3 ms·

costs are falling, prices aren't

• hga 11y ago
  Costs are falling quite a bit less than normal. The tick from 32 nm Sandy Bridge to 22 nm Ivy Bridge went smoothly, as far as we can tell, but Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs have been going up, for example more and more masks are required for each new node, starting at 32 nm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning The next tick from Haswell at 22 nm to Broadwell at 14 nm did not go well. Seriously delayed due to low yields, per Wikipedia they're not doing low end desktops with it (perhaps due to NRE? Then again, these ought to be server chips with features cut out), and the Skylake microarchitecture on 14 nm has started coming out relatively quickly, cutting the normal lifetime Haswell should have had. The Cannonlake shrink to 10 nm has been delayed at least 2 years, with a Kaby Lake mid-life kicker at 14 nm breaking the tick-tock system they've used since 2007. No doubt this is paying off in reduced power for the computrons for mobile and server systems, but costs, that's not doing hardly so well, and apparently breaking Moore's Law. Intel is supposed to be the best at this, and foundries like TMSC have also been having problems at various points as they shrink.