The World's Most Complex Machine

(worksinprogress.co)

58 points | by mellosouls 2 days ago

5 comments

  • Amorymeltzer 15 minutes ago
    It's been mentioned before, but Chris Miller's Chip War from a few years back is an excellent, very-readable book on the topic. Goes into depth on the history and development of chips and their production. He did the rounds on the interviews back then, and it's definitely worth a read. The EUV stuff is great, but I particularly liked his history on how the USSR was always going to lose and how integral Apollo really was.
  • maxalbarello 1 hour ago
    For anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend this Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
    • jasode 36 minutes ago
      The Veritasium video is good but their "newscast" style with constant back-and-forth cuts to talking heads can make the presentation a bit disjointed.

      The more straightforward video of ASML EUV is from Branch Education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2482h_TNwg

      Because that vid gives an overview of the whole machine, it gives context to what each scientist is talking about in the Veritasium interviews.

      • maxalbarello 0 minutes ago
        Thank you! The video you recommended definitely goes more in depth. I still like Veritasium's style more but it's just personal preference ofc
    • Zealotux 49 minutes ago
      Great video and I think the only way to truly grasp the complexity of EUV lithography as a layman.
  • mytailorisrich 18 minutes ago
    It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.
  • ForHackernews 37 minutes ago
    They might be the most complex mass-produced commercial machines but the Large Hadron Collider has a plausible claim to the title of "world's most complex machine" https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/103591-la...
  • moffkalast 44 minutes ago
    If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows?

    I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.

    • irdc 37 minutes ago
      That’s what the likes of AMD with their chiplet design have been doing.

      There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.

      • moffkalast 19 minutes ago
        This is gonna sound super dumb, but I'm not sure how they aren't being profitable if there are shortages, just price things beyond break even level? The average person can't even tell the difference between a Core 5 and a Core 5 Ultra, you can practically sell them at the same price and I'm not even sure they'd notice when actually using them. The performance jump is relatively minor and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.
        • MadnessASAP 9 minutes ago
          It mostly comes down to the consumer market not being significant enough by itself. A consumer may not notice a 10% increase in performance per watt or dollar. A large office building probably will, and a datacenter definitely will.

          I don't think I'm being entirely hyperbolic when I say the consumer market only exists to put devices that can connect to and feed the datacenter loads into the general populations hands.