PC Gamer (US Edition)

HELLO, WORLD!

Your PC is made of sand. Or at least the bits that make it a PC are. Melted and refined sand is made into microchips because sand is made of silicon, which is a semiconductor, an element that acts as an electrical conductor under some conditions and as an insulator under others.

Fabricators such as GlobalFoundries, Intel, and TSMC turn sand into crystals, cut them into discs, etch complex circuits into their surface and turn them into i7s, DDR4, RTX 2080s, and the like. This has been fine since the invention of the transistor in 1947 (though some

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