The World's Most Complex Machine (worksinprogress.co)
70 points by mellosouls 3 days ago
jstummbillig 6 minutes ago
> By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips.
Makes one wonder: Would we be much better off of worse off if we reshaped society to do more of things, where a new technology is unlikely to work but highly beneficial in the limits? Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?
Amorymeltzer an 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 2 hours ago
For anyone interested in the topic I highly recommend this Veritasium video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiUHjLxm3V0
jasode an hour 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 an 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 2 hours ago
Great video and I think the only way to truly grasp the complexity of EUV lithography as a layman.
mytailorisrich an 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 40 minutes 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 32 minutes 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 23 minutes ago
maxalbarello 16 minutes ago
i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability.
whatever many secrets are involved, information wants to be free and it's hard to believe that others won't figure it out.
by the time they do catch up we better be steps ahead. what's after EUV?
codeulike 41 minutes ago
"at some point" is doing a lot of work there. How long do you think?
dnnddidiej 12 minutes ago
30 years
ForHackernews an hour 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 an hour ago
I think something like this wins that category:
ForHackernews an hour 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 40 minutes ago
agree
maxalbarello an hour ago
and yet not even close to the complexity of the human brain
moffkalast an hour 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.
simne 8 minutes ago
Because very large share of market now are datacenters. Difference from desktop is dramatic - for desktop really acceptable very simple chips with bad energy efficiency, but DCs already deal with extremely high power consumption, as they typically "compress" so much consumption in one rack, that constantly working near to physical constraints.
frangonf 14 minutes ago
Isn't exactly this what China is doing? Apart from poaching ex ASML employees? Now reaching 7nm, and just throwing up more energy to catch up in FLOPS like Jensen said?
irdc an hour 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 an 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.