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AMD struck gold with TSMC right?
by varshithr 7y ago
AMD struck gold with TSMC right?
- bitL 7y agoApple financed TSMC's 7nm to a large extent, AMD lucked out.
- ahartmetz 7y agoAMD was lucky, but it is also being run by a highly accomplished semiconductor physicist, so some things are perhaps a little less luck than one might think.
- bitL 7y agoI would vote for Lisa to be the CEO of the year. It's also fun to know she is a relative of NVidia boss that once worked at AMD and they both are from Taiwan, home of TSMC and who knows if they have family inside as well...
- AFascistWorld 7y agoNo she's not his relative.
- bitL 7y ago"It is worth mentioning that another Taiwanese semiconductor elite, Nvidia founder Huang Renxun (Jensen Huang) also came from Tainan, and has a relative relationship with Su Zifeng (Lisa Su). Su Zifeng’s grandfather and Huang Renxun’s mother are brothers and sisters" https://old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/8pdxo7/nvidias_ceo_jensens_niece_is_lisa_su_ceo_of_amd/ https://old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/8pdxo7/nvidias_ceo_...
- wmf 7y agoYes, although there was an element of luck that Intel 10 nm failed at the same time that TSMC 7 nm came out smoothly. The opposite situation happened back at 32 nm and could happen again.
- geogra4 7y agoyeah but how many nm are left? There's a phsyical limit to transistor size!
- ivalm 7y agoThere is a lot of density that can be increased. The node size doesn't represent transistor size, not even the gate size.
- vasili111 7y agoWhat is the theoretical limit? I mean there should be end.
- umvi 7y agoWell, the diameter of a silicon atom is 0.2nm, so I would guess it's at least that with silicon-based computers.
- londons_explore 7y agoNot necessaraly. The node size represents the equivalent 'gate' size of a standard transistor with similar performance characteristics. By using better transistor designs, you can make the effective gate size much smaller than the actual gate size.
- 6nf 7y agoYou can't make features smaller than one atom though, and silicon atoms in a crystal matrix are about 0.5nm apart.
- pas 7y agoThe limit of information density is known as the Bekenstein bound. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound It is derived through quantum mechanics and via the Plank constants and black hole physics. Basically any more information squeezed together would turn into a black hole. Though ordinary (non quantum) thermodynamics limits information density well before this bound. As to what happens in the next decades with the good old Silicon stuff. Well, nobody knows just yet, but 3nm is what anyone realistically talks about, and just sci-fi tech after that.
- BostonEnginerd 7y agoI don't know about struck gold -- they were the only game in town with a 7nm node available.
- wmf 7y agoAMD has to choose a process years before that process goes into production, so there's a lot of risk that production could get delayed or yields could be poor. AMD could choose TSMC then discover later that Samsung would have been better.
- agumonkey 7y agobtw, what happened to GF ?
- wmf 7y agoGF canceled 7 nm; I guess they didn't have enough money to support the R&D needed to develop advanced processes.
- hajile 7y agoI don't know that it was a lack of money so much as the cost/benefit ratio. We like to think of all the big chips from Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc or of bleeding edge mobile processors from Apple or Qualcomm. The reality is that these are a small fraction of the total market for chips. The vast majority of chips are made at 28nm or larger because the cost of production is so much lower. Supply and demand is another big factor. As supply increases, prices will drop down to bare minimums and if costs can't be reduced enough, there will be expensive fabs sitting around doing nothing. Even if GF has enough money to design and make the fab, that doesn't mean the demand is high enough for them to charge enough to recover their costs. Instead of spending that money on 7nm, they can spend it refining their 22, 14, and 12nm lines to improve efficiency and lower production costs. With TSMC or Samsung pouring those billions into 7 and 5nm, there's a good chance at GF pulling quite a bit ahead in the slightly older nodes. Once they have done this, those bulk chip makers using 28nm will start moving to smaller nodes. There's quite a tidy sum of profit to be reaped here. Given how every consumer has dozens to hundreds of these small chips for every cutting-edge chip in their home, appliances, or car, there is cumulatively a huge savings to be had in product and energy costs.