25 ms·

Moore’s Law is not Dead

74 points by ricw 7y ago

baybal2 7y ago
About the industry at large: lots of changes ahead. Take a look at this: https://www.hotchips.org/program/ https://www.hotchips.org/program/ For the first time in a long while they gave the entire first day to non-semi companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft Nobody could've imagine the industry turning this way a decade ago.
- rrss 7y ago
  > entire first day to non-semi companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft They've given the entire first day to the semiconductor divisions of these hulking behemoths.
petra 7y ago
Instead of an ad, here's a good description of the situation:https://semiengineering.com/why-scaling-must-continue/ https://semiengineering.com/why-scaling-must-continue/ Tl;Dr - old Moore's law is dead , but our new systems(ai , gpu...) still need a huge number of transistors , beyond what can be made on a single chip today, so scaling is still valuable.
- velox_io 7y ago
  I thought about upgrading my GPU recently (an rx480 8gb from 2016), I was disappointed to find that even the rx5700xt was only double the performance of an rx580/rx480 (they're essentially the same GPU) [0]. It also costs double, this is THREE years later. (It turns out the rx 500 series have hardly dropped in price since release ~£200.) So while Moore's law is still ticking along (albeit a little slower), and transistors are still shrinking (7nm vs 14nm). It doesn't really affect the price, so instead of being able to buy 4x the performance (transistors) for a similar price, it hasn't changed. It seems pricing is no longer based on cost, it appears to be based on what the market will pay. Strangely, it doesn't seem to be the same with CPUs. During the same period, AMD has doubled in core/ transistor count between Zen 1 and Zen 3 while has stayed the same price[3]. [0]https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_radeon_rx_5700_xt_evoke_review,4.html https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_radeon_rx_5700_xt_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Radeon_RX_400_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen
  - wyxuan 7y ago
    This is a little misguided. The only reason that AMD is so cheap on the consumer side is that they genuinely want to take a crack at Intel's market share. With GPUs, they're only competitor is Nvidia, and as long as they are cheaper than Nvidia at a reasonable performance, they are fine.GPUs are extremely profitable while CPUs aren't as profitable (yet)
    - deogeo 7y ago
      Wasn't this also true 3 years ago? I.e. it only explains profit margins, not the absence of a price/performance drop. And, well, they have the same number of competitors in both CPU and GPU, and I think even their market shares are very similar, no?
      - velox_io 7y ago
        I only wrote about the GPUs initially (as I had been looking at them in the last week). Then I released the comparison to CPUs, which even included the same company. It just seems strange that two similar markets are functioning very differently. Increased fabrication costs don't explain what is going.
    - velox_io 7y ago
      I have a feeling AMD wants some of Nvidia's market share too. In fact the reason Nvidia recently released all those 'Super' cards was to counter AMD's release, it's also rumoured that AMD had to reduce their prices as a result. In many ways, Nvidia is acting like Intel did. AMD simply couldn't compete on performance so this allowed them to get cosy (Intel's high-end for consumers stayed at 4 cores for a decade, Nvidia's prices have been steadily raising for a while). Also, a lot has happened in the last few years: RAM prices skyrocketed, Bitcoin mining drove up demand for AMD GPUs. However both of those have been over for a while now. The rx480 was priced very aggressively, the $199 price grabbed some headlines (8gb card cost a little more). Given the die shrink and three years (plus the Ryzen cores doubling), you'd be forgiven for expecting the rx5700 to come in closer to $199, than the $349 (XT is $399) keep in mind that these new cards aren't much over double the performance. While, it's no secret that shrinking fabrication is getting harder and more expensive (it's hurting Intel right now). Prices per transistor have dropped for CPUs and SSDs has dropped noticeably, even DRAM to an extent, but not GPUs... Even demand for machine learning doesn't explain the price hike (GPUs are now being artificially handicapped, just as professional graphics have been, shifting demand to the even more expensive Tesla cards).
boyadjian 7y ago
It depends what you call Moore's Law. For me, Moore's Law was essentially that the cost per transistor was divided by two every 18 month. Nowadays, it's not true anymore. But of course, it doesn't mean that progress has stopped.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  You wrote: > [..] divided by two every 18 months [..] Wikipedia wrote: > [..] whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit [..] Godfrey Cheng, Head of Global Marketing, TSMC wrote: > [..] The number of transistors in an integrated device or chip doubles about every 2 years. [..] (Even if we ignore the difference on the cost versus number of transistors or components.) 12 months, 18 months, 24 months. How long is it? I have no clue with regards to the answer. It seems to me we first need to agree on the definition of a law before we can discuss it.
