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> More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011. That is an incredible bumper-sticker factoid. Does that pace keep up, that in any gi
by themgt 10y ago
> More transistors were made in 2014 than in all the years prior to 2011.
That is an incredible bumper-sticker factoid.
Does that pace keep up, that in any given year N we're manufacturing as many transistors as year(0 .. N-4) combined?
- akuma73 10y agoThat's how exponential work. There is an end to it and it's not far off. Exponential transistor scaling (Moore's Law) has ended.
- kabdib 10y agoIs that really true? We're probably done in 2D, but memory devices (flash) have been scaling vertically. Of course, you have to lay them out 2D, one layer at a time. And power density is still a problem with circuitry used for computation.
- wtallis 10y agoNAND flash memory is scaling vertically at the moment, but not exponentially, and not for long. Within one or two doublings of the current layer count we'll be at the limit of what can be achieved without making further sacrifices of horizontal density, or going back to the drawing board on how 3D NAND is done. This is because 3D NAND is not manufactured like 2D NAND layers stacked one at a time. The features that run through the whole stack are hitting aspect ratios in excess of 50:1, and that can't be stretched too much further.
- petra 10y ago3D logic circuits don't suffer from an high aspect ratio , but according to data by Zvi Orbach, after 4 layers the ecnomic benefit almost stops.
- dingo_bat 10y ago> Every second of that year, on average, 8 trillion transistors were produced. Literally unable to imagine these numbers.
- QuantumRoar 10y agoWell, they are quite tiny. A billion transistors fit into the area of your thumbnail. A typical wafer used for lithography has a diameter of 300mm. You can fit quite a few processors on such a wafer and you only have to expose once at each lithography step to create all of them.
- WalterBright 10y agoI have no idea how one can get a billion transistors to work. Even an extremely small failure rate can render it impossible.
- kbart 10y agoYes, it's an extremely technologically difficult process. That's why building a new fab cost billions[1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication_plan...
- WalterBright 10y agoI remember back in the 80s when engineers speculated that anything bigger than a 64K DRAM would be impossible because nobody could get that many transistors all working at the same time.
- mtrn 10y agoTechnology is one challenge. I wonder what other kinds of scaling must take place to sustain such industries? Like, how do you scale learning, so that a single person or a small team is able to have a good overview plus detailed know-how on the these complex devices. I remember Linus Torvalds mentioning, that while the 386 was a complex CPU, he was able to understand it on a sufficient level. But this time seems to be gone.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago> That is an incredible bumper-sticker factoid. It's also how exponential growth works - at time T = t you're producing/using as much as was produced between T = 0 and T = t-1.
- kurthr 10y agoAlthough I'd expect the number of transistors manufactured to keep growing for some time... the exponential growth of this "collective pursuit" appears to be limited. I wouldn't even claim that it is necessarily limited by technology (although it appears to be), but it is certainly limited by investment. Since investment typically follows the ITRS roadmap, announcements like this have a huge effect on future growth. https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/07/28/transistors-wont-shrink-beyond-2021-says-final-itrs-report/ https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/07/28/transistors-wont-shrink-b...