15 ms·

TSMC and Google push chipmaking boundaries with 3D 'stacking'

133 points by lawrenceyan 6y ago

belval 6y ago
Intel needs to step up their game if they want to stay relevant. I am sure their execs know it so I can't wait to see what they will offer in the next 5 years.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Intel's revenue is big enough that they must have some kind of warchest to fall back on. Obviously money isn't everything but it doesn't hurt. They can probably still hammer AMD on both their software and documentation, i.e. roughly a quarter of their sales are to data centres. It will be interesting to see what happens to X86 post-M1 (i.e. ARM coming of age), I suspect not much but I think the world has changed enough to have another stab at VLIW (for example) even if the cost/benefit is pretty marginal.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    I’ll second this. My M1 Air is a freak of nature. I’m so excited for this next wave of computing. Lots of things that need setup Dev tooling wise and much work underway to get it supported but my god man... and it’s passively cooled. I have a beast i7 gaming rig too and my M1 beats it at everything but graphics performance. What I think Intel will continue to work their enterprise business until this “arm wave” starts to pull up. Engineers at Intel probably have some ideas.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      I genuinely don't think M1 is a new wave of computing (yet), both in the sense that it's apple so it's not up to you what you do with it but also because ARM and X86 aren't all that different these days. Ultimately M1 is "Company with enough money to buy the US Navy, follows existing path to logical conclusion, succeeds". If a company other than apple makes a fast arm chip that'd be very interesting, though. Nvidia have probably thought about it.
      - josh2600 6y ago
        Time will tell if you're right. I do think that what's happening under the hood of the Apple chip is real and is causing more than a few executives in the silicon world to lose sleep. This reminds me of when RIM got their hands on an iPhone for the first time. One of many articles: https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/27/rim_thought_apple_was_lying_about_original_iphone_in_2007 https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/27/rim_thought_apple...
        novok 6y ago
        I think it the hints were there if you were in the industry. CPU scaling is TPU scaling and apple's chips were showing leading single core performance compared to android / qualcomm chips for many years now with very low power usage. After that you could see how they could scale that up relatively easily. Also apple built in some special instructions that makes macOS software better, like core operations of objective-c, so some of this might be very apple runtime specific optimizations.
        tinus_hn 6y ago
        The first iPhones used generic Samsung processors and the power is quite similar to the hardware in BlackBerrys contemporary products. They probably just didn’t realize that one day of battery life is enough for most use cases and is less important than a real browser and the other features brought by the iPhone.
        josh2600 6y ago
        I feel like you're glossing over a bunch of things here. 1) the display on the iphone was gigantic compared to any other device on the market. The fact the iPhone had the battery life it did was amazing. 2) the software on the iphone destroyed anything RIM had ever put forward. 3) the iPhone was a much better piece of hardware aesthetically and performance-wise than anything RIM had ever put out. Their closest competitor was the Pearl and it was garbage compared to the iPhone. 4) Lastly, RIM had 10 year development cycles. Pivoting to attack the iPhone meant ripping apart 10 years of planned development much of which was already executed. Pivoting that hard is just not something companies at the scale or RIM are designed to do. RIM should've seen the writing on the wall, shred their hardware business, and gone all in on supporting BES on iPhone. I digress...
  - sharpneli 6y ago
    The current CPU's already are VLIW in a fashion. Its just that they have a hardware jitter for it. That's what superscalar OoO CPU basically is, a piece of HW that generates VLIW instructions based on the normal instructions that come in. A superscalar execution port is basically just one subinstruction in VLIW. Explicit VLIW only helps you to save that piece of silicon from the chip. And it's not that much in the grand scheme of things. It used to be, but not anymore. Static compile time VLIW means one cannot really make it wider anymore, or narrower. Dynamically doing it on runtime means a cheaper and smaller core can just be narrower. Remove an instruction slot for one integer ALU? Fine, no issues. Everything still works, albeit slower by that much. Make a beefier chip? Perfect, it got faster by the amount of instruction level parallelism that was available. In addition a compiler cannot really see across function boundaries (except if it's statically determinable). A jitter can. Modern chips have reordering window of hundreds of instructions, M1 apparently goes up to over 600. That's quite a lot of stuff there that it can dynamically reorder across. A compiler might not have noticed that due to some weird dynamic call that was not visible during compilation time there is now an FPU instruction that could be inserted here, an OoO processor can. Due to that explicit VLIW is basically dead outside of some highly specific applications, like DPS and whatnot. In a similar fashion ridculously wide vector units were obsoleted by the approach pioneered by GPU's. Just add few things to allow masking based on branches and you get SIMT approach. Write as if it was scalar code and it'll run on HW that has vector lengths going from none at all up to whatever, NVidia has 32 wide vector units as an example.
    - jleahy 6y ago
      Even more importantly, and I'm surprised you didn't mention it, static compile time VLIW doesn't know what to do for memory access. A load might take any number of cycles depending on whether the line is in L1, L2 or L3 cache, with static compile time VLIW then the compiler has to guess, if it's optimistic the whole CPU stalls, if it's pessimistic then you're much slower than you would otherwise be. I believe this is the real thing that make superscalar OoO (ie. JIT to VLIW in silicon) win.
      - sharpneli 6y ago
        That's a great point to emphasize. Because memory access times are inherently more or less nondeterministic. I consider it to be roughly as important as being able to reorder instructions across non statically determined branches and function calls. And both of these expose the fundamental weakness in explicit VLIW, if it's essentially nondeterministic it cannot be taken advantage of. Then we naturally have some other benefits, like hyperthreading. Which basically is just compiling two instruction streams together on the fly.
- topspin 6y ago
  The trial balloons currently being floated by Intel forgo the pursuit of cutting edge process nodes in favor of third party fabs. Intel's existing foundries will serve older nodes while external foundries will build the high margin devices. They've been carefully dropping hints of this since July. Through the first week of November the headlines were "Intel to decide soon" whether to outsource, with a decision supposedly appearing sometime in January. This looks like the sort of precision expectation setting one would expect of an experienced zombie corp CEO like Swan. So don't bet on Intel making any great comeback in fab tech; they've decided they can be 'relevant' without it.
  - petra 6y ago
    Since Intel mostly fabs it's own chips, what will it serve with older nodes ? And will that be enough ?
  - JackMcMack 6y ago
    It will not be enough. There are essentially 3 leading fabs left: TSMC, Samsung, Intel. Samsung has yield issues, Intel has yield issues, TSMC somehow has no issues. GlobalFoundries has already dropped out of the race. TSMC is selling every wafer they make, and continues to invest heavily to solidify it's lead. ALL of these fabs depend on ASML machines. IIRC last year they delivered just over half of the machines that were ordered.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - novok 6y ago
      If all of these fabs rely on ASML machines, why does TSMC have its shit together while the other two do not?
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        I think in 50 years we will find out that various state security services have been interfering with IC fabrication tech. Things like deliberately moving critical things by a few nanometers so entire production runs are broken...
- websg-x 6y ago
  Intel already got 'Foveros 3D Chip Stacking’ Tech shipping last June, the Lakefield processor.
- hinkley 6y ago
  We know that some components of a chip benefit more from die shrinkage than others. Intel is having yield problems with die shrinkage. Chiplets are a thing. I can’t for the life of me figure out why Intel hasn’t already hedged their bets and started working hard on hybrid chips. Especially since this now appears to be a long term industry direction. If the next step blunts the consequences of your current problems, why not jump on it? Sunk cost fallacy?
  - tambre 6y ago
    Intel has EMIB [0], which they've used in i7-8809G [1]. And they seem to be going all-in on chiplets heavily... for 7nm [2]. At their current pace it'll be a few years before that. [0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7/i7-8809g https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7/i7-8809g [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16021/intel-moving-to-chiplets-client-20-for-7nm https://www.anandtech.com/show/16021/intel-moving-to-chiplet...
- jonplackett 6y ago
  I wonder how much better Intel's i9 laptop chips would perform if they were on 5nm like the M1. Would they be competitive? Or are apple so much further ahead on other things too?
TaylorAlexander 6y ago
“TSMC is now taking chip packaging vertically and horizontally, using a new 3-D technology that it dubs SoIC.” They picked a name for it that is already a common term in chip packaging. Face meet palm.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  I had to look that one up. A small outline integrated circuit (SOIC) is a surface-mounted integrated circuit (IC) package which occupies an area about 30–50% less than an equivalent dual in-line package (DIP), with a typical thickness being 70% less. They are generally available in the same pin-outs as their counterpart DIP ICs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_outline_integrated_circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_outline_integrated_circu... I suspect companies do these make collisions intentionally.
  - ZeteticElench 6y ago
    No, it means System on Integrated Chips https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/SoIC.htm#SoIC_CoW https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technolog...
trianglem 6y ago
I’m naive on this topic but what makes TSMC pretty much the only fab on the world that can do this? Do they have technology the west doesn’t? Know how? Why isn’t there a fab in the US, it can’t be just labor costs?
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  The US closed most of it's fabs decades ago, except for Intel.
  - ipsum2 6y ago
    A few of Globalfoundries' fabs are in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries
- impulser_ 6y ago
  Intel is working on 3D stacking as well. TSMC is building a plant in Arizona.
- jjcon 6y ago
  Intel fabs are in the usa
- whazor 6y ago
  EUV is hard and expensive. You need massive clean rooms and a huge laser. Afterwards you need to scale up and actually become profitable, which is even harder. One EUV machine costs 145 million dollars, and you are not going to buy a second one before the first one works well enough. That is why TSMC has now half of all the machines. Many manufacturers gave up making fabs and went to TSMC for production. I do think the proximity of Taiwan to China is a huge help for both fast turnaround of tools/machines as in workers. China themselves are banned from having the latest chip technology. Taiwan is often used as a proxy for western countries to be near China.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    $145 million dollars is pocket change to Big Tech. It must just be that they don't think it would be profitable enough to compete when they can buy. If they ever stopped being able to buy, I'm sure they'd get to work real quick. I could also see Apple in-housing their chip fab at some point sooner, just for the sake of continued vertical integration. It doesn't hurt that they have the deepest pockets too. The interesting question is whether or not they'd ever take orders from third parties.
coolspot 6y ago
I have read somewhere that there is no benefit of making multiple layers of transistors per chip because you get to thermal limits pretty quick. We barely can keep 1 layer whithin operating temperature.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Yes and no. You do run into thermal limits, but you can control how much power you draw by adjusting voltage and clock speed. Somethings are more "transistor" hungry than "cycle" hungry. That said, I expect the early uses might be in mixed mode (linear and digital devices in the same package) and things that benefit from a huge cache or pre-programmed ROM. There are also things like diamond substrates that improve the thermal transfer characteristics as well which helps you to draw more heat from the package than just silicon. This was a feature of "silicon on sapphire" processes and perhaps we will see some "silicon on diamond" parts.
- areoform 6y ago
  I've always wondered why advances in 3D chips haven't taken advantage of nano-fluidics. One radical new chip design could be very micron-sized coolant pipes for wicking away heat. The "coolant" could perhaps be gallium for rapid heat transfer. Micro-valves could open/close as parts of the chip draw more power, pumping more fluid through them, and cooling them faster. Every problem has a solution, we must be creative enough to discover & build it.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    Microfluidics is one of the most complex fields to commercialize a product in, and is littered with dead startups. The short answer is that the scale change changes the behavior of everything - pumps and flow just plain don't work the way they do at larger scales, and the forces created by surface tension and hydrophillicity become large relative to the strength of the mechanical parts.
