[hengheng]

EUV has always been about achieving high enough power to be economically viable. It was never about making chips at any cost.

I remember reading the tinfoil hat theory about three-letter agencies making low-quantity high-cost chips at incredible process sizes in order to break encryption. I doubt that's still as viable today as it was before leakage currents started dominating, but it was an impressively plausible theory.

[maxglute]

>economically viable

IIRC EUV development picked plasma over synchrotron because plasma projected to be cheaper, even though technically synchrotron had more benefits. Queue many, many years of solving for technical challenges for LPP and now commercialized EUV machines cost 200m, 400m for next high NA. Which is about the cost of multiple small or single medium size synchrotron facility. It's amazing plasma EUV works, but it's also a failure in the sense that it is FAR less economical than originally envisioned, which explains why particle accelerator route is still being worked on.

[smallmancontrov]

Back in the day, HP advertised that the distributed amplifiers in their 26.5 and 50 GHz equipment were made with e-beams, but the process size wasn't anything special, certainly not by today's standards. I'm not really sure what drove the decision.

[artemonster]

that tinfoil hat theory, just as basically all of them, can only be produced by people that have absolutely zero understanding of the topic. The amount of challenges that industry has faced during the relatively fast progress through nodes is just non skippable, as there were so many things to be discovered through very expensive and long brute force (just one example: high k dielectrics)

[fooker]

No, you can absolutely make specialized chips that are orders of magnitude better than the commercial state of the art if you don't care about mass production or operational costs.

I can bet there are superconductor/photonics/topologically different/strange memory/smaller process size prototypes around.

Right now we are getting to the limits of transistor sizes, but even a couple of years ago experimental prototypes of smaller process size were developed years before mass production.

[LeifCarrotson]

Well sure, at many orders of magnitude more cost. If you wanted to brute-force RSA, you'd be better off leveraging economies of scale to operate ten thousand current-gen 4nm GPUs running at 2 GHz with air coolers than a single exotic prototype 1nm ASIC running at 8 GHz with cryogenic cooling.

Aside from LCS35, most cryptographic problems are about as easy with two processors that are half as fast as one processor that costs twice as much.

[rowanG077]

That is if your problem is parallelizable. There are a ton of sequential problems that are hard or impossible to break up.

[voxic11]

What would be an example that the NSA would be interested in?

[rowanG077]

Well I'm not an NSA engineer but I can imagine complex real-time analysis of streaming data, think processing 400+GbE link data. It quickly becomes too much too store, analysis could impose sequential packet dependencies.

[almostgotcaught]

> No, you can absolutely make specialized chips

proof? i'm just like... where? where do you think people are making these chips and using which ovens?

> smaller process size prototypes around

no there aren't. there just aren't. you could hide this in your basement about as easily as you could hide building your own space shuttle (and launching).

[fooker]

> no there aren't. there just aren't.

There's no hiding anything here. You can find random articles about publicity stunts companies used to try based on these. Specifically when IBM was in the game, and Intel until they got butchered by incompetence.

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

> no there aren't. there just aren't.

You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?

[voxic11]

You can always turn a claim into a logically equivalent claim of the non-existence of any counterexamples.

    “For every instance, e equals mc²”

is logically equivalent to

    “There is no instance where e does not equal mc².”

That combined with your belief that claims of non-existence can't be held with any degree of certainty means you believe that no claim can ever be held with any degree of certainty. Which is not a very interesting insight.

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

This is an equally unsupportable claim, though. This requires enumeration of the entire state of the universe, an impossibility. This is just the standard swan problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory). What you have is a model you're very confident in without the deductively-rational basis your diction implies.

People should really read more hume if they're going to weigh in on philosophy of science.

[artemonster]

This is highly stupid argument, honestly. burden of proof lies on people that make idiot claims

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

Hume is deeply disappointed in you.

[almostgotcaught]

> You do realize we all know it's impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something, right?

I love condescension that is so petty it's laughable. As the commenters said below there are very well-understood precedents/principles that allow me to conclude "no" here eg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

So no it's not "impossible to have any degree of certainty in asserting the non-existence of something", we actually have a whole branch of mathematics dedicated to exactly that (it's called probability and statistics).

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

Probablility and statistics are models that produce something we call certainty. This has no relation to actual certainty, aka knowledge. If you're making an abductive claim, you should state it as an abductive claim. Otherwise you're simply claiming true knowledge that is literally impossible to have.

[artemonster]

where you get this nonsense? I am from semicon industry, so please, sources for the claim "orders of magnitude better"

[fooker]

Look at the history of 5nm process for example, from the first prototypes to mass production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nm_process

[christkv]

Where is my superconductor based CPUs preferably at room temperature.

[_carbyau_]

Hell, even liquid nitrogen temperatures are fine. More hassle than you'd want in your pocket but yearly running costs wouldn't be too bad for most businesses.

[nick3443]

Does a superconducting semiconductor even make sense philosophically?

[throwaway81523]

It's a superconducting switch, not a semiconductor per se. Lookup "Josephson junction". IBM spent a fortune on a huge R&D program to make computers from this, but eventually abandoned it. I think they got some circuitry working but eventually decided it wasn't practical enough to commercialize.

Also, some of today's work in quantum computers uses superconducting qubits. Maybe that's in the same research stage now. No idea if it will ever become practical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect