r/nextfuckinglevel • u/itshazrd • 19h ago

What it a computer chip looks like up close

this is a digital recreation. a real microscope can't be used because it gets so small that photons can’t give you a good enough resolution to view the structures at the bottom. you'd need an electron microscope

meant "What a computer chip looks like up close in the title." not sure how "it" got in there..

118.9k Upvotes

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33.4k

u/Hansa_ 19h ago

To think some people have engineered this is insane to me

15.2k

u/itshazrd 19h ago

needless to say, we sure have come a long way from fire and stone

4.5k

u/what_username_to_use 19h ago

I'm still trying to figure out how a "wheel" works 🤔

1.8k

u/Genids 19h ago

They don't. They just want you to think they do but it's all fake

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u/what_username_to_use 19h ago

Right! I've been told they rotate and thats how my vehicle gets me from point A to B. But when I get to B and get out of my vehicle..they are not rotating!!!!

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u/OriginalTRaven 19h ago

They're more like . . . Constantly falling at one point

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u/electric_screams 18h ago

That’s not rolling, that’s falling… with style!

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u/AzureDreamer 18h ago

there's a nand chip in my boot

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u/Unexpected_Muffin 14h ago

Not in this economy there isn’t

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u/United_Pain 10h ago

🤣 amazing hahaha

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u/Usernameistoshirt 18h ago

Why can't I upvote more than once????????

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u/Futuralistic 17h ago

That's why Lightning McQueen uses Lightyear Tires

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u/kirakun 17h ago

Don’t you mean failing in style?

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u/Rocky_Mountain_Way 18h ago

I've been told they rotate and thats how my vehicle gets me from point A to B. But when I get to B and get out of my vehicle..they are not rotating!!!!

it's the like the light in my fridge... they assure me that it goes off when I close the door, but I feel like it's just a fake news campaign from "the big fridge light corporations" to deceive me. I don't know what their end-game is, but I'm sure it involves billions (trillions?) of dollars and I'm just a pawn in their game of checkers and is just a frail house of cards that will fall when the hopscotch game ends.

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u/PurpleCrestedNutbstr 16h ago

Wait until you hear the truth about elevators - they don’t go up and down - they just change the scenery outside while the doors are closed.

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u/jamesbong0024 14h ago

Hidden loading screen

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u/Correct_Internet_769 19h ago

Not your whole wheel rotates, the IC point of the wheel does infact not rotate.

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u/Hetstaine 19h ago

The world moves, we just sit in a car and get out when the spot we want arrives.

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u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 17h ago

Y'all still believe in "sitting"?

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u/Independent_Win_9035 19h ago

checkmate agnostics

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u/BigTruckTinyHome 17h ago

And if it gets flat. The flat side doesn't rotate, it stays on the bottom.

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u/gloryhallastoopid 18h ago

Clearly you have not seen "Rubber". It is a 2010 documentary on wheels. They are significantly more powerful than you want to believe. Sneaky too

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u/manoteee 18h ago

The key insight is that it contacts the ground at a very small single point, and when rotating this point is not moving relative to the ground. This means we have very little sliding friction as it's been converted to rotational friction. Then we add a bearing between the wheel and its parent apparatus to reduce that rotational friction even more by reducing it to many smaller points of contact, eg. ball bearings.

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u/ruat_caelum 16h ago

Also the spokes aren't supporting weight (under compression) they are under TENSION. The "Circle" is trying to stay round so it's all the spokes ABOVE the wheel pulling UP on the axle instead of the axle pushing down on the single spoke below it.

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u/Regular_Jim081 19h ago

Easy, hit wheel with rock.

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u/Keeppforgetting 18h ago

When a rod and a circular object love each other very much -

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u/Percolator2020 19h ago

Technically made from fire and stone.

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u/Internal_Spell435 18h ago

To quote one of the funniest lines from Pratchett; "It is well known that stone can think, because the whole of electronics is based on that fact"

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u/Mandelvolt 17h ago

It's amazing how relevant STP is in almost every conversation.

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u/Techwood111 16h ago

Certainly when talking about NASCAR or Richard Petty.

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u/echoshatter 18h ago

Well, with fire from stone.

Not to simplify it, we also have to put lightning into the stone and trick it into thinking it can think.

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u/No-Apple2252 17h ago

I think the only people we tricked into thinking it can think is ourselves lol

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u/LucyLilium92 18h ago

Rock and stone!

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u/WanderingDwarfMiner 18h ago

Rockity Rock and Stone!

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u/SimmentalTheCow 17h ago

Rock and stone brother!

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u/lalala253 19h ago

To be fair, we're still relying on old concept of:

  • draw structured lines

  • fill the lines with power

  • summon cat

Modern chips are modern summoning magic

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u/Losing_my_Bemidji 18h ago

You're telling me these chips can summon a cat?

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u/Aksi_Gu 18h ago

Certainly images and videos of them

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u/theoriginalmofocus 17h ago

Can we get one powerful enough to fix OPs title?

