Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "Asianometry" channel.

  1. Not sure Applied qualifies as unappreciated. The Wall Street Journal follows them closely, and has for decades. My favorite story about them was I briefly dated a woman who worked there. She was PHD physics, and standing to close to her brain could give you a sunburn. I asked her how she liked working at applied, she said "I like it, but don't like the fact they make me talk to CUSTOMERS". IE, applied employs brainiacs.
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  2. I feel like I should wrap this subject with an opine on reverse engineering (RE) in general. IMHO this tends to be a glint in the eye mainly of incompetent engineers and managers who like the idea of cutting engineers out of the process. Engineers are troublesome little critters who bitch a lot and eventually discover the joys of sex and the consequent burdens of children. I have always found that it is easier to create software/hardware designs from scratch than to copy the work of others, since REing others work makes it harder and also because the state of software design today is typically crappy, poorly documented code. I often do scratch designs even when given others' source code. REing a chip just gives you a fat binder of schematics (probably a lot of fat binders nowadays). It does not give you the design of the chip, and the design processes of the chip are farther than ever from the schematic thanks to the size of the designs and the fact most of it is done in Verilog. I'm willing to bet most RE today is done by silicon makers wanting to figure out how that new stacked DRAM cell works.
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  3.  @bunyu6237  A couple of reasons (better software than hardware). First of all, there is a larger group of people working on software than hardware, so the jobs are more plentiful and the demand greater. Second, hardware/software crossover people are considered odd birds, and when I used to do that I had people literally telling me to "pick a side", go one way or the other. I find it easier to get and do software projects, and the pay is better. I dabbled in Verilog long after I stopped being paid for hardware design, and I realized it would take a lot of work to get a foothold in good Verilog design with virtually no corresponding increase in salary, and more likely a decrease for a while during the time I gain credibility as a Verilog designer. The last time I was paid to design hardware it was still schematic entry (and yes, in case you haven't figured that out, I am indeed that old). Of course, a lot of this is my personal situation. I am not sure any of the above would serve as career advice. I definitely consider my hardware background to be a career asset, since specialize low level software design (drivers, embedded, etc). Having said that, I keep up with hardware advances and have often dreamed of uniting my Verilog experience with software experience. That dream is unrealized.
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  4. Good job. There was a bit of conflation there with microcode (its firmware?). It would have helped to underline that it is entirely internal to the chip and operates the internals of the CPU. In any case, microcode was discarded with the Pentium series, KINDA. It actually lives on today in so called "slow path" instructions like block moves in the later cpus, which use microcode because nobody cares if they run super fast or not, since they are generally only used for backwards compatibility and got deprecated in 64 bit mode. I await the second half of this! Things took off again with the AMD64 and the "multicore wars". Despite the mess, the entire outcome probably could have been predicted on sheer economic grounds, that is, the market settling into a #1 and #2 player with small also-rans. Today's desktop market, at least, remains in the hands of the x86 makers except for the odd story of Apple and the M series chips. Many have pronounced the end of the desktop, but it lives on. I have many or even most colleges who use Apple macs as their preferred development machines, but, as I write this, I am looking out at a sea of x86 desktop machines. Its rare to see a mac desktop, and in any case, at this moment even the ubiquitous Mac pro laptops the trendsetters love are still x86 based, although I assume that will change soon. Me? Sorry, x86 everything, desktop and laptop(s). At last count I have 5 machines running around my house and office and 4 laptops. I keep buying Mac laptops and desktops, cause, you know, gotta keep up with things, but they grow obsolete faster than a warm banana. Yes, I had power PC Macs, and yes they ended up in the trash. And yes, I will probably buy Mac M2s at some point.
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  5. Right out of Stienbeck's "the pearl", which, spoiler alert, is not the Pearl.
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  6. First class analysis.
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  7. I toured the NUMI plant before it closed, and I toured it again after Tesla started making cars there. I also went back their to pick up my wife's Tesla later.
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  8. Nothing has changed. Most true multicore/threaded designs are one-off. Think supercomputer clusters. True multithread/multicore software engineers are hard to find. The average software engineer is scared to death of multithreaded designs, and it would not be a stretch to imagine that most multithread apps have latent bugs.
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  9. Congratulations on hitting the big 100k!