  - kingosticks 7y ago
    > Moore also affirmed he never said transistor count would double every 18 months, as is commonly said. Initially, he said transistors on a chip would double every year. He then recalibrated it to every two years in 1975. David House, an Intel executive at the time, noted that the changes would cause computer performance to double every 18 months. From https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-to-roll-on-for-another-decade/ https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-to-roll-on-for-another-... (a source for the the Wikipedia page).
  - boyadjian 7y ago
    18 month or 24 month, this is not very important. I was essentially talking about the fact that the cost per transistor was steadily going down, which is almost finished now.
    - tim333 7y ago
      Is there any data on the cost per transistor not going down? They seem to be able to pack an awful lot onto chips these days, the current record apparently being Samsungs 1tb memory chip with 2 trillion.
tomxor 7y ago
I've seen this interpretation before in HN comments and I think it is an unnecessary distortion of Moore's Law: Note the historical context the observation was originally made in (1965) when doubling was achieved through process size reduction, the effect this had on speed was twofold: operating frequency would increase roughly in proportion (increasing about 40%); secondly and more uniquely to the time, since predecessors transistor count were so limited there was significant room for improvements in instruction implementation and specialization as available transistors increased. Although it's implied, Moore also explicitly stated this in his 1965 paper: > [...] In fact, shrinking dimensions on an integrated structure makes it possible to operate the structure at higher speed for the same power per unit area. [1] Later this effect was more explicitly defined as Dennard Scaling in 1974 [2] Transistor count increases in recent years has very little to do with dennard scaling or improving individual instruction performance and everything to do with improving some form of parallel compute by figuring out how to fit, route and schedule more transistors at the same process size, which does not have the same effect Moore was originally alluding to. [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By83v5TWkGjvQkpBcXJKT1I1TTA/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By83v5TWkGjvQkpBcXJKT1I1TTA... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
- ksec 7y ago
  Tl;dr: Moore's Law is simply about doubling of transistor, we got performance and reduced cost CPU along with it for the first 30 - 40 years. But Somehow the world interrupt the performance and cost as Moore's Law.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    What matters concerning what a term means is what the world interprets, not what something was etymologically, or what was in the mind of the person who coined it.
- kurthr 7y ago
  I'll link to the wikipedia graphic of Moore's Law: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Moore%27s_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2018.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Moore%27... It makes the point that Moore's law is dead. You can see the slope change in in 2006 with the Dual Core Itanium2. So it died after Dennard scaling toppled (and some of the fastest growth ever), and although transistor count continues to increase it is noticeably slower... I fear that it may go slower still since economic costs continue to increase, but profits don't (as fast). When the CFO figures out it's not worth investing in scaling, you just won't build new fabs (unless the gov just says so). To put some numbers to this (topline growth): 1971 TMS1000 (8k) to 1979 M68000 (70k) 2.6yr/double 1979 M68000 (70k) to 2003 Itanium M6 (400M) 1.9yr/double 2003 Itanium2 6M (400M) to 2006 Dual Itanium (1.6B) 1.5yr/double 2006 Dual Itanium2 (1.6B) to 2018 GC2 IPU (24B) 3.1yr/double Personally, I think that an era of backend improvements (wafer stacking etc) to combine processes (Memory/Logic/Flash) into locally interconnected 2.5D is possible, if there remains sufficient investment, and that in turn could drive some improvements to performance and pricing. However, that relies on ever more complex system design and integration... and heat dissipation issues. I don't see full 3D scaling or Quantum compute on the 3-5 year horizon where big new investments will be required. (edit formatting commentary and qualification)
ffwd 7y ago
Can someone here talk about what desktop CPU's might look like for the consumer in 2029? Like, I'm a gamer in 2029 and I'm looking for the equivalent of todays Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen. How much faster will it be? How different will it be from today? Etc.
- SECProto 7y ago
  I'm a gamer in 2019 and I'm using an i5 2500k processor from 2011. It works well enough for the games I run. I might upgrade if I scrounge up $700 for cpu/mb/ram. The point I'm making is that the processor doesn't matter much for gaming. An older computer can easily outperform a new computer if it has better components where it matters for gaming and casual use (SSD and GPU)
  - ffwd 7y ago
