How does a computer chip work?
quora.com
quora.com
OCW Link: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
We started the first week with a handful of diodes and resistors building latches, and slowly built an adder, memory, a calculator and by the end eventually ended up with a programmable traffic light computer.
They were also phasing in FPGAs in the education so you could pick between breadboarding everything or doing it in software with an FPGA or even a mix. Very very fun.
He/She has certainly done a wonderful job but just curios at alternatives and reasons for choices they made..
Why not just refer to an article in the series of ... 'What every programmer should know about ...'
As for why authors don't just link to another webpage: I think it's because a) those pages often don't fit what is being asked, if it's more in-depth; b) the author might have a way to explain it that they want to use; or c) you might presume that writing your own content will get more upvotes.
Meta-funnily enough, in this thread we have both approaches: myself and others offering opinions, another guy linking to a Quora question.
http://www.quora.com/What-s-my-incentive-to-post-answers-on-...
I'm sure that some of that also applies to HN.
1. They are excited by chip architecture 2. They achieved profound and ecstatic insight once they worked all this out for themselves, and want to share that feeling with other people. 3. They just like helping others, and in particular helping others to understand.
From the tone of the piece, I suspect it is mainly 2. I found this a very helpful write up. I am glad this person exists and that they took the time and effort to achieve 2.
The same gamification strategy works on sites like StackOverflow, Reddit and HN. The most successful ones have some twists like Quora, like StackOverflow throws in bonus of putting your points in your resume. I once saw the top points earners on StackOverflow was Jon Skit who had earned 700k+ points. I looked at count of his answers, length of average answer and estimated that he must have spent 4hr per day each working day for past 4+ year to get that many points. This was on minimum side. If you convert this to hourly rate, it's same as he donated about half a million to StackOverflow.
Now if you can upvote this answer, that would be great ;).
It doesn't look zero-sum, looks more of a win-win game than a win-lose game, until we don't count the number of hours lost trying to assemble a long answer etc...But time/money/energy seems priceless when you seem to love/like what you do!So its poised to be a win-win for the source gets reputation/credits and publisher gets visits too!
So from another perspective , it seems ones likes and dislikes can be used in more ways than one!But guess transition from use to abuse occurs when priorities change!
> I once saw the top points earners on StackOverflow was Jon Skit who had earned 700k+ points. I looked at count of his answers, length of average answer and estimated that he must have spent 4hr per day each working day for past 4+ year to get that many points.
That's interesting.Doesn't this defeat the very purpose of having reputation points mentioned in CV?
> This was on minimum side. If you convert this to hourly rate, it's same as he donated about half a million to StackOverflow.
So that's how this so-called zero-sum-game looks but its more driven by priorities than perspective.We don't know how many people were saved from excess time and energy spent on understanding the same because of one persons generosity.
>Now if you can upvote this answer, that would be great ;)
wish i could do it twice :)
> I had this idea after writing this answer: Subhasis Das' answer to Computer Science: How does a computer chip work? which gained quite a few upvotes. I realized a single answer was far too little to talk about all the ultra awesome machineries that are hidden inside a processor.
I think answering the Quora question was what inspired him to start his own blog, which means he didn't really have a blogpost to reference when he answered the Quora question.
Why would anyone... whatever follows exemplifies how out of touch HN readers are with normal people. No wonder pg stopped posting.
That's always been the biggest mystery to me: what are chip manufacturers doing differently with each of these "process nodes" that makes them able to do photolithography at slightly smaller scales, but with the scale only shrinking a little bit per five-year-interval?
Naively, I'd expect a process like photolithography to be mostly scale-invariant (you can lens a mask down to whatever size you like) down to a size where it hits a wall due to quantum effects. So when photolithography was invented, why didn't chips suddenly jump from 100um to 100nm scale?
Another point is that Moore's Law is at least partially self fulfilling. If you are a Chip Fabrication company you need to spend money to make new technologies, the smaller you want things to be the more money you have to spend. You could spend a comparatively huge amount of money and leap ahead of all of the competition, but then you'd have to charge more than the competition for your services. All of your customers are expecting things to progress according to Moore's law, so they won't be prepared to spend the extra money. I suppose ideally you want to be just ahead of the competition, not way ahead. I hope that makes sense, I found that hard to articulate.
Many things, among them the precision of the available machinery of the time - aligning the masks accurately is very important, for example.
The newest 1Xnm processes require special techniques involving diffraction, as the wavelength of light becomes much greater than the feature size.
Manufacturing processes. As you go to smaller scales, the investment required to do so increases, and the error rate as well. When you produce millions of units you want to have a low reject rate, and your process needs to be fully controlled. That's why there's always a gap between what's technically possible and what makes sense in a industrial context.
http://www.itrs.net/Links/2013ITRS/Summary2013.htm
The papers themselves as well as the models are all very interesting if a bit occasionally dry.