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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

EUV lithography is a strange beast. It requires extremely clean rooms and a lot of practical know-how and skills from the humans around it. Few companies are in position to actually use EUV machines to produce chips.

So, in practice, ASML and the few companies are dependent on each other and probably found local optimum of coexistence. ASML does not want to push several top-level tech companies into search for alternatives and the top level tech companies do not want to waste their talent on replication of an already existing product unless necessary.

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This is very true, some one who has interacted with the tech in the past. It’s mind bending physics that if you do the cal a on a napkin you could do it, but all the materials have 1000 tweaks to deal with imperfections.

They are also so far ahead, after uv it will be X-ray, and even electron etching. They are developing tech 10 years ago that still will get them further. At some point there will be enough power, for general consumer products to function just fine. Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed. It might be at that point, that some players step in. Try to build machines that work at similar quality. However, why not just get a second hand ASML? As far as I know once a new generation get bought the old goes to a lower tier processor manufacturers.

Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed

Thats not how it works, software is a gas that expands to fill all the available performance space until it all slows down and we need better hardware again.

But suppose some nation decided that they could devote more software development resources to designing efficient software, and that they could limit processing intensive applications (like online gaming?).

Conceivably they could run the economically important IT functions of the country using less powerful, easier to manufacture, less power hungry greener, and readily available semiconductors.

This sounds a bit like Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

I’ve always wondered - would the effort to develop such software be lower, because the hardware is more forgiving.

In which case you are trading human (software development) time for hardware resources.

If that were the case, it seems like an okay-ish trade off to me tbh.

Brain time > CPU time

> Once a laptop can run email/web/word/excel smoothly, which I think is like 90% pc use, on a whole day battery. I think we don’t need more speed.

Or we can build a more resource hungry software.

The old adage was that Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away.

The M1 MacBook Air can run a whole day (and more) on one charge, but „only“ 5h when doing heavy development with Xcode. If you build a machine that lasts 2x as long with 10x the power, I‘ll pay at least 5x the price for that. Maybe 10x.

So - you want 20x the machine and you want to pay 5-10x.

This feels like a bad deal for Apple.

Why pay 5x ?

If you wait - you’ll get a 20x machine at current prices.

This is what Moore’s law is about ? I.e. Density (~= proxy for compute) doubling at some fixed period.

Not if it costs Apple 1.1x

> However, why not just get a second hand ASML? As far as I know once a new generation get bought the old goes to a lower tier processor manufacturers.

It sounds like you'd be stuck producing old designs on those old machines.

During the time I worked at ASML, I spoke to some of the engineers about things like this.

Apparently, that equipment rarely gets sold off or excessed. Those machine keep producing for years and years and decades even, for the same companies, in the same fabs, in the same location. Even as they get older and older, they’re still so profitable to keep running that it almost never makes sense to turn them off or sell them to someone else.

They were actually quite proud of the fact that they had lots of old hardware in the field that was still running and producing wafers for the same customer so many years later. They were a little taken aback by what it cost them to keep those old systems around themselves, so that they could provide support for them in the field. But that’s what the customers were paying for, and so that’s what ASML did.

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