    Yeah good point, I shouldn't have mentioned gaming. I guess what I'm looking for is the general desktop workstation situation 10-20 years down the line, rather than gaming specifically. A workstation for visual arts, music, streaming, linux, programming, whatever, and especially if there will be a point in the 2020s or 30s where you'll have long pauses between cpu releases if they don't improve as fast etc.
    - xbmcuser 7y ago
      I think the 10-20 years down the line will see us move back to dumb terminals with servers over the internet. Microsoft has already moved to subscriptions for Windows and office i.e corporate use. And all the major companies are looking at game streaming i.e home use. Education is moving towards chromebooks i.e education. The rest of the uses for PC's like media consumption has already moved to smart devices and smart phone/tablets. So apart from enthusiasts with money to burn on PC's the actual use case for PC's will be gone hence the current form of PC's will be gone.
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        Well, when you can put computing power on par with a whole cloud in a single box, which you can nowadays, the equation changes again. Cloud is limited by Amdahl scaling like everyone else, but distances and latencies between nodes are higher than in a single box. So instead you should think of time sharing like in the ancient days of supercomputers. Most tasks do not require neither massive parallelism of a cloud or cluster nor computational resources of a supercomputer. If it's the question of ownership or price... Why not make it free? (Ignore this junk, make libreoffice etc. better.) Just think of it as a PC that gets smaller. You cannot quite go super small unless you replace input and output devices. That will require more understanding of our own sensorium.
ksec 7y ago
It is not the density that I worry about. Judging from TSMC's Investor notes and technical presentation, they don't see any problem with 2nm or may be even 1nm. 3nm is currently scheduled for 2022, and 2nm for 2024. So it isn't much about the technical but achieving those within budget. The problem is somewhere along the next 5 years we may see cost per transistor stop decreasing. i.e Your 100mm2 Die would be double the price of previous 100mm2 Die assuming the node scaling was double. At which point the cost of processors, whether that is CPU, GPU or others becomes expensive and the market contracts, which will slow down the foundry pushing for leading node. We could see Hyperscaler each designing their own Processor to save cost, and we are back to the mainframe era, where these Hyperscaler has their own DC, CPU, and Software serving your via Internet.
- sitkack 7y ago
  And they will get the yields in 7nm up and wafer costs down. It ultimately is about the economic cost of computation, which is still dropping. Smaller node sizes are not the only way to get more transistors and/or reduce total costs.
doener 7y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712889
- dahart 7y ago
  That would be helpful if there was more than 3 opinion comments.
dahart 7y ago
Gordon Moore himself is quoted in 2015 as saying that the transistor count interpretation of Moore’s law will be dead within 10 years, in the Wikipedia article on Moore’s Law. If something changed and it’s not dead, I’d love to hear more about the new processes that are making more transistors possible. Working at a chip maker now, but I’m a software guy. My understanding of the problem is that we’ve reached the optical limits of resolving power for the lithography processes. Trace widths are a tiny fraction of the wavelength of light, and chip area is so large we don’t have lenses than can keep the projection in focus at the edges. While there is theoretical potential to get smaller due to gates being many atoms across, actually building smaller gates has real physical barriers, or so I’m told. I’d love to hear more about the manufacturing processes in generally, and more specifically whether something really has changed this year. Does TSMC have a new process allowing larger dies or smaller traces, or is this article mostly hype?
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Well, electron (X-ray) lithography is possible, EBL, one step beyond EUV, it is slow and used to make masks today. Extremely hard to make economical though.
crb002 7y ago
We have a long way to go in packing the RAM next to the CPU to reduce speed of light latency.
cbarrick 7y ago
This article is complete fluff. There's no _real_ discussion of Moore's law. No new revelations about chip design. You say workloads need to exploit parallelism these days to see increased performance gains? No shit. Putting memory closer to the logic cores is a good idea? duh. Hell, the author makes the common mistake of conflating AI with ML, because it's clearly illegal for a businessman in any industry to not buzz about "AI". > by Godfrey Cheng, Head of Global Marketing, TSMC Yeah, this is fluff.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  I agree. Seems like almost every article I see about an interesting topic fails to address the core of whatever it's supposed to be covering. If Moore's law does not address speed increase, that's fine; we've heard that before. If this guy thinks that the shrinkage will continue, despite some people's expectations, he should have said something about how and why. Otherwise, just don't publish the article because you have nothing to say. It's like documentation these days that is all autogenerated boilerplate.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

