[HN Gopher] Amazon Echo Flex Teardown: The Big Silicon
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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
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(page generated 2021-01-17 23:00 UTC)