I’d like you, keen visitor (welcome to my humble abode), to tell me what you find exciting about computers, whether that’s the use of them, or the science behind the hardware, or software development, social media advancements, TSMC foundry improvements for ever smaller die sizes, whatever you like. I would like you to inform me, if you so wish, what part of this fairly large umbrella, is the “oh shit, that’s cool” for you. Or what doors does it open for you?
For me, I like seeing the products of graphics and AI programming, it is beyond my comprehension and ignorance is bliss, but it’s fascinating to me to see how with relatively small hardware resources, we can get frames per second or huge parallel workloads coded on the GPU.
Hidden agenda: I’m trying to give myself reasons not to feel bleak about it all, give up and find a nice hole in the woods to live in.
I can’t say for sure… it seems Intel is stuck on a 10nm process while AMD uses TSMC 5nm nodes. Some say that the performance difference is negligible, but it seems Intel isn’t that great now, and the 14900k is supposed to be a great CPU, almost as good as the AMD 9800x3d (which is the best gaming processor you can buy now), yet it’s plagued with instability issue that gets worse over time. Plus those core ultra processors don’t seem like it’s any good, and it’s basically another socket.
As far as process goes, I think Intel is supposed to have some advances on stacking dies on glass panels… it remains to be seen if it leads to improvement. On the other hand AMD basically uses chiplets, as well as die stacking and such (supposedly this is what all the x3d chips are about).
Is that what excites you about the industry? The manufacturing processes and the differing performance that the processes make in the products?
Interests me too! Over my head though. I was under the impression some of the ARM chips were targeting 3nm. Most of my machines run on ARM now, I appreciate no fan noise whilst listening to music but also not burning my genitals.
Yea, I’m probably more excited about the manufacturing process. I don’t think I would do badly working at tsmc but I’m also kinda shut out of their taiwanese hire pipeline.
That and there won’t be a work life balance working there.
Asianometry has a lot of videos about semiconductor manufacturing. I think he talks to a lot of industry experts.
But we don’t have to dwell on just processors. There’s memory chips of all kind, dram or flash memories, chipsets, analog chips (which seems to be a black voodoo magic), and more.
Intel actually started out making memory, in fact it was what started it. But they had to get out of the memory business or else they’d fold.