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  10. You have tapped into a classic boondoggle here. When I was with Cisco around 2000, the big "new wave" was about all optical switching, which was supposed to be faster than converting optical to electronic and back again, often with DMMs (Digital Micro Mirrors). Howed that work out? The startup world was littered with smoking holes of failed companies. I think the bottom line is we know a lot about devices that operate on electrical signals, but not so much about devices that work on pure light. As in everyone knows what an electrical nand gate is, and optical nand gates are possible with optical signals, but good luck getting that to work, be integrated at high densities, and be efficient. Lets start with the basics. You can route signals easily in electronics, and the 10+ layers of interconnect on current ICs talk to this. What's a light conductor on an IC? Well, air, which should be free, but is far from it. You would have to couple in and out of the IC at many points, which is expensive in terms of real estate. You could conduct with glass, and that is a whole 'nuther level. I'm not saying never. I'm just saying that with any breathless new wave of technology you have to look at history and see if that wave has not broken previously, or like every 5 years or so (cough.... AI).
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  11. Thanks for the overview. I have a high end threadripper CPU, nice to know how it got manufactured. First class video as usual.
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  12. Another note: one of the drivers of the first transistorized computers was the realization that flip flops build with transistors could be built that were far more tolerant of variations in transistor manufactured parameters than analog applications such as radios. When attempting to make transistors with stable parameters for consumer applications, the method used was to mass manufacture them, test their parameters, and live with a high rejection rate. As a result, the computer makers were able to come in and buy up lots of "defective" transistors for use in computers that couldn't be used for consumer electronics.
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  13. I'll bet somehow the reactor also managed to leak oil...
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  14. ....and that was only the beginning. Now electron microscopes can be used instead of mask lithography, and allow the creation of ICs beyond the current reach of technology, giving researches the ability to see what lies at the next shrink level. There is a variation of the SEM that allows reading the voltage on a trace in a live IC with the passivation removed, giving a scope style trace of what is going on there. This is hooked up to the layout database allowing the user to select a wire in the design to display. And FIB or focused ion beams came from the same science, allowing companies to cut out and add material to ICs... literally editing an existing design. The possibilities are endless.
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  15.  @fleurdewin7958  Capacity means cost, and write burnthough is overrated. SSDs already meet the 10 year computer tech standard (anything that lasts for 10 years is ok, since it will be obsolete in 10 years). HDDs are a bad long term bet, and by the way HDDs don't work forever either.
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  16. Sure, what is the clock speed of the human brain? Probably less than a 1khz. Yet all of the computers in the world cannot equal one. Parallel processing in 3d solids baby! Oh, yea, and all that for the cost of a beer or so...
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  17. I used to be fairly blah on Asus Mobos, but the ROG I recently upgraded to is outstanding. Also, they answer the %*#$ phone, something uncommon with the Asiacos. Thanks for the vid. Your presentation is getting smoother and smoother.
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  18. Not sure where you were going with the "bigger chips have mask problems" the number of chips on a wafer is 100's to up to a 1000 or more. Bigger chips simply cut down the total number of chips on a wafer. The constraint on chip size is because of the net yield of the wafer in terms of number of working chips, which is a function of the defect density of the process. This in turn is the number of defects in the wafer, as spread across the wafer in essentially random locations (when I worked in semi we thought of this as like taking a shotgun to the wafer, and the shotgun pellets spread across the wafer). The bigger the chip, the more likely a chip will have one of the defects contained within it. It stops long before reaching one chip per wafer, because you reach a point where the likelyhood of any one chip escaping having a defect reaches zero.
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  19. We do it here in San Jose! come get your nice glass of recycled sewage! No takers?
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  20.  @SianaGearz  Microsoft method for dealing with limits: Ow! I cut myself on this broken glass bottle. I will throw it down the path a couple yards. Later.... Ow! I cut myself on this bottle. I will throw it....
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  21. ARM as tried to go into the desktop market before. I attended an ARM fest about 5 years ago when they were pushing the 64 bit ARMs for desktop and high graphics.
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  22.  @aymericdekerdanet9318  ARM tried it before. MIPs tried it before. Intel tried it before (Itanium). I think all this proves is people have short memories. Would I like a true desktop alternative? Oh yes. The real issue is that even if you give a IBM-PC motherboard based on a different CPU, but with the same peripherals and PCI-E slots, your driver issues and application issues are going to be terrific. Linux can handle it (easily) but then Linux is like %1 of the desktop market no? When you win over the gaming rig boys, we'll talk. I am not a gaming rig guy, but I follow them. I have to. If my builds don't burn holes in the rugs, they don't interest me.
