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Great response. Got a question for you then: are we actually hitting the end of Moore's law here or are we just before a new technology transition for CPUs, su

Great response. Got a question for you then: are we actually hitting the end of Moore's law here or are we just before a new technology transition for CPUs, such as away from silicon.

sweden 11y ago
We are indeed hitting the end of Moore's law. The companies that provide IP are watching the market splitting into two: the companies that want the latest process node to show off technology (for example, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, etc) and the companies that want older but stable process nodes (IoT companies and the automotive industry). When most of the articles speak of the newest process nodes (for example, the 5nm process node) they only touch the economics part of it: "it's expensive, it's costly". But they don't mention the many problems that come with it: it's unstable, there is much more current leakage which increases power consumption unexpectedly, it is not suitable for long longevity and the architecture of your analog blocks have to take into account all these problems which don't exist in the older process nodes. It is possible to produce solutions in 5 nm, but the question is no longer about if we can do it or not. The downsides os these nodes go beyond the engineering resources and the economic resources that are needed to achieve them. That is why the automotive industry is not interesting in these kind of nodes. They want the stable and cheap nodes like 28nm and 40nm, they know that these nodes are well tested and have long longevity. We are also reaching a point in which we already have enough advanced technology for our needs, we need to start to get rid of the need of reaching the next process node in order to have better hardware.
yaantc 11y ago
There's no single answer here. First, Moore's law is about the density of the least cost process doubling every N months (N changed over time ;). So cost is a key part of Moore's law. When you talk about cost, there are fixed NRE paid once per chip design, and then marginal cost per transistor (just including production). To get the full view, it's logical to consider a "fully loaded" cost per transistor, where you also amortize the fixed NRE expense taking into account the expected number of produces chips for a given design. And that's where the increasing NREs bite and make a difference. Even when the marginal production cost per transistor decreases, to benefit from that cost decrease one must have sufficient chip production volume to amortize the NRE and still benefit from a cost decrease. With exploding NREs on more advanced nodes, this requires ever higher volume production to benefit from lower costs on more advanced nodes. At this stage, if you're a medium chip vendor Moore's law is already over --- because with small volume the NRE leads to an increase in total cost per transistor for newer processes. Vendors like Broadcom and NVidia complained publicly about the end of Moore's law, so we're not talking small volume either. For very large volumes, it may still be going on. But that's hard to tell. At some point, the cost may go up even for the biggest (Apple, Intel, Qualcomm) but they may still push forward a bit for improved performance --- meaning higher power efficiency --- as long as there are enough people willing to pay for it. It's no longer Moore's law (where you get more for less money), but it's still moving onto more advanced processes. Still, even assuming enough people are willing to pay more for improved performance (a big assumption IMHO) there are quite formidable challenges ahead.

Great response. Got a question for you then: are we actually hitting the end of Moore's law here or are we just before a new technology transition for CPUs, such as away from silicon.

sweden 11y ago

We are indeed hitting the end of Moore's law. The companies that provide IP are watching the market splitting into two: the companies that want the latest process node to show off technology (for example, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, etc) and the companies that want older but stable process nodes (IoT companies and the automotive industry). When most of the articles speak of the newest process nodes (for example, the 5nm process node) they only touch the economics part of it: "it's expensive, it's costly". But they don't mention the many problems that come with it: it's unstable, there is much more current leakage which increases power consumption unexpectedly, it is not suitable for long longevity and the architecture of your analog blocks have to take into account all these problems which don't exist in the older process nodes. It is possible to produce solutions in 5 nm, but the question is no longer about if we can do it or not. The downsides os these nodes go beyond the engineering resources and the economic resources that are needed to achieve them. That is why the automotive industry is not interesting in these kind of nodes. They want the stable and cheap nodes like 28nm and 40nm, they know that these nodes are well tested and have long longevity. We are also reaching a point in which we already have enough advanced technology for our needs, we need to start to get rid of the need of reaching the next process node in order to have better hardware.

yaantc 11y ago

There's no single answer here. First, Moore's law is about the density of the least cost process doubling every N months (N changed over time ;). So cost is a key part of Moore's law. When you talk about cost, there are fixed NRE paid once per chip design, and then marginal cost per transistor (just including production). To get the full view, it's logical to consider a "fully loaded" cost per transistor, where you also amortize the fixed NRE expense taking into account the expected number of produces chips for a given design. And that's where the increasing NREs bite and make a difference. Even when the marginal production cost per transistor decreases, to benefit from that cost decrease one must have sufficient chip production volume to amortize the NRE and still benefit from a cost decrease. With exploding NREs on more advanced nodes, this requires ever higher volume production to benefit from lower costs on more advanced nodes. At this stage, if you're a medium chip vendor Moore's law is already over --- because with small volume the NRE leads to an increase in total cost per transistor for newer processes. Vendors like Broadcom and NVidia complained publicly about the end of Moore's law, so we're not talking small volume either. For very large volumes, it may still be going on. But that's hard to tell. At some point, the cost may go up even for the biggest (Apple, Intel, Qualcomm) but they may still push forward a bit for improved performance --- meaning higher power efficiency --- as long as there are enough people willing to pay for it. It's no longer Moore's law (where you get more for less money), but it's still moving onto more advanced processes. Still, even assuming enough people are willing to pay more for improved performance (a big assumption IMHO) there are quite formidable challenges ahead.