LaurieWired Profile picture
May 12 6 tweets 4 min read Read on X
What if humanity forgot how to make CPUs?

Imagine Zero Tape-out Day (Z-Day), the moment where no further silicon designs ever get manufactured. Advanced core designs fare out very badly.

Assuming we keep our existing supply, here’s how it would play out: Image
Image
Z-Day + 1 Year:

Cloud providers freeze capacity. Compute Prices skyrocket.

Black’s Equation is brutal; the smaller the node, the faster electromigration kills the chip.

Savy consumers immediately undervolt and excessively cool their CPUs, buying precious extra years. Image
Image
Z-Day + 3yrs:

Black Market booms, Xeons worth more than gold. Governments prioritize power, comms, finance. Military supply remains stable; leaning on stockpiled spares.

Datacenters desperately strip hardware from donor boards, the first "shrink" of cloud compute. Image
Image
Z-Day + 7Yrs:

Portable computing regresses, phone SoCs fail faster from solder fatigue. Internet switches hit EOL, nothing horrible yet, but risk increases.

Used “dumb” car market skyrockets, lead-free solder in ECUs experience their first failures from thermal cycling. Image
Image
Z-Day + 15Yrs

The “Internet” no longer exists as a single fabric. The privileged fall back to private peering or Sat links.

Sneakernet via SSDs popular, careful usage keeps them alive longer than network switches. For those lucky enough not to have their desktop computers confiscated, Boot-to-RAM distros and PXE images are the norm to minimize day-to-day writes.

HDDs are *well* past the bathtub curve, most are completely dead. Careful salvaging of spindle motors and actuator arms, with precision repairs keeps the most critical high capacity arrays online.Image
Image
Z-Day + 30Yrs

Long-term storage has shifted completely to optical media. Only vintage compute survives at the consumer level.

The large node sizes of old hardware make them extremely resistant to electromigration, Motorola 68000s have modeled gate wear beyond 10k years! Gameboys, Macintosh SEs, Commodore 64s resist the no new silicon future the best.

Fancier, (but still wide node) hardware like iMac G3s become prized workstations of the elite. The state of computing as a whole looks much more like the 1970s-80s.Image
Image

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More from @lauriewired

Jul 21
Windows is one massive (private) Git repo.

When I was at MS, the Windows Source had around ~3k PRs a day!

Regular Git didn’t scale to those levels at the time.

Internally there was a progression from Git -> GVFS -> Scalar -> merge back to Git. Here's how it worked: Image
Cloning Defender’s antivirus repositories alone would take a full day!

You may be wondering how we dealt with merge conflicts.

Teams were heavily siloed, with most of the effort put up front on the build process.

Syntax and such was checked with local builds before pushing. Image
Once a PR was made, a ton of automated checks would start.

For something small like a Virus sig, it would make sure you didn’t break the defender engine ;)

Of course, PR's were hand-reviewed but honestly, the build process was so robust it caught just about anything. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jul 14
Microsoft took ~30 years to be compliant with the C++ standard!

Seriously. From 1993 to 2020, MSVC’s preprocessor wasn’t feature-complete.

Code that compiles perfectly on Linux often broke.

Hold your judgement; there's some interesting historical nuance: Image
Image
A tech race in the 80s led to unfixable debt.

Official standards wouldn’t exist until 1998.

MS engineers made “best guesses”, but they were competing with others (Borland, Watcom) for the C++ compiler market.

"We'll clean it up after capturing market share". Image
Popularity became their downfall.

Window’s business model was dependent on legacy compatibility.

The mantra of “never break old code” effectively tied the compiler team’s hands.

Those early “ship it quick, good enough” preprocessor decisions? Kind of a problem... Image
Image
Read 5 tweets
Jul 10
There’s a cursed C++ competition where programmers try to create the largest possible error message.

Finalists created ~1.5GB of error messages from just 256 bytes of source.

Preprocessor exploits were so easy, they had to create a separate division! Here's my favorites: Image
Image
One contestant experimented with C-Reduce; a way to search for C++ programs that create unusual compiler behavior.

Maximizing the fitness function for error as a reward, no templates, no pre-processor hacks.

Just nested parenthesis causing exponential error output! Image
For the “precision” subcategory, the aim is to create exactly pi megabytes (pi*1024*1024) of error.

Source had to be <256 bytes.

One anonymous entry hit it spot-on with just ~230 bytes of code. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jul 9
What happens when you freeze a process *perfectly*? RAM, VRAM, network, everything.

Imagine:
- Live-migrations of LLM training jobs
- time-travel debugging
- Surgical repairs of a crash moments before segfault

It’s called CRIU, and it’s already here: Image
Image
It starts with a mad Russian.

At least, that’s what a lead linux kernel dev called it:

“a project by various mad Russians to perform c/r mainly from userspace, with various oddball helper code...I'm less confident than the developers that it will all eventually work” Image
Despite the criticism, Pavel Emelyanov, head of the OpenVZ kernel team, pushed on.

By 2012, Linus Torvalds merged the first wave of patches into Linux.

Previous attempts “failed miserably”, mostly out of insane complexity.

The key lied in parasitic code injection. Image
Read 5 tweets
Jul 7
Humans live at 10 bits per second.

The brain takes in ~11 million bits per second of sensory data, yet the inner conscious workspace is massively compressed.

Most people speak at ~40 b/s. How can we speak faster than we can think?

It's all about error correction: Image
Image
Speech may exceed the cognitive speed limit, but most of the bits are redundant.

Language is designed to withstand noise and mis-hearing. The 40bit “raw rate” is predictable from context.

A Caltech study shows the effective payload collapses to <13 b/s when stripped. Image
What about typing?

Also maxes out right at 10 bits per second, and that’s at 120 wpm!

Even Starcraft e-sport pros measured out to, you guessed it, ~10 b/s information output during a match. Image
Read 4 tweets
Jul 5
Whole-home lithium power used to be a rich man’s game.

Now it’s “high-end graphics card” territory.

This is a $2500, lithium polymer battery that would power an entire US residential house for >24hr.

China is *crushing* it on kilowatt hours per dollar. Image
Let’s put it into perspective. That battery is 2x the kWh of a tesla powerwall 3.

Each powerwall will set you back $15k a piece.

Residential battery setups usually cost $1000 per kWh.

This is $80 per kWh. Image
China’s selling these near the predicted theoretical limits.

Domestic brands are a cool 10x more.

Do you realize what possibilities this opens up?

Instant micro-grids. 3 days of offline power for $10k. Crazy-durable power resiliency. Image
Read 4 tweets

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