    - areoform 6y ago
      What's the breakthrough needed to make chips like these a reality?
lifeisstillgood 6y ago
So what I take away from this is that one company, TSMC, is at the forefront of chip manufacture (with Apple M1 and now Google), whilst being a few miles away from a Chinese administration that sees a recalcitrant province not an independent country. Our societies are like inverted pyramids- balancing on surprisingly small foundations that can tip over with more ease than we care to admit.
- tasogare 6y ago
  This is why the recent weapon deal finalized by the current POTUS was so important. A lot of people there are disappointed by the result of the US presidential elections, since the probable soon-to-be president have a very ambiguous stance on the matter. It would be nice if other powers such as France were to offer arms deal, particularly ships and aircrafts (it did in the past). Taiwan is a very nice place with a lot of talents, influences, languages and a working democracy. It would be a real shame if all of this were whipped by China.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    No amount of weapons could stop China invading Taiwan if they chose to.
    - kilroy123 6y ago
      This is not true. If the US stepped in to defend Taiwan, militarily, the US nuclear arsenal would be enough.
      - blackrock 6y ago
        If you’re not aware, China also has nukes. And they can also hit every square inch of the United States. There is something call MAD, that keeps the United States scared of launching nukes against China.
      - onion2k 6y ago
        All China would need to do is ban exports of Chinese goods to the US in retaliation and the US would be completely crippled and unable to function as a country within 3 months. There is literally no scenario where the US would ever nuke China.
Bayart 6y ago
http://archive.is/hMrUc http://archive.is/hMrUc
ninedays 6y ago
The very first paragraph : > “ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is working with Google and other U.S. tech giants to develop a new way of making semiconductors more powerful.” The title is unfortunately misleading as it makes it look like only Google and TSMC are “pushing the boundaries” whereas it also includes other tech companies.
- option 6y ago
  and compared to others like AMD and NVIDIA, Google’s share of chips is negligible
  - AlotOfReading 6y ago
    Do you have numbers on that? Google was one of the largest manufacturers in the world for a couple years there. It wouldn't surprise me if they were still up there.
    - selestify 6y ago
      What years were those? Why did they stop?
      - AlotOfReading 6y ago
        Around 2012ish-2014ish, Google was producing massive amounts of hardware for their own internal infrastructure. They didn't stop (and actually added popular consumer devices), but the overall market has simply exploded in size even faster.
    - thunkshift1 6y ago
      Are you serious?? I don’t think that has happened.
      - Mr_P 6y ago
        I wouldn't be surprised if Google's TPU's pushed them far over the edge on this. I'd bet TPUs running inference for Ads models can basically print money for the company. They've also already been building their own network chips for some time. So, given the scale of their datacenters, I think it's entirely reasonable that they'd outpace nvidia.

133 points by lawrenceyan 6y ago

Intel needs to step up their game if they want to stay relevant. I am sure their execs know it so I can't wait to see what they will offer in the next 5 years.

mhh__ 6y ago
Intel's revenue is big enough that they must have some kind of warchest to fall back on. Obviously money isn't everything but it doesn't hurt. They can probably still hammer AMD on both their software and documentation, i.e. roughly a quarter of their sales are to data centres. It will be interesting to see what happens to X86 post-M1 (i.e. ARM coming of age), I suspect not much but I think the world has changed enough to have another stab at VLIW (for example) even if the cost/benefit is pretty marginal.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  I’ll second this. My M1 Air is a freak of nature. I’m so excited for this next wave of computing. Lots of things that need setup Dev tooling wise and much work underway to get it supported but my god man... and it’s passively cooled. I have a beast i7 gaming rig too and my M1 beats it at everything but graphics performance. What I think Intel will continue to work their enterprise business until this “arm wave” starts to pull up. Engineers at Intel probably have some ideas.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    I genuinely don't think M1 is a new wave of computing (yet), both in the sense that it's apple so it's not up to you what you do with it but also because ARM and X86 aren't all that different these days. Ultimately M1 is "Company with enough money to buy the US Navy, follows existing path to logical conclusion, succeeds". If a company other than apple makes a fast arm chip that'd be very interesting, though. Nvidia have probably thought about it.
