[Arm-netbook] OT: Food for thought

[doark at mail.com]

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On Sat, 6 Jul 2019 07:47:07 +0100
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 6, 2019 at 3:49 AM David Niklas <doark at mail.com> wrote:
> 
> > > It looks like there are some quantum interferences as well as EM
> > > and RF issues, *and* probably some power and layout issues in the
> > > tinier geometries, all of which the Foundries absolutely do not
> > > want the customers to know about, because it constitues "reverse
> > > engineerable knowledge" about how the Foundry lays out the chips,
> > > and a competitor Foundry could get hold of that and start their own
> > > multi billion dollar money spinner.  
> >
> > Here's where closed source IP really confuses me: If a "money spinner"
> > tried to do that wouldn't they be sued, pay royalties and regret it
> > for the rest of their existences?  
> 
>  in the meantime, whilst such a court case is underway, they're losing
> literally billions due to the upstart having "stolen" their knowledge.
> a CSMC employee actually did that to TSMC: worked on TSMC's 28nm line,
> went back to China and started CSMC's 28nm line with the knowledge.
> 
>  It took years for the court case to go through, as it's in a
> different international jurisdiction.

Ah, here the story is:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150225094201/http://english.cw.com.tw/article.do?action=show&id=14895

It seems to me that there will always be thieves in the world. Hiding
science does more harm to the scientific community then the
thieves.
Think long term though, luke, as chip fabrication plants are prone to
do, at least for process design and improvement. If I'm a priest and I'll
give away copies of the Bible and your a chip fabrication guru and you
don't ever tell anyone anything about chip fabrication what will the
population learn about?! Isn't it obvious that science will ultimately
die off or become some super diluted idiocy (old wives tales)?! If people
are willing to die for God(s) (real or not), but not even lift a finger,
but instead purposefully restrict knowledge and understanding, to teach
their fellow man the sciences will the sciences not be out competed many
to one?! Am I the only one who sees this (our/your/the chip fabs), fate?

I digress, this cannot be my life. It's fundamentally not for me. I'm a
fool for wanting to learn -- anything. I'm wedded to suicide. I'd be
equally productive considering the long term, in watching the clouds go
by. I'm going to do things differently... much, much differently, if I
have any say so at all in the matter!

> > > Bottom line is, we're literally decades and hundreds of millions of
> > > dollars away from libre foundries.  I am probably out on those
> > > estimates by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude.  
> >
> > Are we talking any libre foundry, or some particular nm size (not
> > that a nm is actually used to describe a nm anymore)?  
> 
>  Outside of my ability to say.

You know what happens when you can't answer one of my questions, right? :)
tap tap tap tap ...... tap tap tap ... Aha!
How's this, a 28/22nm chip fabrication plant for $4.2 billion?
Not that GlobalFounderies ever had a winning process...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2814/3
And, if you read further down you can see that you can get a smaller
plant with a College campus for $4 billion.

I guess this means to buy one we'll have to empty our piggy banks. ;-)

> > > Luckily, DARPA recognises the problem and put up USD 150m to create
> > > fully libre automated ASIC layout software. It's a start.  
> >
> > Interesting. For posterity, here's a link (with HTML garbage removed):
> > https://www.fbo.gov/index?id=a32e37cfad63edcba7cfd5d997422d93  
> 
>  That is (was) a session link, now invalid.  What keywords did you use?
> 
> l.
> 

I got the link from the bottom of this page:
https://www.militaryaerospace.com/computers/article/16722067/darpa-asks-industry-for-swapoptimized-machine-learning-realtime-asics-able-to-learn-from-data

There's an actual absolute path on the webpage which seems to not be a
session link:
https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/HR001119S0037/listing.html

David
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