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  23. Dang we are headed for Picometers? Wasn't that supposed to be impossible?
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  24.  @allentchang  So I have not been part of direct IC design for a lot of years. Last time was at Segate, but we didn't do the layouts or see the layouts (sad). I imagine that analog is still schematics. I think what happens now is that the Verilog tools deliver mostly automated layouts that use "fixer" layout people to correct automation problems and for special layouts, again, including analog. A company like Intel or AMD might typically use a mix of both, for example if the design calls for say a cache, that's going to be mostly laid out by hand for a single cell of it, then replicated many times. The author of this video series is not quite correct that everything is standard cell. Even in the old days, when we used cells they were usually from a library of custom layouts made for that particular design. I guarantee you the latest x86 processor does not use standard cells. The other issue is drive lines. One thing an IC designer does a lot is change the drive strength within the chip to match drive to length of line so that it does not drive it too little or too much, and matches the rise time requirements.
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  25. Test strips are an example off microfluidics? That's a stretch.
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  26.  @ttb1513  The last company I work at silicon design for, Seagate, was emblematic of the basic problems with ASICs. It was 1995 and they were new at ASIC design in house. And they weren't very good at it. It was random logic design before Verilog. An example of this was our timing verification. We had timing chains that were too long for the cycle time, and thus they simply alllowed for the fact that the signal would be sampled in the next clock cycle. Now if you were an ASIC designer back then, what I just said would have made you reach for the tums, if not a 911 call for cardiac arrest. Its an open invitation to metastability. And indeed, our AT&T fab guys were screaming at us to stop that. I got put in charge of hardware simulation for the design, and I have detailed this fiasco in these threads before, so won't go over it again. The bottom line was that ASIC process vendors were loosing trust in their customers to perform verification. The answer was that they included test chains in the designs that would automatically verify the designs at the silicon level. It mean that the silicon manufactured design would be verified, that is, defects on the chip would be verified regardless of what the design did. My boss, who with the freedom of time I can now certify was an idiot, was ecstatic over this new service. It was a gonna fixa all o' de problems don't ya know? I pointed out to him, pointlessly I might add, that our design could be total cow shit and still pass these tests with flying colors. It was like talking to a wall. In any case, the entire industry went that way. Designs are easier to verify now that the vast majority of designs are in Verilog. I moved on to software only, but I can happily say that there are some stunning software verification suites out there, and I am currently working on one, so here we are.
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  27.  @FlashMustache  Yea, but they drive on the wrong side of the road, too.
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  28. In China its "sheee links" :-)
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  29. Yes, I keep running into SGI vets in the industry. SGI died as a company, but lives on as a tech incubator like Fairchild from the early days. We occupied some of SGI's real estate in their final days, along Shoreline blvd. Eventually SGI occupied one of their own buildings closest to the bay. SGIs footprint from their heydays was large and now forms the basis of Google's headquarters. The final days of SGI remind me of an army making their last stand with their backs to the sea. From the roots of old trees grow the new ones. Google's campus is now like SGI on steroids. They not only bought up the old SGI buildings, but seem to be on a tear to buy up every last parcel of real estate on the shoreline, surrounding the amphitheatre like a giant octopus. You can still see the remnants of SGI in the giant sculptures they commissioned there. Its worth a drive around the shoreline area if you ever get to Mountain View.
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  30.  @johnhorner5711  When the Cypress 22v10 EE version came out, I built a programmer for it. Cypress was one of the few companies back then willing to disclose programming details. It didn't work! I could program it once, but then it stopped working. Spent a lot of time on the Cypress apps line trying to work it out, never did (maybe it was you I talked to!). I loved that device, I built it into a lot of things. After that I did chip design at Zilog and didn't get back to programmable logic for 10 years, which by that time was dominated by Verilog, and then got back into programmables with Xilinx.
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  31. PS tie the comments about water in Arizona to the record low in lake mead!
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  32. Sooooo close....100k.
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  33. This was a case where everyone won. Now do Huawei. I am getting tired of my laptop maker being bashed.