    - josh2600 6y ago
      Time will tell if you're right. I do think that what's happening under the hood of the Apple chip is real and is causing more than a few executives in the silicon world to lose sleep. This reminds me of when RIM got their hands on an iPhone for the first time. One of many articles: https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/27/rim_thought_apple_was_lying_about_original_iphone_in_2007 https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/27/rim_thought_apple...
      - novok 6y ago
        I think it the hints were there if you were in the industry. CPU scaling is TPU scaling and apple's chips were showing leading single core performance compared to android / qualcomm chips for many years now with very low power usage. After that you could see how they could scale that up relatively easily. Also apple built in some special instructions that makes macOS software better, like core operations of objective-c, so some of this might be very apple runtime specific optimizations.
        tinus_hn 6y ago
        The first iPhones used generic Samsung processors and the power is quite similar to the hardware in BlackBerrys contemporary products. They probably just didn’t realize that one day of battery life is enough for most use cases and is less important than a real browser and the other features brought by the iPhone.
        josh2600 6y ago
        I feel like you're glossing over a bunch of things here. 1) the display on the iphone was gigantic compared to any other device on the market. The fact the iPhone had the battery life it did was amazing. 2) the software on the iphone destroyed anything RIM had ever put forward. 3) the iPhone was a much better piece of hardware aesthetically and performance-wise than anything RIM had ever put out. Their closest competitor was the Pearl and it was garbage compared to the iPhone. 4) Lastly, RIM had 10 year development cycles. Pivoting to attack the iPhone meant ripping apart 10 years of planned development much of which was already executed. Pivoting that hard is just not something companies at the scale or RIM are designed to do. RIM should've seen the writing on the wall, shred their hardware business, and gone all in on supporting BES on iPhone. I digress...
- sharpneli 6y ago
  The current CPU's already are VLIW in a fashion. Its just that they have a hardware jitter for it. That's what superscalar OoO CPU basically is, a piece of HW that generates VLIW instructions based on the normal instructions that come in. A superscalar execution port is basically just one subinstruction in VLIW. Explicit VLIW only helps you to save that piece of silicon from the chip. And it's not that much in the grand scheme of things. It used to be, but not anymore. Static compile time VLIW means one cannot really make it wider anymore, or narrower. Dynamically doing it on runtime means a cheaper and smaller core can just be narrower. Remove an instruction slot for one integer ALU? Fine, no issues. Everything still works, albeit slower by that much. Make a beefier chip? Perfect, it got faster by the amount of instruction level parallelism that was available. In addition a compiler cannot really see across function boundaries (except if it's statically determinable). A jitter can. Modern chips have reordering window of hundreds of instructions, M1 apparently goes up to over 600. That's quite a lot of stuff there that it can dynamically reorder across. A compiler might not have noticed that due to some weird dynamic call that was not visible during compilation time there is now an FPU instruction that could be inserted here, an OoO processor can. Due to that explicit VLIW is basically dead outside of some highly specific applications, like DPS and whatnot. In a similar fashion ridculously wide vector units were obsoleted by the approach pioneered by GPU's. Just add few things to allow masking based on branches and you get SIMT approach. Write as if it was scalar code and it'll run on HW that has vector lengths going from none at all up to whatever, NVidia has 32 wide vector units as an example.
