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

  1. Two short factoids: 1. IBM thought X ray lithography was the way to go and failed (ultrashort wavelengths). They may have just been to early. 2. How do they even know the next generation chips are even possible? Test chips can be created (slowly) by using scanning electron beams. Electrons have a really short wavelength. There is no mask used, each step on the chip is done by scanning it. Hence it is slow, but works for lab use.
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  2. Seems like this all ends with silicon cubes instead of silicon chips. There is already a lot of 3dness in tons of interconnect layers and 3d transistors. When they start bonding different circuit layers together then we start emulating the human brain.
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  3. Your channel is excellent. I would just ignore the critics. Arguing with people on the internet just justifies them.
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  4.  @makisekurisu4674  No.
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  5. Sure, but the problem is that anyone can get into the SSD business, and your SDD chip supplier is your god.
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  6. HDDs are an inferior form of storage compared to SSDs (how nice that the world can be described with TLAs). Thus HDDs are going to live or die based on being a form of backup. We saw this same dynamic happen before. Tape drives and optical drives, as a backup media, died out because arrays of HDDs were cheaper. HDDs certainly have a price advantage over SSDs, but that price advantage is eroding as SSDs become cheaper in relative terms. A quick dive in Amazon shows the price advantage at about 5 to 1, HDDs over SSDs, in the same format (SATA). M.2, the rising defacto standard for SSDs (M.2 modules have a significant speed advantage over SATA, which never accounted for the great difference in speed between HDDs and SSDs), have a price premium, but that is eroding rapidly, for the simple reason that there is no fundamental reason for such an advantage of M.2 over SATA. On the contrary, M.2 has less material than SATA and so holds the long term price advantage. SATA drives need a metal case. The upshot is that HDDs hold a clear advantage, and reason for existence, at the 10 to 1 price level. At 5 to 1 we see that the sales curve for HDDs is trending down. When the price advantage falls below 2 to 1, its time to get out of the pool. The HDD industry will die.
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  7.  @Chad.Commenter  Cite.
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  8.  @Intelwinsbigly  Yea we (OCZ) did that and sold drives like that. They didn't sell. Good for repetitive storage accesses, terrible for true random access. I worked on the second generation SSD drives for enterprise. We implemented PCIe connected drives, long before NVMe was a twinkle in Intel's eye. Just the fact that the SATA bottle neck (6g) was REMOVED caused our SSDs to blow every hard drive (enterprise level!) clean out of the water on all performance scores. Those 4 lane PCIe M.2 drives will clean any hard drive's clock, and that is half the bandwidth we used. Can you get TB for cheap with hard drives? Certainly. I can sell you several 6 packs of beer for the price of a good bottle of wine. Would I use hard drives for backup? Heck yea, and I do. A good NAS such as I have at home for cheap is very cool . However, again, I use M.2s (Samsung) with Samsung SATA 2.5's in a 4 x quickchanger/hotplug chassis to boot alternative OSes.
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  9. I have believed for a long time that RFID could solve recycling problems. An RFID tag molded into plastic containers could carry information about the chemical contents of the plastic. The biggest problem with plastics recycling now is that, even though plastics can be easily remelted and recycled, mixing different plastics makes that impossible. So plastics are ground up and mixed together and only go to degraded uses like plastic bags and plastic lumber. RFIDs could allow collection by type, and even return to the maker, as whole bottles or other packages, instead of being ground up. Additionally, the RFID would identify the product on retail shelves and boxes.
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  10. All it takes to beat them is an Arm... and a leg.... :0
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  11. Not to excuse the silicon manufacturers, but Silicon Valley, AKA San Jose, has had a number of contaminations over time. The first was mercury, which they used to mine in the hills above San Jose. It was used during the gold rush to process gold bearing ore. The hills are still quite contaminated with the stuff, and fishing is prohibited, leading to an odd abundance of fish there. Nothing saves your life like being a toxic fish. More recently, it was discovered that the company making rockets, UTC, in the hills, had left large waste ponds of the makings of rocket fuel, and those waste ponds were leaking into the ground water for many years. This leads to thyroid disease. I can't really complain. Starting in electronics at the tender age of 16, I have inhaled tons of triclor, solder fumes and rubbed up against a lot of lead. We used to carry it around in bars, and melt it in pots and soldering machines. But as you can see, it has had no effect on me. But then, as you can see, it has had no effect on me...
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  12. That was an awesome overview of the ASML system, thank you. On to 200k.
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  13. I suspect in the long run people will view mainframes and even minis the way we view engines. History books show stationary engines where the work was transmitted via belts, but no existing examples exist, and its just a series of odd photographs with no similarity to the modern world.
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  14.  @happygimp0  Not much danger of that. In the PC world, everything is open. Apple tried that with their hardware (maybe they will again eh), but its like waving a red cape in front of a bull, everyone rises to the challenge to break it. Linux can run on a MAC.
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