8 ms·
It's fun to dig up old predictions of where we'd be today. Here's an article from 2002: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1176510 https://www.eetimes.
by rm999 8y ago
It's fun to dig up old predictions of where we'd be today. Here's an article from 2002: https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1176510 https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1176510
>Moore's Law scales to at least 9nm: technologist
>It'll be at least a human generation before Moore's Law begins to run out of gas at around the 9nm and even then it may thrive, TSMC's chief technologist said Tuesday (March 12). Calvin Chenming Hu told an audience at the annual Semico Summit conference here that the 9nm node "can be ready more or less on time, in 2028 according to long-term forecasts or 2024 according to the 2002 (industry roadmap)."
Intel is off by 4-5 years according to their initial estimates (in 2011) of hitting 10nm, but they are 5-10 years ahead of where TSMC thought we would be 15+ years ago. TSMC was manufacturing at 10nm last year, incidentally (Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835).
- acchow 8y agoIsn't comparing TSMC to Intel process nodes like comparing apples to oranges?
- garmaine 8y agoThey both manufacture silicon gates.. what does it matter if the production infrastructure on top is different.
- gameswithgo 8y agothe way they measure size is different
- garmaine 8y agoAh. What confused me was the word “process” which typically refers to the stack of things that take a high level description of a circuit and turn it into instructions for the machine to execute to make the wafer.
- MrEldritch 8y agoThe engineering involved in shrinking the gates these days is Herculean enough that Intel's 10nm and 7nm processes are genuinely distinct processes in that sense as well.
- etaoins 8y agoIn semiconductor fabrication “process” almost always refers to the manufacturing process, not the design process.
- rm999 8y agoYeah they aren't quite comparable; I didn't want to dig into the complexities of that, which is why I followed the last thought with "incidentally".
- Valmar 8y agoIt's more one kind of apple to another. They're both process nodes, with certain minor-ish differences here and there. TSMC calls theirs 7 nm, Intel calls theirs 10 nm. Their performance characteristics might be around the same. In practice... who knows. We do know that Intel's current 10 nm CPUs are pretty much broken ~ best they could currently do was useless laptop-grade 2.5 GHz dual-core with no functional iGPU. Not sure about the HT, though.
- djsumdog 8y agoI really hope they don't give up on making discrete GPUs again. That internal program and been brought back up and killed a few times. I use to own an i740 way back in the day, and my cousin even worked on that video driver. With nVidia's buy out of 3Dfx and PowerVR pretty much only doing mobile phones/tablets, it'd be nice to see a 3rd player in the nVidia/AMD space again. I know Matrox still exists, but for what I can tell, they just make cards for 10~20 monitor setups (kiosks, stores, airports, etc).
- Zardoz84 8y agoInteresting... i740 drivers was very broken. I remember having a lot of issue with many games.
- AtlasBarfed 8y agoIt might be, but if AMD/TSMC start cranking out their 7nm stuff next year, I've read that marketing can't bridge that gap: the 7nm people will have the leading processing technology in the world, and Intel will be trailing for the first time in a long, long time. But who can predict what will happen...
- darkmighty 8y agoAs far as I hear from industry specialists (but don't know first hand), the 'node' terms have become little more than marketing. I believe in 2002 it was still a useful metric of feature size, hence why 9nm would be still ahead.
- deepnotderp 8y agoNote that the effective gate length on an Intel "10nm" finfet is 18nm.
- tedsanders 8y agoBad predictions go in both directions. In 2000, Intel was saying that within five to ten years CPUs would run at 10 GHz and be made with EUV lithography. 18 years later and 10 GHz never came close to happening. EUV didn't happen either, though we may finally be close. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/11/intel_plans_1500_10ghz_pc/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/12/11/intel_plans_1500_10... https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6
- ksec 8y ago>Intel is off by 4-5 years according to their initial estimates (in 2011) of hitting 10nm In 2011 they were expecting 10nm in 2016. So it was not really off by 4 - 5 years. More like 3 - 4 years. >TSMC's chief technologist said Tuesday (March 12). Somewhere along the line TSMC's node naming no longer follows Intel's node naming. So that 9nm they mention is more like today's TSMC 5nm. So if you look at 2024 for TSMC's 5nm it isn't too far off. TSMC is planning to have 5nm in 2020. The 4 years speed up has been from heavy investment of Mobile SoC and industry scales changes that were not foreseen at the time.