The World's Most Complex Machine

mmellosouls 3 days ago 18 commentsRead Article on worksinprogress.co

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Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

Amorymeltzer•about 1 hour 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•about 2 hours ago

For anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend this Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0

jasode•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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•about 2 hours ago

Great video and I think the only way to truly grasp the complexity of EUV lithography as a layman.

mytailorisrich•about 1 hour 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.

KermitTheFrog•about 1 hour ago

Non-zero chances - yes. Unavoidable - I wouldn't be so sure. I can't imagine how many top human-hours and cutting-edge inventions involved to construct this machine. And much of this simply cannot be stolen or bought, no matter how much money you have.

mytailorisrich•about 1 hour ago

It has never happened in the history of the world that a company or country could maintain its technological advance indefinitely.

Either China will catch up on this or that particular technology will become obsolete. But it is certain that they won't stay behind forever (measured in a small number of decades at most).

codeulike•about 1 hour ago

"at some point" is doing a lot of work there. How long do you think?

ForHackernews•about 2 hours 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...

bob1029•about 2 hours ago

I think something like this wins that category:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Interconnection

ForHackernews•about 2 hours ago

I suppose it's partly a semantic question that hinges on what you count as a single "machine" and what's a system or a network.

carlovalenti•about 1 hour ago

agree

maxalbarello•about 1 hour ago

and yet not even close to the complexity of the human brain

moffkalast•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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.