Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

worksinprogress.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 251 posts

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#21

Post by maxalbarello »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #11

It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.

i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability.

whatever many secrets are involved, information wants to be free and it's hard to believe that others won't figure it out.

by the time they do catch up we better be steps ahead. what's after EUV?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#22

Post by frangonf »

moffkalast wrote: post #4

If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows? I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.

Isn't exactly this what China is doing? Apart from poaching ex ASML employees? Now reaching 7nm, and just throwing up more energy to catch up in FLOPS like Jensen said?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#23

Post by dnnddidiej »

codeulike wrote: post #16
mytailorisrich wrote: post #11

It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.

"at some point" is doing a lot of work there. How long do you think?

30 years

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#24

Post by simne »

moffkalast wrote: post #4

If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows? I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.

Because very large share of market now are datacenters. Difference from desktop is dramatic - for desktop really acceptable very simple chips with bad energy efficiency, but DCs already deal with extremely high power consumption, as they typically "compress" so much consumption in one rack, that constantly working near to physical constraints.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#25

Post by jstummbillig »

> By betting on extreme ultraviolet lithography long before it worked, ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips.

Makes one wonder: Would we be much better off of worse off if we reshaped society to do more of things, where a new technology is unlikely to work but highly beneficial in the limits? Would we sooner have 10 additional ASMLs or waste a lot of resources?

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#26

Post by scotty79 »

simne wrote: post #24
moffkalast wrote: post #4

If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows? I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.

Because very large share of market now are datacenters. Difference from desktop is dramatic - for desktop really acceptable very simple chips with bad energy efficiency, but DCs already deal with extremely high power consumption, as they typically "compress" so much consumption in one rack, that constantly working near to physical constraints.

You can't make desktop computer 4 times larger but there's very little preventing you form putting 4 racks where you had 1 before. If the floor space is the expensive part of data center then probably some incentives are misaligned.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#27

Post by sbarre »

maxalbarello wrote: post #21
mytailorisrich wrote: post #11

It is unavoidable that, at some point, China will have its own matching or better machine because they obviously how incredibly strategically important it is.

i find it hard to believe that there is no equivalent anywhere else in the world. there is so much talent out there and the stakes are so high that it seems like an inevitability. whatever many secrets are involved, information wants to be free and it's hard to believe that others won't figure it out. by the time they do catch up we better be steps ahead. what's after EUV?

Honestly I thought the same, but after watching a couple of videos on how EUV actually works, and what ASML (and the 1,200 other specialized companies that feed into its supply chain) built..

I can understand why you can't just take one apart and copy it.

There's (apparently) 4 decades of accumulated cutting edge scientific research that has gone into these machines.

I suspect the machinery, process and human expertise required to simply produce the parts required for these machines is the real moat (oh and I guess the US-led export controls too).

The build tolerances for components are incredible. There are 11 primary mirrors in an EUV machine, each one has something like 100 coats of ultra-pure materials that are precisely deposited in picometer-thick layers with tolerances in the nanometers, across a 1-meter wide curved surface.

Then you have to position the mirrors perfectly inside the machine, again with tolerances in the nanometers.

So even if you know what you need to do, having the equipment and expertise to do it is a different thing.

And that's just one part of the 100,000+ parts that make up an EUV machine.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#28

Post by hackrmn »

> These machines are roughly the size of double-decker buses. To ship one requires 40 freight containers, three cargo planes, and 20 trucks. They are the world’s most complex objects. Each contains over one hundred thousand components, all of which have to be perfectly calibrated for the machine to produce light consistently at the right wavelength.

As a software engineer by trade, the above parable communicates to me two very important things and little else by comparison: that the machines are ultimately fragile and nowhere near "optimised", since the complexity is by own admission substantial to put it mildly; the machine is not a commodity, exactly, one of the million pieces breaking subtly likely renders it inoperable; its cost is proportional to its complexity (read: astronomic); by mere fact it's a focal point of geopolitics only supports the rest of the argument it's a machine of current stone age much like siege engines were at some point the closely guarded secret win-or-lose multiplers of feudal culture.

I mean it's certainly interesting to read about the complexity, but reducing the complexity and commoditising the whole thing is what's really going to be impressive I think :-)

I am probably speaking out against the nerd in us, and none of what I said should detract from enjoying the article or the subject, it's just that I think complexity here is the giveaway of us not having conquered UVL exactly, not quite yet :-) Or maybe we lack the right materials which would allow us to reduce the machine or make it less complex or prone to calibration related errors.

Re: ASML became the chokepoint for cutting-edge chips

#29

Post by moffkalast »

simne wrote: post #24
moffkalast wrote: post #4

If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows? I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.

Because very large share of market now are datacenters. Difference from desktop is dramatic - for desktop really acceptable very simple chips with bad energy efficiency, but DCs already deal with extremely high power consumption, as they typically "compress" so much consumption in one rack, that constantly working near to physical constraints.

That's the AI hype narrative, but aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market? That's tiny compared to consumer volume, though revenue is likely on par given the higher cost per unit.
Post reply on HN