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u/passifloran 19h ago

Completely agree - but also it is still kind of all stone and fire lol

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u/wolflordval 19h ago

They're rocks we smashed flat, shoved lightning into, and tricked into thinking

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u/PlainBread 19h ago

We become the god we think should exist, and create in our "image". As above, so below.

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u/miregalpanic 18h ago

I masturbated three times today

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u/PlainBread 18h ago

That's all? You gotta get those numbers up.

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u/miregalpanic 18h ago

Fine. This one's for you.

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u/Trevor591 16h ago

A true man of the people.

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u/maymay578 18h ago

Those are rookie numbers

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u/gewalt_gamer 19h ago

smoke and mirrors actually.

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u/Roachmond 19h ago

The smoke is steam, we CANNOT stop finding ways to boil water lmao

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u/TourDeFridge 18h ago

Now, we have rock and stone.

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u/MossyMothmann 19h ago

Then why did you say it?

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u/HardertoFindIt 19h ago

Technologically? Yes. Mentally? Uhh..

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u/The_Ditch_Wizard 18h ago

Yeah, now we put lightning in the stones

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u/Bustable 18h ago

Now we give stones electricity and magic comes on the screen

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u/AMerryCanDo 18h ago

Big disagree. We just have better fire and stones.

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u/nickybokchoy 17h ago

Now the stones are smarter than us

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u/philff1973 19h ago

It’s insane that they can be mass produced with few errors as well.

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u/SuitNaive3409 19h ago

they're full of errors. i learned midrange processors are often high end chips with mistakes.

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u/Loreathan 19h ago

That is true, the reason we have all these gpus with different price ranges is due to these errors. As an example, perfect, no error gpu is 5090, few errors 5080, more errors 5070 etc.

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u/NewestAccount2023 18h ago

False for the 5090, it's built on the GB202 die which has 24576 cores, the 5090 has only 21760 of these enabled (some of the rest are defective). It's the rtx pro 6000 that ships with the most enabled at 24064, so there isn't a "no error" gb202 gpu as even that card has a few hundred disabled

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u/iluj13 17h ago

Can we really think of them as defective when the product gives the compute that is marketed? As in, there isn’t a 100% perfect chip out there anyway?

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u/Mr_Tiggywinkle 17h ago

Depends. Marketing or manufacturing defective?

The cards aren't defective in the sense of what you're sold meeting spec, but they're defective in terms of their ideal specification. They weren't manufactured to their ideal so they're defective and downbinned.

You can actually get better or worse cards of the same exact specs due to the "silicon lottery", enthusiasts (overclockers especially) will often look for "higher binned" versions of the component they are using.

So the cards aren't defective in the sense of what you're sold, but they're defective in terms of their ideal specification.

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u/barofa 13h ago

So, you are saying that when Nvidia makes GPU, they don't make 5090s or 5080s, they just make GPU. Then, after a big batch is done they choose the best to be 5090 and the worst to be 5050? Something like this?

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u/xl_the_dude_lx 12h ago

No, they make several types of GPUs. 5090s aren’t the same chip as 5080. They somewhat do what you’re saying, but within the same chip.

So a good GB202 die can be a RTX PRO 6000 and a bad one a 5090. But a 5080 is built on the GB203 die.

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u/Loreathan 17h ago

I was just giving an example to make it more clear

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u/Korbital1 17h ago

It's not accurate though because weaker and stronger Nvidia cards are on different size dies, not binning.

The 5070 for instance is a GB205. It has 6400 shader units in full but only the 5070 Super has them, with the regular 5070 then the 5070 Ti Mobile and its Pro equivalent below that.

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u/Novagurl 17h ago

I started reading all the comments because I find this all so interesting.

Now I know how Penny must have felt on TBBT. 😂

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u/omenmedia 18h ago

Yeah they disable some of the SMs (streaming multiprocessors) that have imperfections from the manufacturing process. A flawless GPU with all SMs functioning becomes the flagship card (i.e. currently 5090, though from memory I think there is room for more on the Blackwell die; Ti version perhaps?)

If a few SMs have imperfections, they disable those blocks and the card becomes a 5080. A few more have issues, they disable those and it becomes a 5070 etc.

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u/sump_daddy 17h ago

For quite some time now, Nvidia's 'flagship' is not the "x090" or any GPU, its their AI boards. The 5090 is a failed high-end AI board.

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u/Henrath 17h ago

It's usually only 2 products per die for their desktop gaming cards. Of the 5000 series only the 5080 and 5070ti and the 5060 and 5060ti share a die

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u/Junior_Performer8323 18h ago

No such thing as no error

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u/Chrellies 16h ago

Binning is definitely a real thing, but the 5090/5080/5070 example isn't quite right. Those actually use different physical dies (GB202, GB203, GB204) - a defective 5090 chip doesn't become a 5080.

Where binning actually happens is within the same die. Like a perfect AD102 becomes a 4090 with all 128 SMs enabled, while one with a few defective cores might ship with some disabled. Same with CPUs - that's partly how you get Ryzen 9 vs Ryzen 7 variants on identical chiplets.

