asciilifeform: and evidently even mircea_popescu's supply of screaming + patience was finite, the argentines ended up curing him of further attempts, not he -- them
asciilifeform: i don't pretend to specifically know. point is, it's an anti-personnel mine field, not anti-tank.
asciilifeform: i'm sure mitsubishi also gets what it wants
asciilifeform: orig su version of zek fence was the simplistic 'may not go to foreign devil lands'; modern-day reich's is the moar 'advanced', 'looksy but no touchsy' variant.
asciilifeform: ( asciilifeform is not labouring under delusion , however, that 'if only they sold, i could be sitting in $50k mircea_popescu-grade castle', prolly mitsubishi would own'em all )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'родиной не торгую' (tm)(r)(stalin)
asciilifeform: ( even if half-castle owner is willing to sell, it gotta be to ~another~ orc )
asciilifeform: there was yet another level of idjicy in ro, that i discovered, where they won't sell the shit to foreigners
asciilifeform: d00d commissions a 5-story hruscheba-castle in the middle of fucking wasteland. he's bankrupt the second he signs the paper, whether he doubles down later and goes broke-er or not, neh
asciilifeform: when you haven't with what to pay the whole invoice, or anyone who might ever wish to buy it for even 1% of what it cost
asciilifeform: but the idjicy was baked into the act of commissioning the build
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i saw truly mindboggling number of unfinished-and-decaying half-built houses in timis
asciilifeform: ( see, if you pay with money, the poor fuck manning the desk makes 0 , he only makes if you pay interest )
asciilifeform: reminds me of process of buying autos in usa. picture, you walk in with chequebook. 'i want toyota' --- 3 hrs later, you MAYBE drive off in a toyota, or more likely yer still fighting over 'no, i do NOT want loan, not at 3%, not 2, not 0 , i want to pay with money'☟︎
asciilifeform: they mostly deal with ~broke orcs, neh. who walk in and 'i want 'buy' house, but i have no money'
asciilifeform: well if not then how is the dealer to know that yer payment-capable, without 'assess'. or do i misperceive what that meant
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: lol, didja walk in with 5kg of green ? and reply 'here, assess this'
asciilifeform: and the mistake can be in anyffing, incl. a physical interaction between unrelated components that you did not know were possible.
asciilifeform: much moar comparable to satellite biz. a 1-bit mistake costs you coupla $mil.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: vehehery different class of nre cost, vs engine.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: i doubt any of it belongs in same sentence with word 'soon', we're speaking of just short of mars colony.
asciilifeform: iirc we had a thread re 'ic is deeply incatronic tech' hypothesis
asciilifeform: the plant gets ruinously costlier, per erry 'shrunk nanometre', and somehow gotta be amortized, and the competition gets thinner an' thinner
asciilifeform: imho the race for 'smallest transistor' has been a disaster of incaization -- in '70s there were thousands of ic makers, in '80s -- hundreds, in '90s -- dozens, today maybe 10 .
asciilifeform: it is at the level of 18th c. cannon-forging, roughly. erry house has 'seekrit sauce'.
asciilifeform: the actual physical procedure of baking the ic is not as standardized as i previously (to last thread) thought.
asciilifeform: btw the reason, afaik, why erry fab house forces 'standard cells', is that they have proprietary tweaks to their process , and have lib of cells ( kept seekrit ) that are known to work with said process.
asciilifeform: and their magnitude will depend, i also suspect, on how well he plays his cards.
asciilifeform: the exact figs can only be obtained by a cn-speaking emissary, i suspect.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the sad bit is that conventional asic process , as available today in cn , tw, etc, is also like this. you are forced to use 'standard cells' supplied by vendor.
asciilifeform: they prototype on ordinary, sram-based one, then pay to have it metallized.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: this is actually how existing ic industry worx, a good half of the 'asics' are actually 'hard copy fpga', recall the early miner derps threads.
asciilifeform: there's no 'bitness' in fpga, it's a bag of gates, if you have enuff of them you can made n-bit addder, divider, whatever one likes
asciilifeform: what's the 'crutch' ? not spending a $3mil + 1yr delay if there's bug in layout , like 1970s folx had to ?
