I had this questions come into my head becasue I was watching a video of someone zooming into a microchip and they pass a human hair and continue zooming in an incredible amount. I’ve heard that some of the components in microchips are the size of DNA strands which is mind boggling. I also watched a video of the world’s smoothest object in which they stated that normal objects are no where near as smooth because if you blew them up in size the imperfections would be the size of Mount Everest. Like if you blew a baseball blew up to the size of earth it would have huge valleys and mountains. It wouldn’t be perfectly smooth across. So my question is how are these chip components the size of DNA not affected by these imperfections. Wouldn’t transistors not lay flat on the metal chip? How are they able to make the chips so smooth? No way it’s a machine press that flattens the metal out that smooth right? Or am I talking about two different points and we haven’t gotten that small yet?
In: Engineering
They arent.
Let me tell you a cool secret.
Lets say intel comes out with a brand new series of CPUS, and they introduce a new i11 chip, the most advanced chip yet, well, because making microchips is so effing hard, even on a damn automated manufacturing machine, there is a huge amount of errors in them, so any chip that dont fall within lets say 15% of what an i11 chip is suppoed to be gets marked down to an i9, and they repeat the process anything under 15% of the power of the i9 becomes and i7, then and i5, and then an i3.
So whats the difference? None really, they are all made identically, on the same conveyour belt by the same machine, with the same process.
But cause its so difficult to make that jazz, and instead of binning the hella expensive cpus that did not reach the standard, they turn it down a version number.
Again, this is simplified as that just happens if they work in the first place.
A good example of this is back in the 90s, when a lower powered cpu was more popular, and intel was running outta stock, so they took higher powered one, shut down the power to the lower one, and sold it at lowered one prices.
But whats so funny about that? Well a guy figured out they could remove that powering down block, and get the higher power cpu for the lower power cpu price.
It comes down to quality really, and the error rate is way higher then you would think.
15% is also an example number.
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