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0 pointspama9mo ago0 comments

Your experience with fabs must be somewhat limited if you think that the state of the art in fabs produces deterministic results. Please lookup (or ask friends) for the typical yields and error mitigation features of modern chips and try to visualize if you think it is possible to have determinism when the density of circuits starts to approach levels that cannot be imspected with regular optical microscopes anymore. Modern chip fabrication is closer to LLM code in even more ways than what is presented in the video.

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tudorizer9mo ago

Fair. No process is 100% efficient and the depths of many topics become ambiguous to the point where margins of error need to be introduced.

Chip fabs are defo far into said depths.

Must we apply this at more shallow levels too?

whilenot-dev9mo ago

> Modern chip fabrication is closer to LLM code

As is, I don't quite understand what you're getting at here. Please just think that through and tell us what happens to the yield ratio when the software running on all those photolithography machines wouldn't be deterministic.

kadushka9mo ago

An output of a fab, just like an output of an LLM, is non-deterministic, but is good enough, or is being optimized to be good enough.

Non-determinism is not the problem, it's the quality of the software that matters. You can repeatedly ask me to solve a particular leetcode puzzle, and every time I might output a slightly different version. That's fine as long as the code solves the problem.

The software running on the machines (or anywhere) just needs to be better (choose your metric here) than the software written by humans. Software written by GPT-4 is better than software written by GPT-3.5, and the software written by o3 is better than software written by GPT-4. That's just the improvement from the last 3 years, and there's a massive, trillion-dollar effort worldwide to continue the progress.

whilenot-dev9mo ago

Hardware always involves some level of non-determinism, because the physical world is messier than the virtual software world. Every hardware engineer accepts that and learns how to design solutions despite those constraints. But you're right, non-determinism is not the current problem in some fabs, because the whole process has been modeled with it in mind, and it's the yield ratio that needs to be deterministic enough to offer a service. Remember the struggles in Intels fabs? Revenue reflects that at fabs.

The software quality at companies like ASML seems to be in a bad shape already, and I remember ex-employees stating that there are some team leads higher up who can at least reason about existing software procedures, their implementation, side effects and their outcomes. Do you think this software is as thoroughly documented as some open source project? The purchase costs for those machines are in the mid-3-digit million range (operating costs excluded) and are expected to run 24/7 to be somewhat worthwhile. Operators can handle hardware issues on the spot and work around them, but what do you think happens with downtime due to non-deterministic software issues?

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tudorizer9mo ago

Fair. No process is 100% efficient and the depths of many topics become ambiguous to the point where margins of error need to be introduced.

Chip fabs are defo far into said depths.

Must we apply this at more shallow levels too?

whilenot-dev9mo ago

> Modern chip fabrication is closer to LLM code

kadushka9mo ago

An output of a fab, just like an output of an LLM, is non-deterministic, but is good enough, or is being optimized to be good enough.

whilenot-dev9mo ago

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