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the author of that post and creator of the chip was a high schooler at the time. (now in college). it’s a lot of detailed work. it was hard for the creators of

the author of that post and creator of the chip was a high schooler at the time. (now in college). it’s a lot of detailed work. it was hard for the creators of the process. for us builders, the steps are there and reproducible. maybe you’re using hard in a different way than i am taking it. gate count isn’t really the hard part either, to my best understanding. just like software dev, hobby level and professional level are far apart in terms of what is the hard part. so i think i’m taking offense at your example as being exemplary of the “hard part”

jfoutz 5y ago
Ah, no offense intended. There were a lot of calls to just build more fabs. I personally, and I think it's a common belief, that for a lot of software I could build a simple version, alone, over the weekend. When stackoverflow was new, replicating stack overflow was practically a meme. I was trying to highlight, if you want to make a chip, you can, but it'll take a long time to build up the knowledge and skills. So maybe, you hire people with that knowledge and those skills. Of course, a lot of speed comes from not having to coordinate with lots of people. Small teams don't have as many communication channels, solo work has no communication channels. There's probably a group of people and a set of supplies that could get a fab built surprisingly quickly. I don't think automakers are suffering from 5nm chips, they can get away with older processes. Good luck finding all those resources funding, coordinating, and building the process. Perhaps not hard like discovering new process, but a _lot_ of work. It's not going to be a weekend project. This is what I meant by, It's going to be hard.