asciilifeform: the other is political, all of the existing vendors obfuscate and keep seekrit the necessary docs to actually program the thing. ice40 happens to have been reversed, but it is ruinously small ( still ~150x bigger than the miniature xilinx i baked FG from, however , but too small even for 4096bit adder )
asciilifeform: there's 2 well-known minuses. 1 is that yer making circuit out of immovable parts, connected by drawing line though multiple elements ( bus lines are generally few ) , this gives you much slower circuit with many fewer logical elements than if you had made the device physically from scratch .
asciilifeform: ( orig ancestor was the PAL. there were PALs in yer ro 'spectrum' clone. )
asciilifeform: thing's existed since mid-80s, the pluses and minuses of it are well-documented
asciilifeform: i disagree -- fpga is analogous to gutenberg's movable type; classical 'asic per design' to chinese whole-plate.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: for design that actually fits inside, you end with exactly 'slow asic', with the added win that it's a homogeneous object with no e.g. 'and here is where he will rsa and here is where the low bit of multiplier will live' sabotage target available to enemy mole in vendor plant.
asciilifeform: for 'escher object' it worx pretty well.
asciilifeform: buncha gates, as many as can fit, and a programmable switching matrix, a la old telco , look up tables made of 4-6 bits of sram that turn a given unit into 'and' , 'or', 'xor', half-adder, straight wire, whichever is necessary. i dun know how to more rigorously define, it is one of the simplest devices, straight homogeneous grid of sram cells plus a couple hundred (thousand, in larger devices) 'express lanes' made of straight metal,
asciilifeform: for that matter current FG is baked on fpga, from evil old xilinx.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: recall ice40 ? simple grid of LUTs, + matrix of programmable interconnects.
asciilifeform: and pretty much the ideal 'nonspecificity of diddling' platform, it is quite impossible to meaningfully boobytrap fpga fabric if you don't have foreknowledge of what will go into it and precisely where.
asciilifeform: why not ? it's the simplest item, and theoretically the others can be made from it.
asciilifeform: possibly incomplete list, but roughly it.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i've outlined several items, historically. will summarize for the l0gz, in order of descending ( per asciilifeform's lights ) universality : 1) sane fpga 2) sane minimal cpu 3) 8192-bit arithmetizer ( a la ye olde weitek! but for ints ) 4) 2+3 , if somehow can be fit into 1 die 5) 1chip carrierless radio ( per thread ) 6) sane ethernet controller .
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: let's suppose we make the req'd contact. what wouldja want to fab 1st ?
asciilifeform: this screamingly cries for a cn-speaking fella.
asciilifeform: ( and mircea_popescu seems to concur with my verdict, they're ripoffs )
asciilifeform: the other thing i oughta mention, is the amt of sweat required. if asciilifeform were a free man, could do it in perhaps a year. but at present-day capacity, would not dare to even try.
asciilifeform: the 3550 is per run, if it wasnt obv.
asciilifeform: which is not so bad, quite enuff for a mips ( or even the old bolix , supposing anyone had the layout for it ) but laughably small for e.g. fpga.
asciilifeform: per my reckoning, you can ~maybe~ fit a '386' in these.
asciilifeform: sooo taking only the lower bounds ( 4mm^2 ; 700 eu. per mm^2 ; 30 eu. per tin can ) and not counting eu fees / taxes / exorbitant shipping couriers , and assuming 25 , we end up with a figure of 3550 eu, 'old toyota' gets you 25 units, some of which may even work...
asciilifeform: nao multiply it all by 2 or 3, because that's how many shots it usually takes to properly polish off ic product.
asciilifeform: ( if yer baking cpu, or fpga, or other item large enuff to make the game worth the candles )
asciilifeform: plus 'shipping and eu export fees'. but the other big hit is packaging cost : 30 - 100 eu. ~per chip~, depending on # of contacts / shape of can.☟︎
asciilifeform: here's what i was able to find , via the pdf turd : base charge is 700 -- 12000 euro / mm^2 , depending on density ( 0.35uM to 28nm ); this gets you 25 ~bare~ dies , + 'phree 15 if available' ;
asciilifeform: ( the other sub-$1mil fab is mosis co., but it is in usa, serves primarily usg, and dun publish prices, in the past i tried to get estimate from it but without success )
