I'm gonna attempt to change the BGA RAM chip in a few weeks. Wish me luck! 200 solder balls.

I'm gonna swap the pi 400's D9WHG for a D9ZCL that's 8gigs.

Yes, but the pi 400 remains a good alternative because it is the only option in stock

pi 400? I got one for 70USD and received it today.

That doesn't excuse the shortage of regular pi of course. But it's a nice alternative.

BUT they don't have a CSI port.

But USB cameras exist.

Meanwhile the pi 400: "Guys? Hello? Is anyone here? You still remember me right? I'm in stock!"

Surprisingly not much. If we only look at industry grade hardware. Consumers? Yeah, a lot is wasted.

All server and industrial stuff is actually not too bad. For example, the chip used in the RTX 4090 is also used in a Quadro card.

It is the AD102 chip. Used in the RTX 6000 Ada gpu, which has only 300W TDP compared to the RTX 4090 that has 450W and is pushed to 600W sometimes. Or worse, 800W in the RTX 4090ti.

We're talking about the same chip and a 300W versus 800W difference.

Anyone using a rtx 4090ti is wasting 500W into a bit of extra computing power.

But hey, kwh costs about 0.25euros in the EU depending where you live. This means, you pay 1 euro every 8h of use for a rtx4090ti that could be saved by downclocking the card.

yep.

True that it's not a material, BUT there is a valid point that, such 3D ways of doing transistors are expensive to manufacture.

And we, consumers, don't like expensive things. We want performance/price most of the time.

Not a lot of us would be ready for a 4000$ CPU if it meant 30% better perfs over a 900$ CPU.

That's the thing, it is not a few atoms wide. Ask google, you'll learn something. You cannot make a transistor gate of only 5 or 10 atoms, due to quantum tunneling, but I mean, without the fancy quantum name, it just means that, there are probabilities electrons still get the energy to make the jump when we don't want them to. The gate's size is not two nanometers. It's around 40nm. Or bigger.

Indeed.

1 Angstrom is 0.1nm, and it's first of all completely dumb to use non-standard units, when they could have said 100pm instead.

Intel just ran out of numbers to write, so they used the next available scale: angstrom.

But again, that's just a marketing number.

Intel calls it 18A. TSCM calls it N2, samsung calls it 2GAP. But all those fancy names are just factory processes. Ways to make silicon chips. Those processes are currently done in laboratories and being researched, and are expected to be used around 2025 for production.

Yeah, and the main issue is that, when you add layers on top of layers, you are less and less flat. And at some point you're a whole layer wrong, so you have to do long and expensive processes to try to flatten the thing again.

Cooling is partially an issue, but that's also because CPU/GPU manufacturers push their chips to their limits in an attempt to make them appear better. And end up selling stuff like RTX4090 that is clocked way too high and end up eating 600W, when it could have 90% of the performances for 300W. But hey. They're not the ones paying the power bill.

Simply put: Engineers said they can't make it smaller, it didn't stop marketing people that thought it was a good idea.

It's as dumb as 2666Mhz ram, that in reality is clocked at 1333MHz, and 2666's proper unit of measurement is MT/s.

Why? Because DDRx ram stands for double data rate. Marketing wanted to use larger numbers because it sounded like it'd sell more ram.

They ended up confusing everyone. Again.

Well, they didn't. In reality the 2nm process has an expected gate size of around 45nm.

That doesn't mean they aren't finding cool ways to make the chips even more compact. Lots of less known terms like GAAFET. (some kind of vertical 3D transitors)

But the main issue with all of this, is that the prices to manufacture a single chip is higher and higher. Since now it's not a matter of size, but also of fabrication complexity and time.

If I were to guess, we'll get slowly stuck in 2025-2030 era regarding our current technology. I think this will be when we'll need to use alternatives, more power efficient ARM architecture, which is what Apple is already using for its M1 and M2 chips.

(friendly reminder that 2nm is a marketing name and has nothing to do with actual values compared to back when it used to, it's now just a name for a fabrication process)

It's not the efficiency, but a different architecture. The main issue is that, all software made on windows wouldn't be compatible if you change the CPU architecture.

Yeah, all CPUs use the X86 architecture. Or more modern versions that are backward compatible.

Apple's M1 and newer CPUs are not using X86, instead they use the same architecture as our smartphones. Which is more energy efficient, but costs more to produce if you want the same computing power.

2000 for a 4080!?!

While electric cars are cleaner, we must remember that the car itself as a concept is horribly unoptimized.

To me, making electric cars mandatory just pushes the problem further. You're still moving 1.5t of steel for a 80kg human being and his groceries.

The main issue isn't the ICE cars, it's that our current society needs them. I can't think of many people that say "Hell yeah I'm gonna get stuck in traffic jams for 2h while going to work".

Pretty sure people would move closer to jobs if they could even afford rent....

Sure it's great that we're changing to electric, but it's still not as good as what things could be if we were to design cities with efficient public transports. Not mentioning that electric cars have a high upfront cost and that battery productions may not always follow.

I mean,

The best car is the one we never need to use.

Is it the same chip though?

Oh it's not.

The AD102 chip is used on the 4080ti, 4090, 4090ti and rtx6000 (quadro card)
AD103 is used only on the 4080 16gb? Wtf.
AD104 is used on 4060 up to 4080 12gb, wtf.
AD106 is used on the 4050 and that's it for now.
AD107 is not yet used. But that'd be for something like a 4030 or 4010...

I am guessing they will want at some point to make some RTX 4080ti with the AD103 chip perhaps? Or maybe they will make quadro cards with them..? Or they will bring back the "super" editions...

The hell is wrong with Nvidia this generation...