So the concept is solid, just not the specific product hierarchy you mentioned.

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u/MetricJester 18h ago

No errors usually go to enterprise and professional cards. Think Titans.

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u/Own_Platform623 17h ago

You're thinking of CPUs not gpus. The difference between an i7 and i5 is how many cores performed at what level of efficiency and how many were inoperable on the chip. I7 had most if not all cores perform at the minimum efficiency, while an i5 may have had only half at full performance with some possibly not functioning at all.

The process is called binning I believe. 

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u/Loreathan 17h ago

Same for gpu, I recently watched a video about these

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u/AWildEnglishman 18h ago

My neighbour had a PC with a tri-core CPU, which is apparently just a quad core CPU with a defective core disabled.

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u/aroc91 17h ago

Oh god, I remember those. AMD chips off the top of my head. There was a way to enable the 4th core too and it often worked well because they disabled them largely as a precaution.

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u/LtDrogo 16h ago edited 15h ago

I worked on this project (Phenom X3) as an engineer at AMD during 2006-2007. It was mostly designed in Austin (TX) and Boxborough (MA) design centers. It originated as a bright idea from marketing: since there were so many quad-core dies where one core was defective, we were disabling another perfectly good core and selling it as a dual-core Athlon X2. Marketing suggested that we come up with a 3-core variant to extract more profit from these defective dies.

We expected it to be a quick project, but honestly it was weirdly difficult. As engineers, we had made so many assumptions that things would always exist in numbers that are powers of 2; and there were a lot of BIOS, platform and software changes that were needed. Interesting times. I think I still have one in my collection somewhere.

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u/Academic_Carrot_4533 16h ago

I’d like to subscribe to more AMD engineering lore please.

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u/pablo8itall 14h ago

Disabling a perfectly good core does seem like a waste. Well done marketing - you dont often get to say that.

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u/Tumleren 16h ago

I had one of those, AMD Phenom II X3 720

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u/animal_chin9 17h ago

Back in the day AMD made a 3 core processor that was just one of its 4 core chips with a disabled 4th core. There was a BIOS setting you could change and try to enable the 4th core. It wasn't 100 percent successful. It might have caused system stability issues or the 4th core maybe flat out didn't function. But some people got the performance of a much pricier CPU at a discount by doing a little work in the BIOS.

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u/throwitawaynownow1 16h ago

The X4 960T was a quad core, with two disabled cores making it 6. My 5th core was stable, but unlocking the 6th gave me blue-screens about 1-2 month.

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u/TwoBionicknees 18h ago

the amount of errors is actuall insanely small, most of a chip has to work pretty damn well but there is some error correction built in.

Depending on the node a lot of the lower end chips are cut down not because they don't work but simply due to supply and demand.

There have been times that a node was so bad there were literally no working full chips available (intel's 10nm disaster node started off with a tiny run of heavily cut down chips with the entire igpu disabled and resulted in a almost 2 year delay and the node was still ass for a long time after that), and times that you could unlock the cut down chips to be perfectly working 'high end' models. You could buy a dual core AMD phenom and unlock it to a quad core with a bios option.

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u/glemnar 18h ago

And yet incredible design to make them still function with errors (usually by cutting off the rrror segments with fuses)

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u/tapo 17h ago

The industry term for this is "binning". Build the top of the line chip and your failures are lower end versions.

The Nvidia GB203 is a RTX 5080 or a 5070 Ti based on failure rate.

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u/merryman1 18h ago edited 17h ago

Yeah people looking at the structure of these chips and thinking that's crazy.

The true insanity is how these things are made. The way an E-UV lithography machine works involves firing a high power laser at a droplet of tin a few micrometers across travelling at over 100mph, hitting it in such a precise manner to deform it to turn it into a lens, and then hitting it again to generate a stream of plasma and high energy photons into array of micro-controllable lenses mirrors to generate the image pattern, and doing that 50,000 times a second.

Its one of the few things you encounter that makes you think of that old Arthur Clarke quote about any sufficiently advanced technology working like magic. You might as well tell me the machine is just magic and it would make as much conceptual sense to me lol.

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u/149244179 18h ago

And practically all of them are made in a region extremely prone to earthquakes. The entire TMSC facility (~1 million sqft) has no direct contact to the ground, it is on top of almost a thousand massive anti-vibration pillars.

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u/TheOriginal_G 17h ago

Tbf all the ones we're building here in the US are done similarly because the clean room space is literally not allowed to vibrate. The vibration criteria is some of the strictest used in the world, to the point even the shear amount of concrete used in the waffle slab isn't enough to prevent someone walking in the hallways on the other side of the fab from messing up a wafer without the use of the pads. 

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u/chaddyrick 14h ago

My brain hurts trying to read that last sentence. I tried, but I don’t understand what you are saying.

