throwawaylinux

Whether it is a net win for energy consumption entirely what you're using it for and how the entire power profile of the system looks, not just the CPU and not just at full power.

If it uses as much or more power when busy and you're just using it to push more frames in a video game, you're probably not going to singlehandedly bring about the next ice age. Same if the low utilization system power is similar and you spend most of the time messing around on the internet or editing code occasionally punctuated by a compile job, even if that does run faster.

Not furnishing your users with knowledge that could reduce their reliance on your service is Marketing 101.

Google maps does not want help people gain awareness of their surroundings or improve their navigation skills. It wants users to depend on Google maps.

I'm all for cars. They're a wonderful tool and give a great freedom that is accessible to even quite poor people.

A very good public transport and walking and cycling city is great, but it is no substitute for a car, as the >50% of households in London, massive fleets of cars in Netherlands, etc will attest to.

Better than the perverse incentive to encourage population growth and hold quality of living down.

> "very biggest"? Doesn't "biggest" already cover very?

"very biggest" is a common phrase. Maybe it's more British.

> "near"? Wouldn't "nearly" be more grammatically correct.

I don't know but that's also pretty common.

> "but that was before commercial whaling"? Wouldn't a more professional way of writing this be "until the advent of commercial whaling"

I think it's fine.

> This all sounds like a speech of a tour guide being made towards children not a scientific article in the BBC.

The BBC is a government media / propaganda organization, "scientific BBC article" doesn't have much gravitas.

Why do they need cover for price increases? What was used for cover for price increases before the pandemic? Or why was cover not required for those?

Doesn't add up.

It's having these suspected dirty probes that they haven't investigated yet which is in particular what I'm talking about though. Since they made no particular experimental or theoretical breakthrough here, I just would have thought they would want to be meticulous about confirming an unexpected result. As you say, the point is to show their experimental capabilities.

> I don't think that being wrong looks bad. There are a lot of understandable ways to be wrong, and it's not like any of these labs are being dishonest about their level of confidence (you can't really be "wrong" if you're not overcommitted to a stance).

I'm not in the field, but I would have thought it would look pretty bad if they were wrong and their experiment had obvious sloppy practices. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion apparently that sunk a few reputations.

I completely understand a private rush to replicate for the purpose of building on it and making new discoveries, but just to put rush out a confirm paper? I suspect it's less about demonstrating actual efficiency and ability and more about the paper mill.

> Probably a lab that confirms any piece of it will get a significant share of attention and acclaim.

Why is that though? They're taking a discovery that somebody else came up with, and (mostly) follow a recipe they're given.

I mean if they were synthesizing a theorized substance or significantly improving its production, or measuring an effect that was previously undetectable by known instruments and experiments then those things would deserve acclaim on their own.

Not saying they aren't good scientists and labs working on this or reproducing is worthless, the reward just doesn't seem big enough not to be meticulous about it. If you're right then you'll be one of the dozens of labs that reproduced it and all credit goes to original discoverers. If you're wrong you'll be the ones who bungled the experiment and share just about equal blame.

It's a thinly veiled signal that a corporation will not act out against the status quo, and in return they will have protection from their corporate media and regulatory attack dogs.

The sad thing is they have scientifically captured and subverted mainstream activism, which for a while around 50-60 years ago emerged as what appeared to be their biggest threat. You can "resist" the state of things all you like, but you're not allowed to say anything about corporations that traffic arms to 3rd world countries because they tweet out BLM logos and rainbow flags now and again. And you have to resist by supporting mainstream political parties and politicians who have been around for decades and are definitely not complicit or responsible for what you are resisting.

Is this kind of thing typical for experiments working to confirm such significant results, or is there a mad rush to publish?

Do you really get a lot of prestige from confirming somebody else's result? I would have thought the risk to reputation from sloppy work would far outweigh it (see: the cold fusion shenanigans).

They can, as calculated by switching delays of simple circuits like inverters and NANDs (so simpler than a FO4).

Actually it's probably more like 200 than 300, I haven't seen 3nm models but transistors are still getting faster.

No it's not valuable at all. I'm just replying to a person who got particularly upset by it and seemed to take it seriously. Just ignore them or downvote and move on.

Despite the the "strictly no jesting on the super serious hacker news" rule, I think it was just a joke. I wouldn't let it get to you too much. I thought it was pretty funny.

> so far demonstrated to 770GHz for one CPU

That's not a CPU, it's a simple circuit. From the article, "Simple superconducting logic circuits have been shown to operate at speeds of up to 770 gigahertz."

Exotic semiconductor transistors can switch that fast, record being over 800GHz I think. Regular transistors of the type in your phone can probably do around 200-300GHz. Not to say there could not be revolutionary designs opened up with superconducting wires or switches, just the switching speed itself doesn't necessarily tell us one way or the other.

