keeping track of where everything is written etc. This requires more advanced chips, built on newer process nodes, which take a lot more energy and resources to make.

And SSDs also need extra chips like DRAM and obviously the flash memory itself.