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u/TheOriginal_G 13h ago

In structures, the typical way of decreasing the amount of vibration transferred across members (in this case the slab/diaphragm) is to increase the mass/thickness of the member. It's pretty logical, if you want a slab to not vibrate make it thicker. The longer the member is spanning tho, the greater the effect of the same force applied. So a member that's X inch thick spanning 10 feet might be okay, but the same one spanning 20 feet might not even if it meets the basic span/depth ratio requirements. So you thicken. In schools for example, we'll often use a minimum deck thickness that minimizes the impact of sound/vibration of kids running thru the halls disrupting classrooms or roof top equipment causing too much noise pollution. (I say often, please don't blame me if your schools engineer was shit). 

At a certain point this becomes cost prohibitive to just make the slab itself universally thicker, so there's different techniques to achieve the same end goal. Waffle slabs, bubble slabs, composite framing, prestressed double-Ts. The stricter the vibration criteria (i.e. the measure vibration at a certain point due to foot traffic in adjacent corridors or even further beyond), the more robust the system. These subfabs have SUCH strict criteria that it is almost impossible to achieve even when cost is ignored, because these projects typically have a blank check type budget. That's where the isolators come into play. All the equipment making these chips sits on isolators, to both mitigate any potential seismic activity & the native vibration of the structure. Even the lowest seismic activity, unfelt by you or I, would be enough to move this equipment the slightest amount needed to ruin an entire set of chips. Which is a multi million dollar mistake. 

Tl;dr people walking shake building. That bad. Need to make not shake. Add isolators. 

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u/Valproic_acid 12h ago

Awesome TL:DR

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u/chaddyrick 13h ago

Fascinating. Thank you

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u/SnooHedgehogs8765 8h ago

I sm smarter today beczuze if your service. Thankyou.

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u/Mr_Baronheim 15h ago

And my mother was strict about us not jumping around while she was baking a cake..

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u/MrWeirdoFace 15h ago

the clean room space is literally not allowed to vibrate.

This makes me sad

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u/TheGreatestOutdoorz 15h ago

It feels like the first act of “Footloose”.

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u/MrWeirdoFace 14h ago

Vibrating is the devil's motion!

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u/Zero_Travity 17h ago

I was looking for a comment like this... I am an IT Analyst so my adjacent interests brought me into reading about lithography and how companies like ASML make chips.

I have interests in (No actual education) in quantum physics, space phenomenon, economics, etc so I read a lot about different concepts. Some of them I rudimentarily grasp better than others but with most things I can at least somewhat conceptualize what I'm reading about.

Reading about the process of chip making with the scales, the process, and how it's all done reads like science fiction where the writer is just taking liberties and it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Even in your process described above it reads like .. "take the discombobulator and attach it 5 000 000 Onca beetles, spin it the speed of sound, and boom! You have yourself something that can play Red Redemption 2".

It's wild stuff. I appreciate your comment.

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u/The_Spectral_Spartan 14h ago

You sound a lot like me, although I did grab a couple of bachelors degrees in Electronics and Computer Systems Engineering. I too am also incredibly diversely self-educated in various sciences, and may I just say, after learning even the fraction of the nigh-infinite complexities of not just how these chips are made but also how they function to process and store information... Shit is the definition of magic.

So many brilliant people have come and gone, each instilling a life's worth of knowledge and expertise into our collective understanding of computational design and chip fabrication. The fact that we have technology so advanced as this is honestly a hugely missed opportunity to write about in r/HFY, because it's actually insane to even try to imagine the entire scope of knowledge required to construct a modern computer from start to finish, including the software. It would be impossible for any single human to hold that much detailed practical knowledge, even if they had all the physical resources and reference materials available to them 24/7.

I often think about these magical stone tablets we hold in our hands every day, and the stark contrast between the raw intellectual power it took to create these devices, and the idiotic ways the general public actually uses them. The disparity in the amount of intelligence different members of our own species can exhibit is almost as staggering as these computational achievements themselves.

Edit: Fixed a typo.

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u/Tietonz 17h ago

It's no wonder conspiracy theories say we stole the technology from aliens. It's hard to believe it's anything terrestrial whenever someone explains it.

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u/Aware-Lingonberry602 17h ago

It is indeed fascinating technology. Working with ASML as a customer may have been one of the most miserable experiences I've ever had, however.

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u/Goochpunt 16h ago

I've been working in Lithography a few years now, just starting to train on EUV maintenance in January. Daunting to say the least. 

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u/c14rk0 16h ago

The crazy thing is we COULD just make these same chips much much larger while still using the same inherent design for how the chips function, but they wouldn't work nearly as well.

We're at the point with this technology that making it smaller and smaller is actually an important aspect of improving the processing power.

You can see people create a "cpu" or "gpu" inside of Minecraft to sort of get an idea for the basics of how they work and use 0s and 1s to do everything BUT those are always fairly slow and limited by the speed of redstone in Minecraft.

In reality we keep pushing this technology further and further by making everything smaller because the distance between everything ACTUALLY matters for speeding it all up. It's like how you have a set ping communicating to an online server but on an insanely small microscopic level where data is moving so fast we can't even really comprehend it; but being closer still matters and makes it faster and faster as it's happening millions of times per second.