No it pretty much is true, well it's the power draw from switching transistors and from leakage losses.

Resistance in the metal wires is not so much a problem for power as it is for signal propagation delay. That is the biggest problem with R skyrocketing in M0/1.

And backside power delivery is to relieve congestion in the interconnects. That's typically one of the limiting factors in complex logic designs now, transistor densities of under 70% aren't uncommon.

That's what "Removing the power signal and signal line to just a signal line would free up space for more transistors." line is about in the link. Power delivery losses aren't nothing, but they aren't a big fraction of energy in today's CPUs.

Eliminating most wire delay would be a huge benefit though, and could be a pretty big revolution. Not just within the core or on the die. You're still going to have to switch those transistors and burn current on leakage though, so no cold CPUs just yet.

The subject wasn't plantation timber though, but the forestry service (allegedly) logging out the best trees from forests.

Forestry service doesn't sound like tragedy of the commons, it sounds like tragedy of government.

> Cooler chips. Chips heat due to resistance, and superconductors have zero resistance (by definition). I suspect this is the company's intended application. The following quote from their patent is very suggestive if you know about semiconductor manufacturing.

Power consumption due to R in metal stack is not a large proportion of total. There could be bigger opportunity in reducing wire delay though.

Yep.

> Well, it's right for the leading edge.

No, the point was that the leading edge will stop advancing when it can no longer compete economically with companies that sell mature nodes. Which is obvious, but I was just being similarly reductive.

> The point is that they will stop scaling chips before technical limits are reached.

Sure, like most commercial ventures, cost becomes prohibitive at some point and overtakes benefits. As it always has been.

The discussion moved to talking about is competing with mature nodes, where you said they'd only be competing with themselves (which doesn't seem to be right).

> Competition with "mature nodes" is different in the sense that here one company (like TSMC) will be "competing" with itself.

No, why? Lots of foundries out there that don't compete on leading edge nodes.

> Apple can't increase the price of their product arbitrarily. So if the price per performance increases, the new iPhone would be slower than the old one. Maybe people will still buy it if it has better power efficiency, but that is a trade-off which has its limits.

That doesn't address what I said -- that price per transistor is not the single limiting factor. I never said any performance increase is worth infinite value.

> That was because of competition. The cost per transistor actually went down by a lot.

I'm not talking about the marginal cost to make the device, I'm talking about the R&D and capital expenditure to develop and build the machines for the next node.

You can be reductive and say it always boils down to competition, but then you would also say that ultimately shrinking will end when it can no longer compete with mature nodes. Competition in both cases. So I'm not sure what exactly that's getting at.

> If it soon goes up significantly, it will stop to make economic sense to increase transistor density any further. Why pay the same amount of money for a less powerful chip?

That's not strictly true, performance of a transistor still has value. Companies like Apple pay premiums to get in early on leading edge nodes, more per device than the mature nodes they move from.

What were the challenges you were seeing or heard were the biggest? The light source?

Still, ASML's latest EUV machine, the 3600D, does draw 1.3 megawatts.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/937966/0000937966220...

But when it comes to cost, evidently replacing many passes and other complicated processes with DUV machines with fewer EUV passes is a net win. And the energy required to create these chips must be a small fraction of the energy they will use in their lifetimes, so improved efficiency of the smaller nodes enabled by EUV would surely be a win, all else being equal.

Cost has been the challenge for the past 30-40 years at least.

Many semiconductor manufacturers have folded, dropped out, or merged over the years due to costs putting development of the next node out of their reach. If the remaining 3 drop out of the race, they will be following the same pattern as many before.

Civil courts are a service. They have significant delays and backlogs in many places, to the detriment of people with legitimate reasons to use them. Probably in no small part due to frivolous and nuisance suits.

Sounds like a good way to get banned from github.

To be clear, this wasn't just suddenly frowned upon. "Drunks" have been looked down on and/or overindulgence considered bad or sinful since -- I don't know -- the Greeks and Romans, certainly Christianity.

> The existence of tools which demand time to make and primitive stone tool factories suggest abundance: division of labour is necessary to invest time in tool making for future benefit. There has to be a relative surplus, more food than not, less time for survival only, to make tools work.

I don't think that's really true. The species wasn't permanently on the brink of starvation such that they didn't have time to bend down and pick up a stick and use it to add to a shelter or throw at an animal, so in the very literal extreme sense we carry a surplus of energy with us. But the equation isn't necessarily much different between one person dividing their time between making tools and hunting, and a division over a slightly larger group. Efficiency improvements with primitive tools would have been large and quite immediate. Also people would have obvious and immediate specializations before any formal organization. Some would be faster, some stronger, some better climbers, some better at sharpening sticks. So there wouldn't have to be some significant build up of a surplus before pretty sophisticated tool making and division of labor would emerge, IMO.