Daily Tech News 2 June 2021

• TSMC is firing on all cylinders. (AnandTech)
  
  It's still not enough, but they're also building a bunch of new cylinders.
  
  6nm production - what they term N6 since the nanometres are imaginary - will match 7nm (N7) this year. N5 is producing better yields than N7 already, though it is a more complicated process and more expensive to produce. And N4 will be entering initial production later this year. N4 is only slightly smaller than N5 but is cheaper, which is not a bad combination.
  
  Meanwhile the company outlined its plans for the 3nm and 2nm nodes. (WCCFTech)
  
  Fabs (silicon factories) for these advanced nodes are planned for both Taiwan and Arizona, and the company expects to expand overall production at a compound rate of 30% annually. Though they didn't specify for how long and no-one asked if paperclips were involved.
  
  Logic circuits are expected to be 70% denser on N3 than on N5. (WCCFTech)
  
  But memory circuits will only improve by around 20%. This is similar to the situation moving from N7 to N5, and it's a major reason why AMD and Intel are both looking at die stacking solutions. Their CPU cores are getting smaller but their caches aren't, so if they don't seek out novel solutions their chips are going to be cores lost in a sea of RAM.
  
  
  
  

• Gas is one thing, but when you hack a country's supply of steak that's a declaration of war. (Bloomberg)
  
  Russian hackers targeted meat processor JBS SA, closing facilities in America, Canada, ans Australia, though some facilities are expected back online soon. The company handles about 25% of the US beef supply and around 20% of its pork. The edible kind, not the other one.
  
  They're also the largest processor in Australia for beef, pork, and lamb, including a huge volume of exports.
  
  I'm dubious that this is ordinary criminal activity. And I'm not alone. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  But I'm equally dubious of the ability of our leaders - who are in general some combination of feckless, fascist, and inconsequential - to do anything about it.
  
  
  
• Europe is at least ostracising aspiring failed state Belarus after its airliner hijacking stunt. (BBC)
  
  Though to be fair, Belarus is also banning travel from Belarus.
  
  
  
  
• Faced with having to pay fees for 75,000 individual arbitration cases, Amazon is scrambling to drop their forced arbitration clause. (Wall Street Journal)
  
  The article is cut off after five paragraphs but you can get the gist. They forced customers into arbitration rather than potentially costly judicial proceedings, only to discover that not all their customers are idiots, and tens of thousands of separate arbitration cases aren't cheap either.
  
  
  
• Turkey reportedly deployed hunter-killer robots in Libya. (CNet)
  
  The drones are designed to track and kill their targets without human guidance or intervention.
  
  This is probably not a good development.
  
  
  
• The space station got hit by space junk. (Science Alert)
  
  It only dinged the Canadarm, which is mounted outside the hull, so there wasn't a pressure breach, but that's kind of close.
  
  
  
• Don't throw away your optical microscopes just yet. (Nature)
  
  A new technique that I don't quite understand... Don't understand in any way whatsoever improves the resolution of regular optical microscopes by a factor of five, to about one tenth the wavelength of blue light.
  
  This is done using metamaterials, or in other words, magic.
  
  
  
• Stp asking difficult questions, you're scientists, not... Wait. (Nature)
  
  Methinks someone doth protest too much.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:18 AM

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