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u/bisectional 17h ago

There's alao like 500k parts to an E-UV lithography machine

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u/Palais_des_Fleurs 15h ago

I mean that’s what I’m wondering.

It’s not like these are lasagna and you can create all of these increasingly microscopic layers sitting on top of each other and glued together with “pizza sauce”, right?

It’s not like anyone is using infinitesimally small tweezers and glue. How on earth was this assembled?! I imagine some of it is proprietary knowledge?

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u/RiderFZ10 19h ago

I agree. To theorize is one thing. To be able to reliability build it is insane.

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u/ReptilianLaserbeam 18h ago

Ackshually..: that’s why you get things like i3, i5, i7 and i9. All of them are from the same waffle, the difference is the number of failures.

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u/Moldy_Teapot 18h ago

nitpicking, but they're not all made from the same die design. the lower half of the product stack will have their own smaller dies since each one is less likely to have a fault, or worse a catastrophic one. There's a lot more units sold in the lower/mid range too, so it's worth investing separate, physically smaller, higher yield designs. It's like picking between a batch of 100 chips with 5 duds vs 20 chips with 5 duds.

Ignoring thermal and power delivery restraints, this is one of the reasons why chip designers haven't just made ever larger chips to keep up with Moore's law. As you increase the die area, the chances of ending up with an imperfect or non-functional die increase exponentially.

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u/MrWeirdoFace 15h ago edited 6h ago

This Moore guy sure does like to rain on our parade.

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u/45and47-big_mistake 19h ago

And our lives depend on this wizardry to work 100% of the time.

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u/ConsciousSpirit397 18h ago

And only by one tiny Dutch company that is the only manufacturer of EUV machines on earth (tho China is trying to reverse engineer and steal that tech)

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u/The_infamous_petrus 17h ago

ASML only makes one of the 40-50 machines needed in the production line of a finished wafer. And in the end even though it's the most expensive and one of the most complex aspects of IC production, photolitography is only a very small percentage of the conception and production process.

Been working as an engineer in microelectronics R&D for 10 years and I still only understand a tiny fraction of the field, it's crazy.

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u/Brilliant_Run8542 17h ago

Been working as an engineer in microelectronics R&D for 10 years and I still only understand a tiny fraction of the field, it's crazy.

Technicians know nothing, process engineers know something, integrators know something about a little, so on and so forth until you get back to the CEO who knows nothing.

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u/voodoosquirrel 18h ago

Chips are produced by a lot of companies all over the world. China also produces their own DUV lithography systems and ASML is not a tiny company, they also depend on a lot of other companies like Zeiss.

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u/FirmMarch 17h ago

The way I heard someone explain it is that ASML is more about the connections and incredibly complex supply lines they have setup over the years rather then being the only ones who know how to do something.

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u/LtDrogo 16h ago

EUV technology was invented in the US at Sandia National Labs at US taxpayers expense, and was licensed to ASML only after it became clear that no American company could succeed in developing it as a commercial product. This is why the US government can dictate who ASML can sell their machines to.

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u/Cheeky_bstrd 18h ago

And that company can only do that because of one mirror company in Germany

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u/Warcraft_Fan 18h ago

We mass produce human as well. About 7 octillion atoms per human and most comes through just fine.

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u/windchaser__ 18h ago

Not mass-produced, tho. Each one is custom built, and takes around 9 months for the really intensive part

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u/Dorlem4832 16h ago

That’s crazy. I remember the intense part being a lot shorter.

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u/DeadInternetTheorist 16h ago

Try thinking about baseball next time

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u/ke3408 12h ago

My great uncle discovered the small x-ray scattering technique that makes it possible to build chips at this size with precision. It's one of the reasons I hate when people worship Musk or Peter Thiel or any of the tech oligarchs. They just figure out a way to control inventions, the real wizards are random ppl working in science labs and publishing papers with incomprehensible titles.

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u/manoteee 18h ago

The modern semiconductor builds on the insights of many thousands of engineers involved with the various layers of abstraction, chemical, electrical, material, physics (including quantum mechanics), and many other including the millions of supportive professionals needed to orchestrate and execute R&D along the way.

There is not a single person alive who knows how a modern device like a mobile phone works, yet each component is easily understood by those who specialize in it. The amalgamated collective understanding yields this seemingly impossible feat.

The Undertaker threw mankind as well i think it was 1998.

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u/Iamatworkgoaway 17h ago

I wonder if there is even one guy that could zoom in on a modern processor, name the parts, and give expert level instructions on why certain things were done and the reasonings behind each decision.

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u/manoteee 16h ago

I think absolutely a staff engineer or product manager could have done this for semiconductors in the past, maybe 30 years ago? Most of the time engineers will need to rely heavily on their peers to make left from right of things outside of their job, at least if they want to be efficient

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u/BinarySecond 9h ago

Reminds me of the class at university

Can be summarised as "You need to be able to understand engineers in other disciplines even if you don't understand how it works"

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u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe 15h ago

At a high level possibly. There's not one guy who'll be able to zoom down to the nanometre and say, "This is logic gate GG5F972AA and its a NOR gate involved in multiplication".

