Let's take a trip to nanometer world of processors and admire beautiful silicon crystals, modern and not so - from 10 microns to invisible in a light microscope 7 nanometers. Chips in high resolution - www.flickr.com/photos/1305612...
and then imagine that 20 years ago software was more snappy than today(arguably sometimes even looked "fancier" or harder to display) and we essentially do the same with computers as we did back then but a hell of a lot less efficiently, billions of transistors, 5ghz multiple core cpus in the palm of your hand but it struggles to diplay a simple webpage because of lazy programming...
@@frozby5973 Probably because stuff like 3D rendering was not as evolved and hardware-intensive as it is now. Also multitasking was barely even a thing.
@@akisalmenaho8473 im not talking just about 3D you can see huge progress in 3D im talking in things like os, browsing, general use, why is windows taking 6gb of ram if its essentially doing the same it was 20 years ago why it takes 100% cpu usage to display a simple website that has (largely because of the minimalism trend) even less stuff on screen or on single page then ever before. Why is win 10 onwards so god damn slow. start, settings, etc are such simple things that are the same yet computers and software from 20 years ago still manage to pull up faster than new hw/sw. Everything thats based on uwp apps is painfully slow to load. Why if windows uses 6gbs of ram on idle things like start or settings are not preloaded. What is it preloading if those things have to be loaded each time regardless ? Theres just so much overhead and abstraction its honestly disgusting, it shouldnt take 500k lines of code to respond to html requests. system settings that is just a window with a blank color and a bunch of icons on top shouldnt need a 5gb/s w/r m.2 ssd to load under a second when it loaded under a second on a pc with a 20mb/s w/r 200ms delay hdd 20 years ago. I know im repeating myself but i just want to get the message across...
@@frozby5973 Website loading problem can very well be an internet issue, considering that internet usage has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. In 2002, a computer was still considered a "luxury item", and only the very top end phones used the internet back then. Nowadays every household has at least one computer (I have two, for that matter. I am a computer builder), and everyone has their phone on the interweebs 24/7. Also websites themselves have a lot more packed in them versus 20 years ago. As for hardware issues, either you have a ton of malware on your computer or you have a very entry level system. No average CPU should hit 100% just for one website. Unless I have 50 or so chrome tabs open, that is (R5 3600/5700 XT/16GB 3200, if those numbers say anything to you). Edit: Oh, and the amount of data overall has become bigger and bigger. About 12 years ago an 8GB flash drive was huge. Nowadays it's barely anything.
@@akisalmenaho8473 web page display and web aplications it indeed left behind...it could be done a tone more all all this processing power, web navigation it the same with 100MB/s or with 10Gb/s
The technology that produces these devices is the most precise and highest technology there is. The amount of work that goes into simply building the plant is mind-boggling, and the machines that “print” the circuits onto the silicon are far *more* mind-boggling. It’s a miracle that they’re as cheap as they are.
You need like 2500 now days to get a really good rig for gaming. Maybe cheap in terms of what you are getting but a lot of people cannot afford that. And the affordability has gotten worse. Thus might open the door for more pay to play e centers, Lan centers.
@@ayliniemi Honestly computers are cheap these days. My very first computer costs a little over 2000 dollars, that got me a low spec system, a 486 when better machines were all pentiums. Today that money gets you a top of the line system.
@@ayliniemi It is not that expensive... and i can promise you it wont open the door to any lan centers or pay to play those have long been a thing of the past nowadays you can buid a gaming rig for 500 bucks that can run newer games 1080p no problem...
@@ayliniemi I'm confused by your comment. No one was talking about the price of gaming PCs. They said that processors are cheap now. Given that you can get a 6 core CPU for about $100 now I would say that yes, they are cheap. Affordability of PC components (GPUs excluded) have been getting better and better over the years so I really don't know where you got that one from.
after watching a lots of videos on how chips are made and how these works .... the working of a micro processor is still a magic for me .... yess it is magic
They use EDA software and design by pre-compiled blocks, no one designs by individual transistors. The design must follow electronics standards for verification. AI helps in finding optimal configurations for the blocks that take up the least space, accumulate the least heat, etc.
Haven't even watched the rest of your content. This video alone makes you criminally underrated! Needless to say I'll support. Love the voiceover style and almost artsy approach while still giving the history and intermediate tech talk on both modern and historical devices! Beyond impressed keep it up :)
Its incredible to think that we made this! From the dawn of man were we lived in tribes outdoors making our first stone tools to eventually making an electronic brain! Just amazes me!
