Computing

We tricked rocks into thinking, and that's pretty cool.

Professionally, I do computer hardware things and kinda want a place to write about it as I keep learning more. I'll write up some things or link to some people who do it better.

My current thoughts on computing hardware

Stacked CMOS using GAA FETs is like the coolest stuff ever, you get to cut your space per pair in (not quite) half, assuming you eat that large of a loss in the metal layers with so very dense wiring. Anyways - it changes the actual space calculations of what you're synthesizing out from RTL so your actual best practices for performance change. Wild stuff, totally bonkers.

CPUs are just really big finite state machines when you get rid of the abstraction. Also they're like really quite optimized for general workloads, but it makes a lot of sense why ASICs are needed for many kinds of workloads. Program types and their consequences, out of order execution, finite number of registers which can clog the living hell out of memory busses, the actual cost of sharing cores across processes, hazard navigation as a result from memory accesses being borked. I guess the tl;dr of CPU development is that every optimization has to look invisible to software, so every performance increase also includes a jumbled mess of logic to hide what it's doing from its OS overlord.