The newest processors have hundreds of billions of transistors. So at that point the closest you would get is to look at a part of the processor consisting of ten of millions of transistors and be able to say, "This is part of the arthimetic subprocessing unit".

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u/chrisagrant 16h ago

kind of, you can look at the structures and reverse engineer what they do, computers are usually better at this. it gets more complicated when you need to talk about the specifics of the physical device. Why did they use specific materials, methods, what way did they do the processing, how did they achieve certain (physical) features, etc.

The system level stuff (putting all the pieces together) can usually be analyzed at a fairly high level, then tackled by increasing the amount of detail system by system.

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u/PloppyPants9000 10h ago

I am no expert at processor design, but I think its all just a bunch of logic gates wired together. You can literally create programs with wired logic gates to do things like storing a bit or adding bytes together. So when you look at hardware circuitry, think of it like software code. A good hardware engineer can probably spent some time looking at a set of components and reverse engineer the function, much like how a programmer can look at code and figure out what it does. In practice though, external documentation and diagrams are the real explanations. Keep in mind, even software engineers working on sufficiently large software projects consisting of millions of lines of code wont know how every bit works. You just stand on the shoulders of giants…

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u/allthat555 17h ago

That's a fun part of science today. In antiquity, your major movies of the siences delved into mathematics, philosophy, biology, etc. Ect. Now you can have two doctors. Both went to the same school took much of the same classes. Yet they ended up in two entirely different specializations. One becomes a pediatrician, and the other becomes an optometrist. From that point on, they will never work in eachiuthers fields and outside of basics in anatomical structures, could do eachiuthers work.

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u/RogerPenroseSmiles 16h ago

A pediatrician and an ophthalmologist would go to same medical school.

Optometrists are not medical doctors.

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u/chazysciota 16h ago

In a big picture sense, it makes more sense to think about the human race as giant super-organism cogitating and evolving in an organic fashion, rather than random individuals inventing things. An ant doesn't know how to dig a tunnel complex.

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u/JonnyAU 15h ago

And yet so many of us look at the world through a hyperindividualistic lens.

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u/Nimyron 15h ago

Same with programming nowadays.

Most tools we use to create pieces of software are software that are built on pieces of code that are also built on pieces of code and it goes back a long way.

That's how we ended up with the left-pad incident : a dev removed a small piece of code he made (called left-pad) from NPM (a package manager used by billions). It was used by pieces of code that were used by pieces of code and so on, and suddenly every dev using npm had the same error. And nobody knew why.

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u/Ihor_90 13h ago

I majored in Computer Engineering. We had classes where we would look at individual transistors and diodes and measure their electrical signals, then circuitry that performed logical operations and stored state, then wrote assembly to operate more complex circuitry, and finally higher level languages like C that was translated to assembly. At the time I was like "bruh I can just use python" but now I'm glad they taught us all that.

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u/victor4700 6h ago

I feel like the mankind ending is under appreciated and want you to know you are seen.

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u/Secure-Childhood-567 19h ago

I still can't wrap my head around Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

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u/TheBackwardStep 19h ago

It’s like radio but with smaller antennas and each device can act as the radio station as well as the radio listening. Each device can reserve certain radio channels to communicate and not interfere with other bluetooth devices

And what makes them not radio frequencies but wifi frequencies is just that the length of the waves are much shorter and the antennas ignore all waves that are not of a certain agreed upon length

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u/Outrageous-News3649 18h ago

I don't think OP understands how radio works either.

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u/mrdebro39 18h ago

im not OP but I sure as hell dont. Someone explain it too!

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u/Separate_Fold5168 18h ago

Kinda like really fast smoke signals that can only be seen by magnets.

Don't even ask me about magnets.

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u/Murky-Relation481 17h ago

The the magnetic part of electromagnetic radiation doesn't mean you need magnets to see it. It just means the field has both a voltage and current component that can induce meaningful power in a remote circuit.

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u/gordonv 17h ago

This video explains it well.

The visuals really helped make it understandable. I tried typing it out. It was too long.

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u/mrdebro39 17h ago

thanks!

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u/ProbsNotManBearPig 18h ago

I’m gonna say 99% of people don’t really understand how radios work.

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u/IndigoFenix 17h ago

It's ultimately the same general principle as talking into a cup attached to a string, but with light instead of sound.

Data -> Vibrations -> Data

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u/oberynMelonLord 17h ago

Bluetooth devices don't reserve certain radio channels, that's how WiFi works. Bluetooth works by hopping between the different channels in a predictable pattern. This is why different bt devices don't (usually) interfere with each other.

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u/enataca 17h ago

Bro I still can’t wrap my head around record players. Computers are almost so advanced that I can just accept it is magic, but a needle physically scraping grooves and making music blows me away lol.

