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What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is
by mjfl 8y ago
What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?
- jonas21 8y agoLess ticking and more tocking?
- neltnerb 8y agoIt seems like they plan to shift to novel hybrid architectures, at least if things like Intel owning Altera mean anything. I'd expect them to be doing things like putting neural network accelerators down and the like. Or everyone has to make a dramatic leap to a new underlying computing physics, like the quantum dot transistor or the vacuum transistor [1] that lets them increase frequency or lower power consumption. If you double the clock frequency, I believe this still linearly increases the computing throughput, though I'm not expert enough to know if that's still strictly true. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing-the-vacuum-transistor-a-device-made-of-nothing https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/introducing...
- apcragg 8y agoA big problem with increasing the clock speed is that your processor still needs to wait for the DRAM to respond. Modern processors are crazy smart about prefetching, caching, and running instructions in parallel, but at some point Memory bandwidth and latency begin to dominate over CPU clock speed. Many players have started looking at puting multiple dies on the same substrate with high-speed interconnects to reduce memory latency and improve throughput. Those improvements could help push the usefulness of higher clocks a bit further.
- neltnerb 8y agoIs it roughly accurate to say that if your computing area operates at 10x the speed, you can do 10 cores worth of computing work with one core? That would free up a lot of die area for other things, though I don't know how to guess how much that extra space would improve the other bits. I'd kind of figure that such a technology would also speed up the RAM, but I suppose that's not true either if the underlying storage technology is too slow. But I know that's also an area of active research.
- analognoise 8y agoIn CMOS the killer is that they consume power when switching (power ends up being a square of switching frequency). So if you switched. 10x, you'd have to somehow dissipate 100x the power. Your core might be small, but the industrial-sized refrigerator needed to cool it suddenly isn't.
- baybal2 8y agoI thought recently, given how bad leakage gets at <10nm, why not to go back to RCL or TTL logic? A similar line of thinking lead to source-coupled logic being resurrected for use in high speed PHYs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current-mode_logic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current-mode_logic
- neltnerb 8y agoMy question had the assumption of something akin to vacuum transistors that allow high frequencies without the heat generation, but yes, I agree that the current technology won't scale by 10x without a generational shift in underlying approach away from MOSFETs.
- analognoise 8y agoWhat? No. As far as computing goes, the digital abstraction still and will always hold unless we start doing analog computations like were done with analog computers from the 1940's to about the 1960's (in the West, they lasted longer in Russia due to their inability to compete in Silicon). A vacuum transistor, used as a switch, is still a switch.
- neltnerb 8y agoFWIW, I believe there's a theorem that given an allowable error rate in a digital computation was literally equivalent to a noise level in an analog computation. I agree that they are cool, especially for things like feedback and asynchronicity, but I'm not sure that they're fundamentally going to give us that much better results quantitatively.
- mjfl 8y agoI feel like neural network accelerators are too small a market to replace their microprocessor business.
- steve_musk 8y agoMight be fun to look back at this comment in 10 years
- neltnerb 8y agoBut on-chip FPGAs that reconfigure to enable specialized hardware might be enough to differentiate their product line. And being able to say you support DirectCNN 9.0 on your CPU isn't so absurd... I have the feeling a neural network accelerator will be no more surprising than a floating point unit in 20 years.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- est31 8y agoI think Intel is trying to grow drones (an emerging market) and cloud departments. And in general, the end of process size reduction doesn't mean the end of innovation in chip building and design. There are limits on node sizes, as there are limits on heat dissipation, but once you have high enough yield, there are few limits onto how many circuits you put onto a chip, as long as most of the circuits are powered off. Ultimately, the more stuff special purpose circuits compute instead of the general purpose one, the better for power consumption.
- mbell 8y agoTSMC is already doing risk 5nm production and 3nm seems entirely viable. We won't see a 'wall' until sometime after 3nm (~2025). Depending on whom you talk to, 2nm and smaller process sizes are also viable. I wouldn't expect any serious shift away from silicon processes till 2030.
- bogomipz 8y ago>"TSMC is already doing risk 5nm production and 3nm seems entirely viable." What is "risk production?" Is this similar to prototyping? I'm not familiar with this term. Thanks
- leetcrew 8y agomaybe autocorrect of "risc"? I'm not familiar with the term as written either.
- mbell 8y agoIt's analogous to a release candidate in software. Basically means the fab line has passed all tests and run some test chips but hasn't actually done a production run of anything yet. The risk of issues / bad yield is higher than it would be after a few million chips have been run through the fab to work out all the kinks. In practical terms it means they aren't building low cost consumer products yet, they are probably building low volume high $ parts that desperately need 5nm. They are also probably doing a bunch of IP verification runs, confirming process designs for all the building blocks that are used to build SoCs: ARM cores, memory controllers, IO controllers, etc.
- purpleidea 8y ago> low volume high $ parts that desperately need 5nm What sorts of parts fit this criteria? Details would be appreciated, thanks!
- Strom 8y agoCryptocurrency mining hardware probably fits it. Not that low volume is preferred, but better performance per watt efficiency is definitely worth high $.
- pault 8y agoMy impression is that they know moore's gravy train is over and they're scrambling to figure out new tricks to allow them to sell a new generation of processors every year. Personally, while I'm a little disappointed that processors 20 years from now might not be 4+ orders of magnitude faster than the one I have now, I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I think we're pretty close to this point already).