The colours are "false" in the same way some butterfly wings have "false" colours! They both have repeating structures smaller than certain wavelengths of light. Amazing phenomenon.
You get all the colors because changing the angle you view it at, is changing the angle it's reflected back at to your eye. The reflected color is the wavelength of light didn't get absorbed into the surface at that angle.
Like tiny anechoic chambers for light waves, it’s incredible. The scale is so tiny that literal quantum tunneling is a predicted issue with scaling any further down, since the components are almost at an atomic scale.
The fact that the guts of a modern CPU are simply too small to see because their parts are narrower than the spectrum of visible light is crazy to me. And I really wasn't expecting you to end on a Terminator reference. That's kind of unsettling to think that computers, designing their own kind, may one day decide we are no longer needed.
Your video is amazing. Even having studied how they make these in college, I'm still in awe of what we can do. Seeing them like this in such high detail is incredible.
I am still waiting for nanotechnology. Something akin to catalytic converters and atomic force microscope and cold fusion: a way to change bonds to Si, Ge, GaAs without heating all the die. Then grow circuits like nerves grow. Chips get faster just by being powered and downloading from npm.
I used to be a microelectronic technician and worked in the photolithography bays. We’d use regular microscopes to look for imperfections on the surface of the silicon but in order to actually “see” the individual features of the chips we had to use scanning electron microscopes.
Processors to me feel like a whole different life form. They started simple, evolved just like we humans did to become so damn complex and magnificent. It's just matter of time when these processors will have thoughts and consciousness like we do. Just magic!
They will never have thoughts , because they are non living. They need a instructor . They are simply a calculator, which are super fast at calculating.
@@squidscrew1339 Well, it hugely depends actually. What would you consider 'living' and 'non living'? And also, imo, I think it's very confined to think that only biological things can attain consciousness. I do agree that present computers are nothing more than extremely fast yet dumb calculators but given enough time and energy, computers can very well attain things we might think are impossible for them.
@@Divyam_Deep it's human who is actually developing. May be after 50 years sometimes there won't be any PC , sometimes new things may have replaced it . Human can build and upgrade to totally different things . While these machines can only do things within their space , i mean they can't invent something which is totally different at all with different functions too by itself. Human have already doing these things from the day they started living here . Humans invent things to make their life easy . Machines doesn't have life and doesn't have necessity by it's own and doesn't have mind , these are bunch of non livings , our lives that's what differentiating us from these. even humans can't play with their life , humans doesn't have any control/access over his life . He can't even hold or transfer life .even healthiest people may die , even weaker people may live . What we are doing in machines is trying to make them like us . But since we can't create our life , we cannot make them as like us , never ever . If humans have ability to create their life and hold it and transfer it etc then they may able to do make these things as humans do . But humans never ever able to do that. Whereever you live ; even without any tiny hole to escape for your life still you will die . You can't never hold of it .
@@squidscrew1339 Buddy, reading your answer I got to know two things about you and the way that you think. First, you believe that there would be emergence of some new technology that would replace the current silicon based computers and tech and secondly you are assuming that we can't make other machines self aware and sentient just because we humans can't do it to ourselves. Looking at where you are coming from, I'd say You are really confining yourself to thing the conventional way and are not really getting what all this means. I'd suggest you to take your time, research this topic, read some books about it and then perhaps we can talk at lengths about A.I and non-biological life. If you'd like to what I think and believe in than I'd say that Biological life is just like the bootstrap program for non-biological life. If you'd want some suggestions on what books and resources I'd suggest to understand this better, you can reply to this message and I'll be more than happy to share stuff with you.
I appreciate the Terminator 2 music in the background, it reminds me of Cyberdyne Systems and how the manufactured the SkyNet A.I. that ended up becoming self aware and nuking planet Earth lol.
Great video! I'm a line operator in a chip fab, I currently run photo tools so that clip of the mask at the end was a nice little nod. I find what I see on the wafers fascinating, even by naked eye. Haha, have also learned developers love to hide things in the chip design that can only be seen under microscope.