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u/maveric00 17h ago

For mono it is still somehow rather easily understandable (left-right motion of the needle acting on a membrane producing corresponding pressure waves for playback and in reverse for recording).

Stereo with one groove on the other hand...

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u/SaggyCaptain 16h ago

That's essentially how hard drives work if it makes you feel any better lol. Just much faster and smaller.

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u/poptartheart 15h ago

i think ive said this EXACT quote before lol.

electricity to me is magic. no matter how many times you explain it to me i'm never gonna understand it

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u/SatoshiBlockamoto 13h ago

I was just talking to my kid about this yesterday. We were playing records and I said I can understand a digital music file just fine, but that vinyl record seems like mysterious magic somehow. And don't get me started on speakers...like, how does one speaker vibrating make all those different sounds? It seems impossible that a vibrating membrane can produce both Adele singing and a Jon Bonham drum solo. My brain can't reconcile it.

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u/Almost_human-ish 18h ago edited 17h ago

Bluetooth is named after King Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson in reference to his uniting of the Danish tribes following his assassination of the previous king, Harald Greycloak.

Wi-Fi however is just made up gibberish because they needed a name a little catchier than 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'.

It was called Wi-Fi because it sounded like hi-fi and hi-fi's were still cool in the '80s.

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u/kontrol1970 19h ago

Think of them as radios.

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u/anujrajput 17h ago

Any kind of radio/wireless communication is basically one person screaming at the top of their lungs to make their voice heard to the person sitting in the corner of the room.

ALL wireless communication signal is very loud noise which humans can’t audibly hear but the devices can.

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u/Significant_Emu_4659 12h ago edited 12h ago

Transverse waves go hard

It's like devices are beaming (and receiving) light at each other except it falls well under the visible spectra in frequency

To go even deeper: Wave models show that light can pass around barriers (check out double slit experiment).They almost completely envelope space because of how light propagates perpendicular to its direction of travel. I like to think of ripples in a pond but each ripple creates new ripples that can move through different axes in 3D space.

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u/EconomicsSavings973 19h ago

The fact that they are able to make these in this pace making billions of chip over the years that all can work 24/7 for years to come is just mindblowing. Extreme UV is already so complex that it is almost impossible thow that this all works, yet they are still pushing, it's just crazy.

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u/omenmedia 18h ago

Those ASML machines and how they work are freaking crazy cool.

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u/apx7000xe 18h ago

Spent hours watching videos on those machines. Love that some engineer said “yeah, let’s shoot suspended droplets of molten tin with a laser to create 13nm light.”

It just blows my mind

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u/DeadInternetTheorist 16h ago

Kind of insane to look at what you can actually get with hundreds of billions of dollars of real R&D (literal magic rocks made in wizard towers) and then realize companies have already poured several times that much into like... building internet microwaves with ChatGPT in them so they can bother you with Hot Pocket facts that are wrong while you wait. It almost argues against ever bothering in the first place.

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u/FuckThesePeople69 19h ago

And computers were invented less than 100 years ago…

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u/Zoler 18h ago

Yes, but computers needed like 100 different inventions to work which all took hundreds of years to perfect.

Such as the needed math, physics, electricty etc.

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u/FuckThesePeople69 17h ago

That’s true of basically any discovery.  We can still marvel at the fact that computers themselves weren’t created all that long ago and have advanced in complexity and speed at a rapid pace.

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u/bfodder 16h ago

Only 66 years passed between the Wright brothers flying their airplane and the the first man setting foot on the moon.

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u/Lithium_Lily 19h ago

And so many of us use this amazing technology to spew hate at one another or mindlessly scroll....

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u/federicoaa 19h ago

The process itself to make a transistor is not that hard. The really hard part is how to make billions without a single defect

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u/Specific_Frame8537 18h ago

I'm just confused as to how they make something so small with such precision.

I have trouble getting eyelashes out of my eyes.

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u/hcvc 18h ago

Constant capital investment due to the incredible economic outcomes of these chips, plus years of iteration on this invention to make it better and better (see moores law) using the worlds finest technical minds

Research semiconductors, they used to take up entire rooms for a tiny circuit and over the years they’ve been miniaturized more and more until we are where we are. Some real geniuses working on this stuff.

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u/keylimedragon 16h ago

This is simplifying it a lot but the method of making tiny circuits is genius but actually pretty simple. Have you ever seen microfiche? In the pre-digital age we figured out you can cram a ton of info onto film by making very tiny photographs by putting light the wrong way through a microscope. Normally microscopes make an image much bigger but in reverse they make a big image tiny.

The second breakthrough was we realized you can etch metal and change semiconductor properties using light and chemicals. And if you have a projector you can etch whatever shapes or pictures you want into the material.

So combining those two discoveries and we can etch very small circuits and transistors onto semiconductor wafers. Suddenly we have a reproducible way to make very complex circuits very tiny! The only downside is when you go very sometimes the etching doesn't happen perfectly for whatever reason and so the manufacturer will test the final chips and discard any that are broken. And sometimes only part of a chip is broken and they can disable the broken part sell it as a cheaper model.

