Science
7 posts in this domain.
- Why CPUs have three levels of cache Look at a CPU die shot and you'll find more area spent on memory than on math — and that memory is split into L1, L2, and L3. The split exists because no single memory technology is both big and fast, so the chip builds a ladder out of several instead. May 14, 2026 · intermediate
- Why EUV lithography blasts tin droplets with lasers The most demanding layers of leading-edge chips are patterned by a machine that, tens of thousands of times per second, vaporizes a falling droplet of molten tin with a high-power laser. The setup is absurd — and nothing else makes 13.5nm light in a production tool. May 4, 2026 · intro
- Why fiber-optic beat copper for long distances Copper carries electrons; fiber carries photons. The reasons one wins over kilometers come down to physics — how fast the signal fades, how much room there is around the carrier to put signal in, and the fact that light doesn't care about your neighbor's microwave. Apr 29, 2026 · intro
- Why AI accelerators are wrapped in stacks of HBM Open any photo of a modern AI GPU and you'll see the giant compute die in the middle, ringed by short, fat towers of memory soldered millimeters away. Those towers are HBM, and they exist because regular DRAM physically cannot feed a matrix engine fast enough. Apr 29, 2026 · intermediate
- Why GPUs ended up running AI even though they were built for graphics GPUs were designed to shade pixels. Then the same hardware turned out to be exactly what neural networks needed. That isn't luck — graphics and deep learning make the same demand of silicon: identical arithmetic, millions of times over, with nothing to branch on. Apr 29, 2026 · intro
- Why leap seconds exist (and why they're being abolished) The Earth doesn't spin on a schedule, but our clocks do. Leap seconds tried to bridge the two — and broke the internet doing it. Apr 29, 2026 · intro
- Why CPU clock speeds stopped climbing Around the mid-2000s, GHz numbers on CPUs flatlined while core counts started growing. The reason isn't engineering laziness — it's that switching a transistor costs energy, and energy turns into heat you can't get rid of fast enough. Apr 29, 2026 · intro