Comment by alanbernstein
4 days ago
> improvements which become easier to develop because of the increased understanding of the problems they are seeking to solve.
Surely this is aided by ever more sophisticated computational models? Maybe not the dominant factor in Moore's law, but maybe not negligible?
Probably not. Materials science research is much more dependent on analog electronics, specifically measuring voltage signals, than on digital electronics.
Modern computers are certainly a nice quality of life improvement for researchers though.
That said, commercial production lines might be a different story. Now I'm wondering what the minimum viable computer system would be to implement the firmware for ASMLs machines, for example. Probably more than vacuum tubes but I'm guessing you could pull it off with an old 8 bit chip. That's just a guess though.
Yeah, it's aided by better computational models, but not appreciably by having those models run on chips with smaller feature sizes.
If a time traveler from the future gave everyone at ASML and TSMC computers that ran 4 times as quickly so they could run their models faster, but no one could take a look at how they worked or were made, it wouldn't have any noticeable effect.