74 points by ricw 7y ago

About the industry at large: lots of changes ahead. Take a look at this: https://www.hotchips.org/program/ https://www.hotchips.org/program/ For the first time in a long while they gave the entire first day to non-semi companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft Nobody could've imagine the industry turning this way a decade ago.

rrss 7y ago
> entire first day to non-semi companies: Amazon, Google, Microsoft They've given the entire first day to the semiconductor divisions of these hulking behemoths.

petra 7y ago

Instead of an ad, here's a good description of the situation:https://semiengineering.com/why-scaling-must-continue/ https://semiengineering.com/why-scaling-must-continue/ Tl;Dr - old Moore's law is dead , but our new systems(ai , gpu...) still need a huge number of transistors , beyond what can be made on a single chip today, so scaling is still valuable.

velox_io 7y ago
I thought about upgrading my GPU recently (an rx480 8gb from 2016), I was disappointed to find that even the rx5700xt was only double the performance of an rx580/rx480 (they're essentially the same GPU) [0]. It also costs double, this is THREE years later. (It turns out the rx 500 series have hardly dropped in price since release ~£200.) So while Moore's law is still ticking along (albeit a little slower), and transistors are still shrinking (7nm vs 14nm). It doesn't really affect the price, so instead of being able to buy 4x the performance (transistors) for a similar price, it hasn't changed. It seems pricing is no longer based on cost, it appears to be based on what the market will pay. Strangely, it doesn't seem to be the same with CPUs. During the same period, AMD has doubled in core/ transistor count between Zen 1 and Zen 3 while has stayed the same price[3]. [0]https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_radeon_rx_5700_xt_evoke_review,4.html https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_radeon_rx_5700_xt_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units#Radeon_RX_400_Series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen
- wyxuan 7y ago
  This is a little misguided. The only reason that AMD is so cheap on the consumer side is that they genuinely want to take a crack at Intel's market share. With GPUs, they're only competitor is Nvidia, and as long as they are cheaper than Nvidia at a reasonable performance, they are fine.GPUs are extremely profitable while CPUs aren't as profitable (yet)
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Wasn't this also true 3 years ago? I.e. it only explains profit margins, not the absence of a price/performance drop. And, well, they have the same number of competitors in both CPU and GPU, and I think even their market shares are very similar, no?
    - velox_io 7y ago
      I only wrote about the GPUs initially (as I had been looking at them in the last week). Then I released the comparison to CPUs, which even included the same company. It just seems strange that two similar markets are functioning very differently. Increased fabrication costs don't explain what is going.
  - velox_io 7y ago
    I have a feeling AMD wants some of Nvidia's market share too. In fact the reason Nvidia recently released all those 'Super' cards was to counter AMD's release, it's also rumoured that AMD had to reduce their prices as a result. In many ways, Nvidia is acting like Intel did. AMD simply couldn't compete on performance so this allowed them to get cosy (Intel's high-end for consumers stayed at 4 cores for a decade, Nvidia's prices have been steadily raising for a while). Also, a lot has happened in the last few years: RAM prices skyrocketed, Bitcoin mining drove up demand for AMD GPUs. However both of those have been over for a while now. The rx480 was priced very aggressively, the $199 price grabbed some headlines (8gb card cost a little more). Given the die shrink and three years (plus the Ryzen cores doubling), you'd be forgiven for expecting the rx5700 to come in closer to $199, than the $349 (XT is $399) keep in mind that these new cards aren't much over double the performance. While, it's no secret that shrinking fabrication is getting harder and more expensive (it's hurting Intel right now). Prices per transistor have dropped for CPUs and SSDs has dropped noticeably, even DRAM to an extent, but not GPUs... Even demand for machine learning doesn't explain the price hike (GPUs are now being artificially handicapped, just as professional graphics have been, shifting demand to the even more expensive Tesla cards).

boyadjian 7y ago

It depends what you call Moore's Law. For me, Moore's Law was essentially that the cost per transistor was divided by two every 18 month. Nowadays, it's not true anymore. But of course, it doesn't mean that progress has stopped.

