7 ms·
translation: this transition has been inevitable since we discovered that immersion lithography is a bear, the deposition processes to support atomic layer depo
by avs733 11y ago
translation: this transition has been inevitable since we discovered that immersion lithography is a bear, the deposition processes to support atomic layer deposition are a bitch, copper has issues being anorexic, our fabs are so sensitive that they are effected by nearby farms, and EUV litho is a piper dream (in a vacuum).
Not to judge, they make things that are mere atoms in size...but the corollary to Moore's law should always have been EY's law: The cost of each major change in semiconductor production methods doubles
- revelation 11y agoOr they figure there is no point in pouring exponentially more cash into R&D when there is no viable competition left. It's hard to tell with Intel.
- raverbashing 11y agoAnd less and less people buy new PCs with their products Some phones have Intel processors but they're not popular
- beeboop 11y agoI found this hard to believe but from a quick Google search it appears you're right - Intel desktop CPU sales have been on a downward trend since 2011.
- creshal 11y agoThat's partially related to Intel running against a wall with CPU speeds around that time, and partially to the mobile boom. An 2011 i7-2600K desktop CPU is still competitive with current generation i7 CPUs for general-purpose computing – most improvements were in specialized instruction sets like AVX or TSX (which infamously was broken on the first generation shipping it). Lower-end i3 and i5 are even worse off, because they don't get most acceleration instruction sets in the first place. For consumers, it makes absolutely no sense to upgrade their desktop PCs unless they break.
- beeboop 11y agoI am actually part of that camp. I have a i3570k and recently did an entire system upgrade including changing from full tower to mini ITX. The only real problem was the selection of mini ITX motherboards for my older socket type is pretty poor. But I'm now Oculus ready with only a minor CPU overclock despite my CPU being pretty old.
- dmoy 11y agoYea I still keep waiting to upgrade my 2600k, but at this point I think all the other parts will physically break before I need to. It's like 10-20% slower than a chip 5 years newer, big woop.
- creshal 11y agoOverclock by 20% aaaand done.
- kevinnk 11y agoThe 2600k cost about $350 new in 2011. For the same amount of money you could get a 5820K which is about 1.5x faster than the 2600k (or to put it in your terms, the 2600k is 52% slower). Still probably not worth it, but I looked up the numbers and might as well post them.
- seanp2k2 11y agoSame here. It's hard to want to upgrade a 2500k stable at 4.6ghz on air with no overvolting. Got it right when it came out. OTOH, starting with a Radeon 6870 then later adding a second for crossfire and Bitcoin mining when that was profitable still barely give me the power to play the newest Rainbow 6 on low everything @1920x1200 while keeping >30FPS min on Win10. I'm personally waiting for the new GPUs to come later this year before upgrading, then seeing if Oculus or Vive has better game support at that time.
- AnonNo15 11y agoYou forgot about server market which is Intel-dominated and growing well.
- avs733 11y agoThe way I have begun to term it to people not really familiar with technology is this: Every time you buy a cellphone with an ARM chip, Amazon buys an Intel chip to process all the data, services, apps, and websites you access from your phone and all the data those services, apps, and websites collect from you.
- Igglyboo 11y agoThey squashed AMD long ago, I don't think it's this.
- hinkley 11y agoIf they drag their feet long enough eventually ARM will catch up, right?
- ISL 11y agoMany of the other things Intel has done have been somewhat impossible too.
- avs733 11y agoI would argue that it isn't just Intel but all of the indsutry. They do things that seem impossible on a regular basis.
- DanielBMarkham 11y agoSensitive to nearby farms? That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate?
- gnu8 11y agoCan you elaborate on how nearby farms have affected microchip fabs? Something to do with airborn organics from their animals or chemicals?
- atonse 11y agoMy guess would be more vibrations? Heavy equipment causes vibrations in the ground, which most people probably can't notice, but when you're literally printing at the atomic scale, microscopic vibrations probably make a difference.
- dave2000 11y agoWouldn't they make less difference than the vibrations caused by regular factories? Or should we be adding homeopathic fracking to the list of environmental concerns?
- kale 11y agoI work in a lab. We can't use our most accurate scales when there's construction going on with heavy machinery within a couple of blocks. This isn't cutting-edge stuff either, it's measuring to 0.001 gram, with a $10k scale and a 4" thick granite table on rubber pads (unlike other equipment that's on air floating supports with active counter balancing).
- atonse 11y agoThat's so interesting, thanks for sharing!
- sevensor 11y agoWhen I worked in a fab, we saw process variation driven by weather patterns, so fabs are quite sensitive to their environments. (Barometric pressure can affect both diffusion and wets.) But I have a hard time seeing how a nearby farm would affect a fab. The air handling systems are pretty intense, so I imagine you'd see more filter changes if anything, and every change point has the potential to harm the process. But that's a pretty indirect mechanism. A sibling comment mentioned heavy machinery, which also seems unlikely. The lithography equipment had its own pedestals grounded in bedrock, separate from the building foundation, and each stepper/scanner has its own vibration damping. The rest of the equipment is less sensitive to vibration.