Guess it is too hard to pick a single scene from “Grave of the Fireflies”? That movie is basically an emotional gut punch from start to finish.

I mean comparatively to HDDs.

Of course there are also challenges to making a high capacity SSD, but i don’t think they are using fundamentally new methods to achieve higher capacities. Yes they need to design better controllers and heat management becomes a larger factor, but the nand chips to my knowledge are still the same you’d see in smaller capacities. And the form factor has the space to accomodate them.

If HDDs could just continue to stack more of the same platters into a drive to increase capacity they’d have a much easier time to scale.

How about a 122.88tb SSD? Large SSDs are pretty common in the enterprise market and arguably much easier to manufacture since you only need to put a bunch of nand chips on a pcb.

GAA is the next evolution of transistor architecture from FinFET, but as far as I know has no direct link to smaller process nodes. In that (to my understanding) it doesn’t require small nodes and could be used just as easily in larger ones. It’s just that it is more difficult so until now there were other easier ways to make progress. However with new nodes getting more expensive and giving less scaling gaa and other things like backside power delivery are being pursued.

We will have to see if the process is actually good, but I have little doubt that China will become competitive in EUV within 5 years. But if they have it already next year, that will be very fast.

So not only do you expect China to have a working domestically produced EUV machine within 5 years, but a competitive one? Or possibly even next year?

Next year is just pure fantasy that I don’t think even the most optimistic would assume. If they were anywhere close to that we would already know. They’d have shown a working prototype by now.

Euv is crazy difficult and you not only the result of a single company ASML, but many highly specialized companies that are leaders in their respective fields and all over the world like e.g. Zeiss for for the lenses. So for China to replicate it domestically they’d need to copy the whole supply chain. Which is orders of magnitude more difficult than what they’ve done in other industries like electric vehicles or solar panels.

Imo if they have a working prototype of a complete EUV machine within this decade it would already be impressive. But that would still be far off from mass production or wherever the industry is by then (Intel is currently trialing high na EUV). Also for reference Wikipedia says ASML had their first prototype in 2006 and we know how long it took to being that to mass production. China as a second mover might have an edge that speed things up, but just knowing how it works in theory isn’t enough and there are o shortcuts.

But maybe they also pursue another technique such as nano imprint (like canon) to achieve smaller nodes. Maybe that would be easier to replicate without existing global supply chains.

Well there are claims that Huawei is aiming for 3nm with GAA with tape out next year See Here.

I think we shouldn’t forget that the nm numbers really are just that: Numbers. They don’t correspond to any specific measurements and can be chosen more or less arbitrarily. So 6nm for example might just be a slightly refined 7nm node.

Another thing is power efficiency and yields. If they get 4060 performance at terrible yields and with massive power draw then it is very different to getting there at similar parameters as Nvidia.

If China does end up cracking EUV by themselves it would indeed be massive. It’s arguably one of the most complex things mankind has ever done. But there are so many factors to get right that tbh I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Dark Reader: Especially late at night white page background just burns out my retinas, no idea how I ever managed before.