Fnoord 7y ago
You wrote: > [..] divided by two every 18 months [..] Wikipedia wrote: > [..] whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit [..] Godfrey Cheng, Head of Global Marketing, TSMC wrote: > [..] The number of transistors in an integrated device or chip doubles about every 2 years. [..] (Even if we ignore the difference on the cost versus number of transistors or components.) 12 months, 18 months, 24 months. How long is it? I have no clue with regards to the answer. It seems to me we first need to agree on the definition of a law before we can discuss it.
- kingosticks 7y ago
  > Moore also affirmed he never said transistor count would double every 18 months, as is commonly said. Initially, he said transistors on a chip would double every year. He then recalibrated it to every two years in 1975. David House, an Intel executive at the time, noted that the changes would cause computer performance to double every 18 months. From https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-to-roll-on-for-another-decade/ https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-to-roll-on-for-another-... (a source for the the Wikipedia page).
- boyadjian 7y ago
  18 month or 24 month, this is not very important. I was essentially talking about the fact that the cost per transistor was steadily going down, which is almost finished now.
  - tim333 7y ago
    Is there any data on the cost per transistor not going down? They seem to be able to pack an awful lot onto chips these days, the current record apparently being Samsungs 1tb memory chip with 2 trillion.

tomxor 7y ago

I've seen this interpretation before in HN comments and I think it is an unnecessary distortion of Moore's Law: Note the historical context the observation was originally made in (1965) when doubling was achieved through process size reduction, the effect this had on speed was twofold: operating frequency would increase roughly in proportion (increasing about 40%); secondly and more uniquely to the time, since predecessors transistor count were so limited there was significant room for improvements in instruction implementation and specialization as available transistors increased. Although it's implied, Moore also explicitly stated this in his 1965 paper: > [...] In fact, shrinking dimensions on an integrated structure makes it possible to operate the structure at higher speed for the same power per unit area. [1] Later this effect was more explicitly defined as Dennard Scaling in 1974 [2] Transistor count increases in recent years has very little to do with dennard scaling or improving individual instruction performance and everything to do with improving some form of parallel compute by figuring out how to fit, route and schedule more transistors at the same process size, which does not have the same effect Moore was originally alluding to. [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By83v5TWkGjvQkpBcXJKT1I1TTA/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By83v5TWkGjvQkpBcXJKT1I1TTA... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

ksec 7y ago
Tl;dr: Moore's Law is simply about doubling of transistor, we got performance and reduced cost CPU along with it for the first 30 - 40 years. But Somehow the world interrupt the performance and cost as Moore's Law.
- coldtea 7y ago
  What matters concerning what a term means is what the world interprets, not what something was etymologically, or what was in the mind of the person who coined it.
kurthr 7y ago
I'll link to the wikipedia graphic of Moore's Law: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Moore%27s_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2018.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Moore%27... It makes the point that Moore's law is dead. You can see the slope change in in 2006 with the Dual Core Itanium2. So it died after Dennard scaling toppled (and some of the fastest growth ever), and although transistor count continues to increase it is noticeably slower... I fear that it may go slower still since economic costs continue to increase, but profits don't (as fast). When the CFO figures out it's not worth investing in scaling, you just won't build new fabs (unless the gov just says so). To put some numbers to this (topline growth): 1971 TMS1000 (8k) to 1979 M68000 (70k) 2.6yr/double 1979 M68000 (70k) to 2003 Itanium M6 (400M) 1.9yr/double 2003 Itanium2 6M (400M) to 2006 Dual Itanium (1.6B) 1.5yr/double 2006 Dual Itanium2 (1.6B) to 2018 GC2 IPU (24B) 3.1yr/double Personally, I think that an era of backend improvements (wafer stacking etc) to combine processes (Memory/Logic/Flash) into locally interconnected 2.5D is possible, if there remains sufficient investment, and that in turn could drive some improvements to performance and pricing. However, that relies on ever more complex system design and integration... and heat dissipation issues. I don't see full 3D scaling or Quantum compute on the 3-5 year horizon where big new investments will be required. (edit formatting commentary and qualification)

ffwd 7y ago

Can someone here talk about what desktop CPU's might look like for the consumer in 2029? Like, I'm a gamer in 2029 and I'm looking for the equivalent of todays Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen. How much faster will it be? How different will it be from today? Etc.

