Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spectramax | Hacker News Reader

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I just wanted to say this about Intel vs AMD. Back when Intel was the "underdog" it couldn't compete with Athlon/Opeteron CPUs from AMD with its Pentium IV line, fan boys from both sides continually escalated the armchair warfare on Slashdot and Anandtech forums when Intel finally came out with the Conroe architecture that blew the competition away. I've seen this pendulum swing from one side to the other and back. Putting Intel marketing (awful) and AMD's marketing (awful again...), and their fan bases (toxic) aside, can we acknowledge the fact that working on a computer architecture is an extraordinarily complex task and that requires brilliant people all working together? I'll defer this fascinating topic, which most software engineers and tech enthusiasts are completely and utterly unaware of, to this talk by the legendary chip designer (x86 spec coauthor, A4/A5/Zen/Tesla AI ASIC architect) - Jim Keller and his interview with Lex Fridman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA

Designing & manufacturing computer chips is hard af, having worked in semiconductor manufacturing for over 12 years (primarily on the backend side of the Fab).

Edit: Redacting some specifics

Oh yes, totally. I have complete respect for Intel’s engineers. It’s their business department I’ve long had trouble with, but those engineers do truly astonishing, near zero bug work.

I think the culture is improving despite of cashing it out in the 90's and 2000's during the Ballmer / Jack Welsch era. Semiconductor industry hasn't done a good job of cultivating a good, positive company culture and making it less regimented. We need to make it cool to work in a semiconductor company. I can assure you that there are so many incredible challenges that exist - with good definition/funding to tackle them from materials to marketing (direly needs to revamped). Imagine running a portion of the world's most advanced manufacturing processes. Ultra high volume (thousands of wafer starts per week), mind you.

Perhaps videos such as these are shining a positive light on the entire semiconductor goodwill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gMdGrVteI

> We need to make it cool to work in a semiconductor company.

I'm not sure I agree. If by 'cool' you mean along the lines of receiving respect and admiration from others because, while they don't really understand the actual specifics of what you do, they have a general idea and it's celebrated widely, then I don't think we want that happening in semi space.

It looks to me that it's happened already in software development, and I don't think the end result of that is net-positive.

I think that when people are passionate about what they do, and do it because they're passionate about it, the end results tend to be better than if they're doing it because other people will give them recognition.

I'm not saying this is something that happens all the time, and you can argue that I'm being elitest, snobby, or annoyed that the 'cool kids' have come into my playground and are playing with my toys, all of which would be valid positions to take. I do think that with all communities, they're very different when they have smaller appeal to when they have wider appeal.

Niche communities are not without their problems (and the toxicity that can happen in them cannot be understated), but I personally prefer them, and believe the output is generally of a higher quality, than communities with wider appeal.

I know what you mean - I think some of the toxicity and heavy handed management style can certainly improve.

> We need to make it cool to work in a semiconductor company.

I am not optimistic. "Semiconductor company" ==> high capitalization (expensive processes) ==> fertile ground for lawsuits and attacks.

As long as a slightest mistake has a potential to turn into multi-million-loss lawsuits, it will never be cool. Is it easy to be cool walking a tightrope between two skyscrapers? Not for many I'd guess.

BTW it is the same for non-semi companies (like OEMs), except that volumes of a given single product are generally lower, so mistakes are more bounded.

Wow. Those machines are something else altogether. I watched a chip making clip a while back and I recall that they talked about having to make strange patterns in the stencils (not sure what they’re called) to work around the way the light twists when it actually hits the die. I’ve probably got most of that wrong but is that still a thing with the addition of the water layer?

Yeah, they calculate the transfer function of the pattern and then pattern the mask to achieve the end result printed on the silicon substrate. With EUV lithography, it substantially reduced this pattern complexity.

Jim talks about it at this mark in this presentation: https://youtu.be/Qnl7--MvNAM?t=784

Sounds like this video: Indistinguishable from magic: Manufacturing modern computer chips

https://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4

Just amazing. I wish a newer video explaining more recent technologies was available.

I wouldn't use Underdog to describe Intel, they were never one in their x86 history. Always the TopDog.

Intel in the P4 era is a lot different to now. P4 was an engineering mistake. And it wasn't Cornoe that saved that, it was Pat Gelsinger's Pentium M or Banias / Dothan.

The current ( or past ) Intel issues isn't engineering, they have amazing engineers. It is lying. Blatant lies that were fed from Sales and Marketing all the way to their C-Level. That is what happen when a successful company were driven by Sales and Marketing people.

> P4 was an engineering mistake.

The story I've heard was that P4 was a management mistake. Some engineers claimed they surely understood that the limits existed, but the management believed that the only thing that's sellable is a bigger number of GHz. So the engineers got the goal to make a processor architecture for 10 GHz, and apparently P4 was made for that (long pipelines) and it was known that on lower number of GHz the architecture performed worse. But 10 GHz was unachievable because physics can't be cheated (the chips would simply melt without some special cooling that was also not sellable), so P4 architecture was never driven with the clock speeds for which it was designed.

Really enjoyed that video, all hour and a half of it. Thank you!

I think people also need to accept the fact we're never going to engineer a solution to human stupidity. If our society doesn't raise people to be good users, no amount of hardening will stop systems from being compromised.

Like what?

I've written in-depth about why "don't click untrusted links" is unhelpful: see https://xmppwocky.net/blog.py?page=22

That domain isn't resolving.

It is also and untusted link, so I feel could only be preaching to the choir.

Right. Heh.

Agreed. Wasting countless hours on the engineering end doesn't seem wise when those same hours could be spent doing something meaningful. This requires education on the user end. Education that will help them understand the world around them better so everyone wins in the end.

Those are wasted hours. We have to make stuff maximally safe AND educate users, because even that maximal safety/ergonomics/etc. is too little compared to how complex our world is.

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