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No, that's not going to help. Moore's Law is about transistor density, and RISC-V is still dependant on the same silicon process technology the existing archite
by ansible 10y ago
No, that's not going to help. Moore's Law is about transistor density, and RISC-V is still dependant on the same silicon process technology the existing architecture are.
We may see some improvement in performance due to the new architecture, and maybe even more so with the Mill CPU architecture. But the end of the road for silicon lithography already in sight, and these new architectures won't fix that.
- chillingeffect 10y agoMoore's law is abt # of transistors, not density [1]. But I still see no reason open-sourcing would boost it. It's a capital-intensive process which is not where open source shines and is typically limited. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law# https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#
- svens_ 10y agoThose two go hand in hand. You can't increase area arbitrarily. The more area your chip has, the less yield you get, which in turn makes it uneconomical to produce. The reason is simple, even a single manufacturing fault can make a chip unusable. If you assume e.g. a fixed number of faults per wafer, you can easily see how increasing the chip area increases the area you have to throw away for every fault. As you wrote, the semiconductor business is very capital intensive, so no one can afford to do that (except for some niche applications, like R&D, space, etc.).