- sliken 8y agoNew? Using epoxy to make batteries hard to replace and other tweaks to make other unreliable parts hard to replace. Popular recent choices are keyboards and backlights.
- vbezhenar 8y agoNot everyone uses Macbooks. There are plenty of laptops with easily replaceable batteries and sane keyboards. Not even talking about real computers, where you can replace everything without any tools.
- sliken 8y agoSure. But CPU manufacturers focus on where the money is, and today that's servers and laptops. While not everyone buys apple, an ever larger fraction of laptops are epoxying batteries and replacing socketed cables with hard wired parts. Just like cellphones where it's pretty common for battery life or USB failure to result in requiring a replacement.
- benrbray 8y agoBut at the same time, I'm considering replacing my 2015 HP laptop because my "A" key stopped working, and the cost to replace the keyboard is 25% the cost of a new laptop, which I'll need anyway in another year or two even if the keyboard were fixed.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
- felipemnoa 8y agoMy first thought is that they should increase the number of cores in a CPU as much as possible. Having a single CPU with hundreds of cores would be really useful. Of course, they also have to make advances on cooling technology. The types of applications that I have in mind are rendering, AI, and gaming. The types of games that would benefit greatly from such CPU are the ones that make heavy use of a Physics Engine.
- m0zg 8y ago>> single CPU with hundreds of cores would be really useful Not with the current memory bus. If your algorithm is written properly it's very likely already memory bound. Adding more cores is only going to worsen the performance in that case.
- JohnFen 8y agoI actually think along similar lines but at a higher level of abstraction. I think we'll have to start moving towards multiple complete computer systems, each with their own internal busses, memory, etc., that operate as a unified whole. A bit like massively parallel systems do.
- jotm 8y agoWell hello there! I've been running 2 computers this way for years. Works very well for some stuff that supports multiple nodes, but unfortunately useless for most software. By far, the 1GbE link is the most limiting factor. Almost 15 years and we still don't have 10GbE as standard.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoLooking at ARM they have the Big little architecture (little processors for more efficient energy usage and big processors for when you need the performance). Putting more emphasis on less power hungry ways to get similar performance or otherwise. Also putting more specialized parts like GPUs, FPGAs, ML accelerators either near or on the die. the A12 is a good example of this. Also, Intel's buyout of Xilinx shows that FPGAs can be put on die or near it. You could even put storage on the SOC. Then there are the more esoteric methods like Quantum Computing.
- newusertoday 8y agointel bought altera not xilinx. xilinx is still independent company
- temptemptemp111 8y agoI don't think they'll get far with QC... But I want to see GPU+CPU+Memory all compressed together under one heatsink ASAP. Reducing RAM by an order of magnitude in latency could be one of the next jumps.
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoI bet CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, modems, DRAM, flash, optane-like things will all end up on the same die eventually. Granted some processes are better at making some types of devices ... but maybe we'll see more one-size-fits all type chips in the future. Now that I write this it seems like we are already most of the way there.
- johncolanduoni 8y agoQuantum computing is profoundly unlikely to be a solution to maintaining performance increases in desktop, datacenter, or mobile processors. Unless someone comes up with a good way to do a single thing people use a PC, phone, or server (outside of very specific HPC applications) via a quantum algorithm that isn't just a classical one with extra steps, it would not be useful at all for this.
- 40acres 8y agoReducing process size is a tough, yet straightforward way to improve the efficiency of a chip. But there are other methods too, modern data centers will be looking for power efficiency, innovation in packaging can improve efficiency and make the most of out bad yields. Novel architectures are going to see the light of day now that process reduction is become so difficult.
- wtallis 8y agoMulti-chip packages are getting more common, with Intel's EMIB and AMD's new EPYC processors. Only portions of the CPU are moving to leading-edge fab processes while things like the memory controller and iGPU are good candidates to stay on proven processes (eg 14nm).
- atq2119 8y agoIronically, the leaked roadmap shows a product with a 14nm (old process) CPU combined with a 10nm (new process) GPU. The article's interpretation is that Intel are struggling to get clock rates up on 10nm.
- ethbro 8y ago> Is there a [post-Moore] plan, or is it an existential wall? Fixed function hardware and more emphasis on efficient software. We've had decades of software laziness, because anything less than an order of magnitude performance improvement on the software side was best shipped unoptimized, earlier, and just wait for hardware process shrinks. We'll likely get back to something like the 60s, before the mass-marketing of the PC enabled funding of the relentless process improvements of the 80s, 90s, and 00s.
- ianai 8y agoI’m still wondering whether gallium chips will ever make sense as replacement for silicon in cpus.
- Spooky23 8y agoArtificial support linkage with Windows 10, build X releases, and introduction of native 4K and higher resolutions.
- pkaye 8y agoI think for the time being the chiplet approach is practical. Combine many dies into one package like AMD is doing.
- agumonkey 8y agoForgot the options but there are some. Optronics ? spintronics ... neutronics..
- FrozenVoid 8y ago1. better integrated graphics. 2. better cache hierarchy, larger/faster cache. (Cache misses and various cache access penalties reduced) 3. faster/low-latency ram access, probably new interconnects to minimize latency. 4. integrated sound/network chips and other peripherals. (essentially the path to System on the Chip) 5. more vector extensions and specialized instructions. (machine learning, graphics, high-precision floats,etc) 6. more secure processors and mitigations for future exploits. (e.g. this is 2020 processors, but our 2021 processor is immune to that)