Daily Tech News 27 November 2023

• While Americans are slowly waking up from their food comas, those crafty Chinese are preparing to start manufacturing 5nm chips... Sort of. (WCCFTech)
  
  China has been banned from buying the machines to make chips below the 14nm node. They can make 12nm chips because 12nm is really just a tweaked version of 14nm. And they can make 7nm via a technique called double-patterning, which was used before EUV technology (extreme ultra-violet) made direct 7nm and smaller nodes possible.
  
  Double-patterning is expensive and fussy and wrecks your yield - the percentage of good chips you get from a wafer - but it does work.
  
  To get 5nm they would need to go to quad patterning, which is also a proven technology but even more expensive and a whole lot fussier, and the resulting yields would be in the toilet.
  
  China can build its own machines, but to do so it will first need to build the machines for that, and currently it lacks the machines to build those machines. It's very complicated and requires incredible precision, and there really isn't any way to rush it.

• Beej's Gude to Interprocess Communication. (Beej.us)
  
  It's amazing how little this stuff has change since I was a baby programmer logging on to my first Unix system.
  
  
  
• So Cyber Monday is here, and with it lots of amazing computer deals like...
  
  Nothing, really. I mean, the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro can be found for $250, but that was already true.
  
  I got some cutlery and a fancy slow cooker. I bought a cheap Kmart slow cooker when I moved to a colder climate last year, and I use it all the time. This new one is bigger and has a timer and a temperature probe, and can allegedly roast an entire chicken.
  
  I'll give that a try because it's not something I bother with very often because I hate cleaning the oven. With a slow cooker you can just put the cooking pot and the lid in the dishwasher and forget about it.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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