SECProto 7y ago
I'm a gamer in 2019 and I'm using an i5 2500k processor from 2011. It works well enough for the games I run. I might upgrade if I scrounge up $700 for cpu/mb/ram. The point I'm making is that the processor doesn't matter much for gaming. An older computer can easily outperform a new computer if it has better components where it matters for gaming and casual use (SSD and GPU)
- ffwd 7y ago
  Yeah good point, I shouldn't have mentioned gaming. I guess what I'm looking for is the general desktop workstation situation 10-20 years down the line, rather than gaming specifically. A workstation for visual arts, music, streaming, linux, programming, whatever, and especially if there will be a point in the 2020s or 30s where you'll have long pauses between cpu releases if they don't improve as fast etc.
  - xbmcuser 7y ago
    I think the 10-20 years down the line will see us move back to dumb terminals with servers over the internet. Microsoft has already moved to subscriptions for Windows and office i.e corporate use. And all the major companies are looking at game streaming i.e home use. Education is moving towards chromebooks i.e education. The rest of the uses for PC's like media consumption has already moved to smart devices and smart phone/tablets. So apart from enthusiasts with money to burn on PC's the actual use case for PC's will be gone hence the current form of PC's will be gone.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      Well, when you can put computing power on par with a whole cloud in a single box, which you can nowadays, the equation changes again. Cloud is limited by Amdahl scaling like everyone else, but distances and latencies between nodes are higher than in a single box. So instead you should think of time sharing like in the ancient days of supercomputers. Most tasks do not require neither massive parallelism of a cloud or cluster nor computational resources of a supercomputer. If it's the question of ownership or price... Why not make it free? (Ignore this junk, make libreoffice etc. better.) Just think of it as a PC that gets smaller. You cannot quite go super small unless you replace input and output devices. That will require more understanding of our own sensorium.

ksec 7y ago

It is not the density that I worry about. Judging from TSMC's Investor notes and technical presentation, they don't see any problem with 2nm or may be even 1nm. 3nm is currently scheduled for 2022, and 2nm for 2024. So it isn't much about the technical but achieving those within budget. The problem is somewhere along the next 5 years we may see cost per transistor stop decreasing. i.e Your 100mm2 Die would be double the price of previous 100mm2 Die assuming the node scaling was double. At which point the cost of processors, whether that is CPU, GPU or others becomes expensive and the market contracts, which will slow down the foundry pushing for leading node. We could see Hyperscaler each designing their own Processor to save cost, and we are back to the mainframe era, where these Hyperscaler has their own DC, CPU, and Software serving your via Internet.

sitkack 7y ago
And they will get the yields in 7nm up and wafer costs down. It ultimately is about the economic cost of computation, which is still dropping. Smaller node sizes are not the only way to get more transistors and/or reduce total costs.

doener 7y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20712889

dahart 7y ago
That would be helpful if there was more than 3 opinion comments.

dahart 7y ago

Gordon Moore himself is quoted in 2015 as saying that the transistor count interpretation of Moore’s law will be dead within 10 years, in the Wikipedia article on Moore’s Law. If something changed and it’s not dead, I’d love to hear more about the new processes that are making more transistors possible. Working at a chip maker now, but I’m a software guy. My understanding of the problem is that we’ve reached the optical limits of resolving power for the lithography processes. Trace widths are a tiny fraction of the wavelength of light, and chip area is so large we don’t have lenses than can keep the projection in focus at the edges. While there is theoretical potential to get smaller due to gates being many atoms across, actually building smaller gates has real physical barriers, or so I’m told. I’d love to hear more about the manufacturing processes in generally, and more specifically whether something really has changed this year. Does TSMC have a new process allowing larger dies or smaller traces, or is this article mostly hype?

AstralStorm 7y ago
Well, electron (X-ray) lithography is possible, EBL, one step beyond EUV, it is slow and used to make masks today. Extremely hard to make economical though.

crb002 7y ago

We have a long way to go in packing the RAM next to the CPU to reduce speed of light latency.

cbarrick 7y ago

This article is complete fluff. There's no _real_ discussion of Moore's law. No new revelations about chip design. You say workloads need to exploit parallelism these days to see increased performance gains? No shit. Putting memory closer to the logic cores is a good idea? duh. Hell, the author makes the common mistake of conflating AI with ML, because it's clearly illegal for a businessman in any industry to not buzz about "AI". > by Godfrey Cheng, Head of Global Marketing, TSMC Yeah, this is fluff.

perl4ever 7y ago
I agree. Seems like almost every article I see about an interesting topic fails to address the core of whatever it's supposed to be covering. If Moore's law does not address speed increase, that's fine; we've heard that before. If this guy thinks that the shrinkage will continue, despite some people's expectations, he should have said something about how and why. Otherwise, just don't publish the article because you have nothing to say. It's like documentation these days that is all autogenerated boilerplate.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]