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mind-bending 7nm chips

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

We have to buy The Boy an iPad for his school. I have no idea why they want middle school kids using an iPad when a Macbook Air would be far more durable for similar money. But, we went shopping. And it turns out that Bic Camera is out of iPads. They offered us a discounted iPad Air, which happily comes with the new A12 processor, the newest Apple currently sells. What I find particularly amazing about the A12 isn't its features but rather its manufacturing. It's built on the 7nm transistor process, meaning the chip is vastly more dense and also low-power than previous generations of chips. I looked it up; the A12 processor has 10 billion transistors.

That's fifteen to twenty times the number of transistors in the ~2009-era i7 I also bought today. Needless to say, the power draw is night and day as well.

One of the fun things about transistor technology is that we're running up against limits imposed by physics (as described by quantum theory). That is, at that scale we don't know where every electron is at any point, and it's hard to make semiconductors actually work reliably. Technology is getting crazy at so many levels: the physical technology is at a level where it's pushing against theory, the struggle to make use of hardware innovation is wreaking havoc with equipment manufacturers*. Programming languages are in flux. Countries and corporations are using hardware and software and networking to compete with one another, and to parasitize and control the population. Society is using social media to fight culture wars. It's really quite a crazy time.

Anyway, we have to now buy a keyboard for The Boy's iPad. We're going with a third-party.

*e.g. AMD released a line of products and firmware upgrades around Christmas that were rushed, causing users to experience total failures of the product.