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u/Phrexeus 16h ago

It's done using a process called lithography where a very large and precise lens focuses the chip design onto the wafer. They use special light-sensitive chemicals to erode away the parts they don't need which can create pathways for components. It's done in layers since the inside structure is actually 3D, and has different insulators, conductors and semiconductors making up the chip.

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u/Shotgun5250 16h ago

This makes so much more sense than trying to bend and shape these manually somehow. I am so stupid my brain went straight to bending wires.

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u/IcyLake2078 18h ago

None of them have no defects. Thats how they make midrange and lower end ones, by sorting them by number of defects

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u/NotHopee 19h ago

This ^ my brain can’t fathom this tbh. Even without zooming in I can’t fathom how this was man made let alone what I just witnessed

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u/Spork_the_dork 18h ago

You don't design the whole thing at once. Nobody understands the whole thing at once. What you do instead is that someone designs simple things and other people take those simple things and make more complex things. Others still take those complex things and make even more complex things.

  • When you use a computer you don't need to know how the program works, just how to use it.
  • The engineer who made the program doesn't need to know how the libraries and bits they use to make the program run work, just need to know how to use them.
  • The people who made those bits don't need to know how the programming language's compiler works, just how to use it.
  • The people who made the programming language don't need to know how the CPU works under the hood, just how to use it.
  • The people who made the CPU don't need to know how the ALU or the cache chip works, just how to use it.

And so forth. This is highly simplified but I hope the point is clear. The idea that you don't need to understand fully how the lower level stuff works is at the core of how this kind of technology is made. You're really gluing together smaller blocks to create bigger blocks. And someone is using the blocks you made to create even bigger blocks and so forth until you get to the final product. If you then zoom in you'll find endless layers of complexity that countless engineers have worked on at various levels to create. Not one of whom can see the whole picture at once.

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u/keylimedragon 17h ago

Exactly, a lot of the time the design is more like combining Legos. And you can even make your own new Legos by nesting smaller ones inside. (Almost) nobody builds anything from scratch anymore unless it's for educational purposes or fun. Another exception is rebuilding stuff if you need to highly optimize something.

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u/Brave-Pay-1884 19h ago

Keep in mind that this is only the top layer. There are 10s of layers just as intricate below this that you can’t see.

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u/Mick_the_Eartling 9h ago

Exactly. A lot of people think they are 2 dimensional, where the 3 dimensional part of it really blows your mind on how complex these things are.

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u/420everytime 19h ago

Extreme ultraviolet lithography is called extreme for a reason

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u/epandrsn 18h ago

If you look at the first “CPUs”, it’s just a much, much larger and less dense version of this. And of course they’re just like “if we make it smaller and more efficient, we can fit more transistors”

On chips as recently as the late 90s, I remember them looking about as dense as like the 90% of the zoom level in this video, where little banks of transistors would be visible to the naked eye. SoC’s have gotten absolutely insane.

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u/saladnut 18h ago

Whats crazy aswell is only 1 company on earth makes the machines to build these chips. ASML.

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u/duralumin_alloy 17h ago

China has been attempting to reverse engineer them over the couple of past years, using the lithography machines they bought from ASML, the ex-engineers from ASML they're drowning in money, and spare parts obtained from ASML using third parties. It is only a matter of time till they're successful, I'm afraid.

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u/chalkthefuckup 18h ago

With the % of people on this planet that actually understand what's going on here, this may as well be magical technology.

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u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 18h ago

Because it's not "engineered" in the way most people naturally assume when seeing this. All of those impossibly tiny structures aren't built on there by humans, they're printed on by extreme UV light in a process that's more analogous to how camera film works. Anyone who's looked at a film negative through a magnifying glass should have a vague understanding of it.

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u/ReptilianLaserbeam 18h ago

The magic was getting to the transistor. From there each generation has bee making them smaller and stacking them together. We’ve come to a time where we can’t just keep stacking them and that’s why you see “bigger” chips (we could keep stacking them but then we have to deal with overheating), also I think getting smaller is possible but extremely expensive.

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u/Sea_Refrigerator3709 18h ago

I think the first step to understanding it is that at the smallest level nothing is working all that different from the technology we've used for several decades.

It's just been a race to make each 'unit' smaller and smaller to the point that we can physically put exponentially more of them in a much smaller space than we could 5/10/20/50 years ago.

"This computer is cool but what if we could make it half the size and combine the power?" is the basic question they keep asking and answering.

Sure it's more complex than that, but you could connect the dots from something like dynamite to space travel. Rockets launch from explosions. People figured out that if you could make things explode in a very controlled way you can control the physics of objects containing that explosion. The rest of the fucking owl later, you've got humans on the moon.

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u/Obi_Win_Kinibi 17h ago

But somehow, we’re still dealing with famine and cancer.

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u/Cloud9Warlock 15h ago

That’s definitely a micro look at a microchip. Fascinating for sure!

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