r4venw avatar

r4venw

@r4venw@kbin.social

So why is 3 nm chip better?

Ok I think I do know the answer but I never learned it, so I want to learn it today. It’s been about 1 year now we can reliably make 3nm chips, which is impressive on a scale of size. But why is is better? My theory is simply: We can make a product the same size but add more on it because it’s smaller, making it stronger and...

partial_accumen,

Until we have reliable and wide-temperature operating superconductors, electronics are limited by electrical resistance in the materials that conduct electricity. So the materials inside CPUs have resistance. With chemistry we’ve lowered it as much as we can, but for it to still be a semiconductor (the material that makes transistors and CPUs work) there are practical limits and we’ve hit those with humanity’s knowledge today.

Take your hand palm flat and place it on the floor next to your foot. Put some weight on your hand and drag your hand quick from your toes to your heel. Your hand got a little warm from the friction, right? Now imagine doing that same hand dragging exercise from your bedroom all the way to your living room. HOT HOT HAND! Friction is the same thing that causes heat in CPUs. The friction is the electrons flowing rubbing against the resistance in the conductor.

So we’ve got heat limiting us, and the more distance we have, the more heat we have, the more limits on CPU speed we have.

So with present day CPUs, how can we make less heat? Use less distance in the CPU from place to place inside it.

This is where we come to your 3 nm (nanometers). This is the measurement of the width (of a part called the “gate”) of one single transistor inside the CPU. Its 3 times smaller than say a 9 nm gate technology CPU. Our new CPU has 3 times less distance to travel which also means it needs less electricity to do the same work. Less electricity also means less heat because there fewer electrons rubbing against the conductor’s resistance.

So less distance to travel, and fewer electrons needed to travel. Thats good stuff for making faster CPUs!

So now you ask, why are we stopping at 3nm? Why not 1nm right now? In short, we don’t have the technology for it yet. CPUs are made with, believe it or not a photographic process! Light in the specific shape of the CPU circuit is shined on specially prepared silicon. Chemicals make part of that silicon conduct, and some part NOT conduct. This is semiconductor lithography. I could go down a whole separate line for this, but this isn’t what you asked so I’ll leave off right here.

The Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled. (mastodon.online)

The Hyperloop was never meant to be built. Elon Musk admitted it was all about fueling opposition to California’s high-speed rail project so it would get canceled.

The most egregious false solution may be the Hyperloop. The modern version of the concept was proposed by Musk a decade ago as a pure hypothetical. Musk, a noted public transit hater, saw it as a way to reduce support for California’s planned high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. “It seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train,” reporter Ashlee Vance wrote in his 2015 biography of Musk. “He didn’t actually intend to build the thing.” Musk’s ultimate hope? “High-speed rail would be canceled,” explained Vance.

Did Trump let Americans die purely for political purposes? (www.rawstory.com)

of at least a half-million Americans is to argue — nonsensically — that the virus came out of the Wuhan virology lab and therefore something, something, something Trump is not responsible. He’s doing this with House Oversight Committee hearings this week.

How To Torrent Software Safely (For Dummies) (andscape.notion.site)

I wrote this post for a friend, I’m sharing it here for anybody it might help. I got asked multiple times how I download cracked music software so I figured it’d be easier to write it down once. It’s meant for people with very low technical skills who just want to start torrenting software without major risks, and it...

Republicans try to stop military’s electrification with mind-bogglingly dumb proposals (electrek.co)

Several Republican representatives have proposed amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act to try to stop the Pentagon’s electrification. The proposals sound so mind-bogglingly dumb that they look like they were written by 19th-century Luddites or the fossil fuel industry itself....

Imgur links suck

Most Fediverse software supports image uploads, so there's no reason to use Imgur for image hosting. Hell, even on my small single-user server (atomicpoet.org), image hosting is easy peasy. Not only is Imgur not needed, they're an annoyance for those of us who are used to seeing images natively on the Fediverse....

/kbin project management costs, financing, future plans

I wrote the first line of code for /kbin on January 14, 2021. Around this time, I started working remotely and decided that the time I used to spend commuting to the office would be devoted to /kbin. Throughout this entire period, /kbin has been a hobby project that I developed in my free time. It was also when Lemmy started...

kbin.social lifecycle: from 181 unique visitors to 2.9M in three months.

Defederation, Threads and You

A lot of us are pretty new to the fediverse and we've arrived just in time to grapple with what is easily the biggest federation/defederation controversy ever to hit it. I've put this thread together to hopefully help communicate some of the more complex ideas that we're trying to get our heads around....

Big Tech can transfer Europeans’ data to US in win for Facebook and Google (arstechnica.com)

The European Commission today decided it is safe for personal data to be transferred from the European Union to US-based companies, handing a victory to firms like Facebook and Google despite protests from privacy advocates who worry about US government surveillance.

OC Assuming boost stays as some sort of a super-upvote/share combo alongside regular up/downvote buttons, here's a UI idea on how to merge it into one unified voting system. App animation + web block mockup

I heard that votes have been changed to behave closer to how people would expect, and boost is staying here as well. So I had an idea how to bring it all together in the interface....

Super Off Road: A home port comparison (lemmy.world)

Ivan ‘Ironman’ Stewart’s Super Off Road is a 1989 arcade release that plays kind of like a fancy Super Sprint. It’s a single screen game where three players race their trucks over a number of courses, picking up nitro and money, and upgrading their vehicles between races. It’s fast, goofy, chaotic and a lot of fun. The...

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