[HN Gopher] Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon ___________________________________________________________________ Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon Author : parsecs Score : 53 points Date : 2021-01-17 20:16 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (electronupdate.blogspot.com) (TXT) w3m dump (electronupdate.blogspot.com) | rmoriz wrote: | I wish we would be able to repurpose such closed down devices to | run free software. | Closi wrote: | > The engineering that went into this block was probably in the | thousands of person-hours and involved some pretty rare | engineering skills. | | It's probably in the tens of thousands - one person working on it | by themselves for a year gets you to 2000 hours. | baybal2 wrote: | No, even a one man team can do a cookie cutter SoC with hard | macros these days. | | Mid-tier SoCs of around 2010-2012 period were done by teams of | just 20-30 for most of brands on the market. | | Only after the mobile market skyrocketed did RnD expenses | skyrocket too as market competition started to get serious. | syntaxing wrote: | It's super impressive that someone can just look at a die image | and know what blocks are what. Kinda wished I knew more to about | ASICs to be able to do the same. | MJalali wrote: | I always enjoy to see the details of boards | dang wrote: | Related from 5 days ago: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25742276 | banana_giraffe wrote: | > In ~1997 this level of compute power would have been enough to | get on the TOPS500 list of the fastest computers our civilization | is capable of creating.... now something that consumes only 54 sq | mm of silicon that gets put into a $15.00 gadget. | | ... and it's incapable of doing anything useful without even | bigger computers somewhere else. | | Progress is so odd sometimes. | londons_explore wrote: | I often wonder if there is anything else in society that could | scale in a similar way to moores law. | | Is there anything else we could use a lithographic-like process | to make massive numbers of very cheaply, yet still find buyers | for? | | Floors of a modern skyscraper are nearly that - they're made | with moulds that get reused again and again on every floor. But | to get decent scaling, you really need to make instances in at | least 2, and preferably 3 dimensions in one go. | | We've already done it with things like the printing press that | can churn out books very cheaply - but it turns out that we've | now reached the limit of the numbers of books people want. | | Humans also reproduce exponentially - with a sufficiently high | birth rate, numbers of people can rapidly grow. One needs | enough space to support that growth, and we are sadly lacking | in that... Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast- | scaling of civilization? | mistermann wrote: | Ideas, emotions (love, hate, apathy, etc). | | See: 1/6/2021 events at the US Capitol, the number of | children that die annually due to malnutrition, etc. | baybal2 wrote: | > Is there anything else we could use a lithographic-like | process to make massive numbers of very cheaply, yet still | find buyers for? | | Very few. The thing with litho is that materials inputs, and | outputs are nearly the same, it's just the value coming | defies conventional economics. | | Thermodynamics limits all physical processes by entropy, but | nothing limits the entropy itself. | baybal2 wrote: | > Humans also reproduce exponentially - with a sufficiently | high birth rate, numbers of people can rapidly grow. | | With a sufficiently high birth rate, daycare, cheap real | estate, schools with less than 100 pupils per class, free | higher education, and solid, assured pensions, and state | elderly care. | ethbr0 wrote: | Why haven't we better stardized housing, education, and | food to scale? | | Human needs are not bespoke. | baybal2 wrote: | The Eastern Bloc kind of tried, you can see how it went. | | Saying it being a half-success would be a complement. | | If a Union's citizen could've choose in between Union's | kindergarten, and an American one, he wouldn't need to | choose, though some people say daycare wasn't as bad in | Western countries of the bloc. | | I would still admit, Union's secondary education was a | rare somewhat half-success story, and it only looks so | good if you compares it to USA, but not so much other | Western bloc countries. | | China tried mass housing along Union's model, and it | failed miserably (though this failure could've probably | been called a success by standard of places like | California.) It took it to adopt capitalist real estate | model to get where it is now, and even today, Beijing has | no viable recipe how to house 60% of population that got | to stay behind in the industrialisation drive. | | The bling-bling Chinese 1st tier cities most Westerners | get to see only represent how 5% of China population | live, and even they get to house most of its citizens in | rather gloomy "bedroom district" type suburbs which most | outsiders lauding "Chinese housing model" never see. | | The quality of housing in China drops with inverse square | root of a distance from nearest 1st tier city, and from | downtown to suburb. | TeMPOraL wrote: | Because economic pressures are much stronger than | humanitarian pressures, so standardized things are | optimized to be as small and cheap as possible. Hence | slums, standardized testing and junk food. | [deleted] | TeMPOraL wrote: | > _Perhaps Mars will allow us to practice our fast-scaling of | civilization?_ | | For a few decades (assuming fixed rate), until the population | doubles and we'll be overpopulating _two_ planets. We need to | either slow down on the exponent - not just population, but | also markets - or figure out interstellar travel rather | quickly. | noja wrote: | > We need to either slow down on the exponent - not just | population | | We did this. Population growth is slowing rapidly. | TeMPOraL wrote: | Sure. But you even quoted me saying _not just population_ | , which is the key point. Stabilizing population doesn't | buy us much if the market - and thus resource | exploitation - is still growing exponentially. | mpweiher wrote: | Population growth is predicted to effectively stop by 2100. | | https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/17/worlds- | popu... | lotsofpulp wrote: | Resource consumption is the relevant metric. | baybal2 wrote: | > For a few decades (assuming fixed rate), until the | population doubles and we'll be overpopulating two planets. | | By the time mankind would be able to populate Mars, we | would've probably have no effort to just build cities in | space. | | The amount of steel, and aluminum you can make just from | moon, and earth is enough for billions of space cities. | ta988 wrote: | what about food? wouldnt that be the limiting factor? | baybal2 wrote: | I you can lift exatons of steel into space, you can | probably already afford to solve the problem of direct | synthesis of all, and every fertilizer, and probably | nearly every other chemistry process just by throwing | more energy at it. | TeMPOraL wrote: | Raw materials will be cheap in space, once we crack | orbital manufacturing. | bserge wrote: | I believe space would be the least of our worries in that | case... | bserge wrote: | Well it's not technically incapable, it's just that the makers | can't profit from it. | intricatedetail wrote: | Is that extra Wi-Fi being unused? Not difficult to imagine that | this could have been a tap for LE to listen in if someone turned | off WiFi ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-17 23:00 UTC)