3 ms·
I find stuff like this fascinating and marvel at how it's even possible to do via visual inspection alone. It's also sobering to think about how long it would
by kogir 13y ago
I find stuff like this fascinating and marvel at how it's even possible to do via visual inspection alone.
It's also sobering to think about how long it would take using a similar process to understand a modern, 20 nanometer chip.
- fein 13y agoI always look at things like this and say that I wish I understood every step of the process, from electrical theory to fabrication. I have the same approach to software, but I have to keep reminding myself that the things I'm trying to understand took hundreds of people to complete. It's an incredibly annoying internal struggle. I have no idea how to deal with it aside from grinding it all out until I die.
- kens 13y agoAuthor here: I don't understand every step of the process either :-) But old chips like this at least seem theoretically possible to comprehend in their entirety. I expect it would be pretty much impossible to reverse-engineer and understand a present-day processor with billions of transistors instead of thousands. But I could be surprised - 35 years from now people may be reverse-engineering Xeon chips for fun. And perhaps posting about interesting things they found in Intel's random number circuitry.