@@947C.Christmas.Siletz.Benton That's fair, the fab I work for is 60 years old. I don't think we have a process node smaller than 90nm and we still work with 200mm wafers. So we'll never be a TSMC or an Intel. That being said, we're not producing 80's/90's technology, we're producing 2022 technology with in some cases 30+ year old machinery. Honestly, that's another thing I find fascinating about my job.
@@joehoisington7761 But, wouldn't you like to be the master of the technological wave that the INTEL DUO TECHNOLOGY created? Think about all of the new spending also encourage by government. You could be the father of the new photo masks.
This video takes me back. The endurance course was incredible but savage at the same time. There’s nothing like nursing blisters and a sore body through the whole course
the funnest thing is that when you look at the design you can see what the engineers did to make it theirs. like, Micky mouse , bozo, even their names are included in the way they laid out the circuits. my brother designed many chips and he told me of some of the stuff you can find in the circuits - even 4 letter words !
The computer technology has always being able to surprise me. there are many times I have ponder looking at my phone, like a child watching a magic show. just a box of silicon, plastic and metals combined together to create beautiful illustrations called 'pictures' and allow us to reach the other end of the world. Its just crazy to think.
He said "12 billion transistors in 2017 , for $500". On one chip! And I balked at buying my laptop at best buy for less than that. Why cast pearls to the swine? I Thank you sir, for putting things into perspective for me.
I remember hearing a story about the time the 386 was introduced. I heard Intel rented every large computer (think IBM) it could find in California over a long weekend to simulate the then new chip to insure no design errors were missed. Today it would probably be a room full of desktop computers, since one of them today has more power than what was running major companies circa 1980. Processor dimensions have shrunk so much that ordinary light wavelength is too large to print the tiny patterns onto silicone. Ultraviolet as well, has wavelength too long. What is next, Xrays ? I worked for STC in the 70's. We made a disk drive about the size of a washing machine, and it was 10 mega bytes as I recall. Today you can hold terabytes in your hand.
This is exactly what I was looking for, a deep dive into these miraculous technologies on a microscopic level. Additionally, I love your appreciation that these designs are not just scientifically interesting but also art. Modern CPU / processor technology is effectively one of man kinds greatest creations in the history of human life on this small blue earth.,
It amazes me how memory storage works at lightning speed and how it remembers.Also hard drives where the disk are literally microscopic measurements apart from each other's.
Mate i just have to say that was brilliant, awesome job with that video man well done! I haven't looked yet but i hope you've made more like that one! Cheers.. 👍 Edit: My Dad gave me my first computer when i was 4 years old, 40-odd years ago back in 1982. It was a Commodore Vic-20 with a "massive" 16 kb of ram (do the kids these days even know the term 'kilobytes' exists lol?) It would be super interesting to see it's processor beside one of these modern ones for comparison...
If you want to blow your mind, calculate how big a modern processor would be if the transistor element size was equal to that of the thickness of a sheet of paper. Don't forget to leave a little space between the transistors.
Diffraction is no more the limit of optical microscopy. You can get color pictures of sub wave length structures by use of optical scanning near field microscopy. There are microscopes of this kind which can achieve a lateral resolution of less than 5 nm with ultra-thin quartz tips, obtained by an etching technology. The theoretical limit is atomic resolution in true color. For this purpose you need to irradiate the sample with wavelength tuned laser light pulses according to the three human color receptor wavelength maxima. Superconducting bolometers can act as radiation receivers which count each single photon as a measure of intensity of the reflected light. The result is a natural true color picture of these sub-micron structures. This is really amazing.
I have a friend that worked for a certain company that does contract work for the US government. He talked about they would dissect chips to see what they can learn. It said it was very expensive machinery to do this. I guess they slowly sand the outer of the chip, then sometimes use acid and other methods to get to the bare processor and look at it with a microscope. We won't get in to details here, but the government might "use" what they learned and make their own chips.
Thank you for explaining this and showing exactly what your speaking of. Very interesting, out of my electronic league , but still really interesting lol
iFor size reference...There are as many nanometers in a millimeter as there millimeters in a kilometer. 1 million. And 1 femtometer would be 1 million times smaller than a nanometer which is so small single digits femtometers can be used to measure atom nuclei diameters quite easily. 1 Femtometer is a trillion times smaller than a millimeter.
Superb video. It makes me laugh when people still say never trust the autorouter, but the fact is that processors with 40bn transistors and structures, most of the design will never have never been seen by a human. Most of it is repetition, but still that level of complexity is unimaginable.
