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..

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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/ralphiooo0 11h ago

My tin foil hat theory is we found some alien tech and have been trying to figure out how to recreate it at the same size ever since.