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The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat. I can’t think of how there is going

The article mentions it obliquely but fewer companies than ever can fab at the “edge.” [1] And Intel has faltered somewhat. I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_trend https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...

Fordec 7y ago
I can think of a few. Unbundling the engineering model as the current system is highly integrated - do certain segments of the process better than the incumbents. This would be primarily a business model innovation, not an engineering one. New architectures, as Intel have shown lately, their architecture isn't perfect. This requires a new set of design thinking from the ground up and challenging existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets. Risc V gives some hope to this idea. Non-silicon (Photonics, GaN, Diamond, Quantum, etc.) computing technology would require new skills with different materials that the incumbents don't possess. Still years away though. Commodity EUV and further process simplification would greatly reduce the barrier to entry but requires new uninvented engineering technology and practices.
- temac 7y ago
  Risc V is made to be boring. It does nothing to "challeng[e] existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets". It is also very unlikely to become the next high perf ISA for tons of reasons, it is more suited for embedded stuff.
  - Fordec 7y ago
    Risc V doesn't touch on Von Neumann architectures. That could be addressed by tech like Memristors as an example but to put it lightly, they're not ready yet. But the belief that to be a competitive fab house you have to churn out high performance chips is in itself one of the existing unquestioned assumptions of chip manufacture which may not pan out in the longer term. The idea of the generic CPU may very well become seen as a luxurious, wasteful idea once Moore's law properly runs out of road in a few years. Specialization will breed new ISAs, even boring ones.
    - temac 7y ago
      > The idea of the generic CPU may very well become seen as a luxurious, wasteful idea once Moore's law properly runs out of road in a few years. Specialization will breed new ISAs, even boring ones. This is already the case and I suspect the current general structure will continue mostly unchanged: you will still need your general purpose high perf generic CPU for the mostly the same workloads we use them for today (and that's including to run legacy software), and for now there is kind of only one broad successful approach to design them (for mass produced things, at least). Then in embedded chips you can use basically anything, and you also have way less stable ISA in chips more dedicated to massively parallel compute. Even with JIT you can not really multiply the basic GP CPU ISA ad infinitum, because for bulk system code JIT is not that viable (even if it is for big apps). Also, this is basically attempting to deport the stable interface problem in another layer, but you can not necessarily remove all the features that made it possible to have a stable ISA, given tons of them are also needed for perfs. And they are since a very long time. So for even just semi-fast general purpose CPUs, I suspect the race is mostly over (hypothesis: higher level computer topology unchanged -- if you switch to e.g. chip stacking, things could change more) For all the other cases, and you are right they are also massively important, things will continue to evolve in tons of directions.
nrp 7y ago
I suspect SMIC or another Chinese foundry will get there over the next 10-20 years. China justifyably considers it a strategic priority and a matter of national security and will put in as much money as it takes to pull people and IP out of Taiwan, South Korea, and the US to make it happen. The closest parallels are display fabrication, where BOE and CSOT have swallowed the LCD market and BOE is on track to compete with Samsung on OLED market share over the next five years. Similarly, there are a handful of fabs in China now starting to ramp DRAM and flash on competitive process nodes.
throw0101a 7y ago
> I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. There will probably be a continuing growth of demand for making chips, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some folks get into the market with "old" tech. So it's unlikely any one will jump in right at the bleeding edge, they may work their way up to more modern processes over time. I could see a niche of 'home grown' fabs in various countries / regions that server local demand that is paranoid about supply chain security. Depending on how automated you make the fabs, I wonder if it would be possible to sell "limited runs" of chips to people, kind of like book self-publishing but with VHDL/Verilog.
lainga 7y ago
You know what I like to think about sometimes: all of TSMC's facilities, except for one each in Washington and Singapore, are easily in range of mainland A2/AD weapons. Even if Taiwan is unhit, the silicon will be no good if it can't get off the island.

Fordec 7y ago

I can think of a few. Unbundling the engineering model as the current system is highly integrated - do certain segments of the process better than the incumbents. This would be primarily a business model innovation, not an engineering one. New architectures, as Intel have shown lately, their architecture isn't perfect. This requires a new set of design thinking from the ground up and challenging existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets. Risc V gives some hope to this idea. Non-silicon (Photonics, GaN, Diamond, Quantum, etc.) computing technology would require new skills with different materials that the incumbents don't possess. Still years away though. Commodity EUV and further process simplification would greatly reduce the barrier to entry but requires new uninvented engineering technology and practices.

temac 7y ago
Risc V is made to be boring. It does nothing to "challeng[e] existing assumptions about Von Neumann architectures and instruction sets". It is also very unlikely to become the next high perf ISA for tons of reasons, it is more suited for embedded stuff.
- Fordec 7y ago
  Risc V doesn't touch on Von Neumann architectures. That could be addressed by tech like Memristors as an example but to put it lightly, they're not ready yet. But the belief that to be a competitive fab house you have to churn out high performance chips is in itself one of the existing unquestioned assumptions of chip manufacture which may not pan out in the longer term. The idea of the generic CPU may very well become seen as a luxurious, wasteful idea once Moore's law properly runs out of road in a few years. Specialization will breed new ISAs, even boring ones.
  - temac 7y ago
    > The idea of the generic CPU may very well become seen as a luxurious, wasteful idea once Moore's law properly runs out of road in a few years. Specialization will breed new ISAs, even boring ones. This is already the case and I suspect the current general structure will continue mostly unchanged: you will still need your general purpose high perf generic CPU for the mostly the same workloads we use them for today (and that's including to run legacy software), and for now there is kind of only one broad successful approach to design them (for mass produced things, at least). Then in embedded chips you can use basically anything, and you also have way less stable ISA in chips more dedicated to massively parallel compute. Even with JIT you can not really multiply the basic GP CPU ISA ad infinitum, because for bulk system code JIT is not that viable (even if it is for big apps). Also, this is basically attempting to deport the stable interface problem in another layer, but you can not necessarily remove all the features that made it possible to have a stable ISA, given tons of them are also needed for perfs. And they are since a very long time. So for even just semi-fast general purpose CPUs, I suspect the race is mostly over (hypothesis: higher level computer topology unchanged -- if you switch to e.g. chip stacking, things could change more) For all the other cases, and you are right they are also massively important, things will continue to evolve in tons of directions.

nrp 7y ago

I suspect SMIC or another Chinese foundry will get there over the next 10-20 years. China justifyably considers it a strategic priority and a matter of national security and will put in as much money as it takes to pull people and IP out of Taiwan, South Korea, and the US to make it happen. The closest parallels are display fabrication, where BOE and CSOT have swallowed the LCD market and BOE is on track to compete with Samsung on OLED market share over the next five years. Similarly, there are a handful of fabs in China now starting to ramp DRAM and flash on competitive process nodes.

throw0101a 7y ago

> I can’t think of how there is going to be a new entrant to the market that competes with the current three’s processes. There will probably be a continuing growth of demand for making chips, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some folks get into the market with "old" tech. So it's unlikely any one will jump in right at the bleeding edge, they may work their way up to more modern processes over time. I could see a niche of 'home grown' fabs in various countries / regions that server local demand that is paranoid about supply chain security. Depending on how automated you make the fabs, I wonder if it would be possible to sell "limited runs" of chips to people, kind of like book self-publishing but with VHDL/Verilog.

lainga 7y ago

You know what I like to think about sometimes: all of TSMC's facilities, except for one each in Washington and Singapore, are easily in range of mainland A2/AD weapons. Even if Taiwan is unhit, the silicon will be no good if it can't get off the island.