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  34. This will look wildly different as a the PLA marches up from the beaches. And that is certainly part of the plan.
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  35. You don't want too much of a paper trail after the Chinese invade... :-)
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  36. Went nuts over nuts eh? Sorry, I just had to. A guy got assaulted over a salted nut. Please, I can't stop.
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  37. TSMCometry?
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  38. Before China, India passed Hollywood, as well. Its just population numbers.
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  39. Concurring with the other poster, I would say China is a bigger threat than earthquakes. Earthquakes stop. China would not.
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  40. MCMs are old tech. NASA and the military used them to put into spacecraft because they don't like PCBs, which fail when heated and produce bigger circuits. We did mixed MCMs/hybrids (ICs, passives, transistors) at Hughes for satellites in the 1980's and before.
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  41. I feel the need to mention here, that I consider (along with others i'm sure) that the proper term is "stored program computer". Von Neumann had nothing to do with the invention of the stored program computer design, which was due to Ekert and Mauchly, the designers of ENIAC. Von Neumann simply took notes on the design and published it under his own name, which led to a misinterpretation that he (ahem) declined to correct.
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  42.  @housemana  You have not listed any FACTS about what I have or haven't done wrong, this is just a general attack response. Pretty rude at that. So get lost.
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  43.  @paranoidpanzerpenguin5262  mmmmm Sun, now Oracle, open sourced their SPARC cpus. For the second, you are muddying the issue. AMD/ATI released full details on their cards and their drivers, which was very important to the early days of Linux. Things have not changed much since then. AMD is suing someone for copying their chips? Stop the presses! Comon man.
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  44.  @Stef3m  1. Its the difference between no source and source. 2. I am just telling you what the Linux kernel group reported. 3. I suspect you are arguing to press an agenda here, thus this is my last answer in this thread.
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  45. I'm guessing TSMC would be the only one that could qualify for a bulk discount from ASML.
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  46. And AMD is not happy about Intel buying its second supplier.
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  47. I don't know. Most of the war and political turbulence of Asia passed the Thais by. Look at their neighbors.
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  48. It kinda happens already. AMD and Intel engineers can practically throw forks at each other during lunch...
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  49.  @AlexanderSylchuk  Oh, you are begging for my favorite story. I interviewed with a company that made precision flow valves. These were mechanical nightmares of high precision that accurately measured things like gas flow in chemical processes. This is like half the chemical industry (did you know a lot of chemical processes use natural gas as their feed stock?). Anyways, what has that got to do with this poor programmer? Well, like most industries they were computerizing. They had a new product that used a "bang bang" valve run by a microprocessor. A bang bang valve is a short piston that is driven by a solenoid that when not energized, is retracted by a spring and opens a intake port and lets a small amount of gas into a chamber. then the solenoid energizes, pushes the piston up and the gas out another port. Each time the solenoid activates, a small amount of gas is moved along. Hence the "bang bang" part. If you want to find one in your house, look at your refrigerator. Its how the Freon compressor in it works. Ok, well, that amount of gas is not very accurately measured no matter how carefully you machine the mechanism. But, it turns out to be "self accurate", that is, whatever the amount of gas IS that is moved, it is always the same. The company, which had got quite rich selling their precision valves, figured they could produce a much cheaper unit that used the bang bang valve. So they ginned it up, put a compensation table in it so the microprocessor could convert gas flows to bang bang counts, and voila! ici la produit! It worked. Time to present it to the CEO! The CEO asks the engineers "just how accurate is it?" Engineer says: well... actually it is more accurate than our precision valves. And for far cheaper. The story as told me didn't include just how many drinks the CEO needed that night. So the CEO, realizing that he had seen the future, immediately set into motion a plan to obsolete their old, expensive units and make the newer, more accurate and cheaper computerized gas flow valves. Ha ha, just kidding. He told the engineers to program the damm thing to be less accurate so that it wouldn't touch their existing business. Now they didn't hire me. Actually long story, they gave me a personality test that started with something like "did you love your mother", I told them exactly where, in what direction, and how much force they could use to put their test and walked out. I didn't follow up on what happened, mainly because I find gas flow mechanics to be slightly less interesting than processing tax returns. But I think if I went back there, I would have found a smoking hole where the company used to be. And that is the (very much overly long) answer to your well meaning response.
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  50.  @brodriguez11000  So is AI.
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