  - jleahy 6y ago
    Even more importantly, and I'm surprised you didn't mention it, static compile time VLIW doesn't know what to do for memory access. A load might take any number of cycles depending on whether the line is in L1, L2 or L3 cache, with static compile time VLIW then the compiler has to guess, if it's optimistic the whole CPU stalls, if it's pessimistic then you're much slower than you would otherwise be. I believe this is the real thing that make superscalar OoO (ie. JIT to VLIW in silicon) win.
    - sharpneli 6y ago
      That's a great point to emphasize. Because memory access times are inherently more or less nondeterministic. I consider it to be roughly as important as being able to reorder instructions across non statically determined branches and function calls. And both of these expose the fundamental weakness in explicit VLIW, if it's essentially nondeterministic it cannot be taken advantage of. Then we naturally have some other benefits, like hyperthreading. Which basically is just compiling two instruction streams together on the fly.
topspin 6y ago
The trial balloons currently being floated by Intel forgo the pursuit of cutting edge process nodes in favor of third party fabs. Intel's existing foundries will serve older nodes while external foundries will build the high margin devices. They've been carefully dropping hints of this since July. Through the first week of November the headlines were "Intel to decide soon" whether to outsource, with a decision supposedly appearing sometime in January. This looks like the sort of precision expectation setting one would expect of an experienced zombie corp CEO like Swan. So don't bet on Intel making any great comeback in fab tech; they've decided they can be 'relevant' without it.
- petra 6y ago
  Since Intel mostly fabs it's own chips, what will it serve with older nodes ? And will that be enough ?
- JackMcMack 6y ago
  It will not be enough. There are essentially 3 leading fabs left: TSMC, Samsung, Intel. Samsung has yield issues, Intel has yield issues, TSMC somehow has no issues. GlobalFoundries has already dropped out of the race. TSMC is selling every wafer they make, and continues to invest heavily to solidify it's lead. ALL of these fabs depend on ASML machines. IIRC last year they delivered just over half of the machines that were ordered.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - novok 6y ago
    If all of these fabs rely on ASML machines, why does TSMC have its shit together while the other two do not?
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      I think in 50 years we will find out that various state security services have been interfering with IC fabrication tech. Things like deliberately moving critical things by a few nanometers so entire production runs are broken...
websg-x 6y ago
Intel already got 'Foveros 3D Chip Stacking’ Tech shipping last June, the Lakefield processor.
hinkley 6y ago
We know that some components of a chip benefit more from die shrinkage than others. Intel is having yield problems with die shrinkage. Chiplets are a thing. I can’t for the life of me figure out why Intel hasn’t already hedged their bets and started working hard on hybrid chips. Especially since this now appears to be a long term industry direction. If the next step blunts the consequences of your current problems, why not jump on it? Sunk cost fallacy?
- tambre 6y ago
  Intel has EMIB [0], which they've used in i7-8809G [1]. And they seem to be going all-in on chiplets heavily... for 7nm [2]. At their current pace it'll be a few years before that. [0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/emib.html [1] https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7/i7-8809g https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/core_i7/i7-8809g [2] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16021/intel-moving-to-chiplets-client-20-for-7nm https://www.anandtech.com/show/16021/intel-moving-to-chiplet...
jonplackett 6y ago
I wonder how much better Intel's i9 laptop chips would perform if they were on 5nm like the M1. Would they be competitive? Or are apple so much further ahead on other things too?

TaylorAlexander 6y ago

“TSMC is now taking chip packaging vertically and horizontally, using a new 3-D technology that it dubs SoIC.” They picked a name for it that is already a common term in chip packaging. Face meet palm.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
I had to look that one up. A small outline integrated circuit (SOIC) is a surface-mounted integrated circuit (IC) package which occupies an area about 30–50% less than an equivalent dual in-line package (DIP), with a typical thickness being 70% less. They are generally available in the same pin-outs as their counterpart DIP ICs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_outline_integrated_circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_outline_integrated_circu... I suspect companies do these make collisions intentionally.
- ZeteticElench 6y ago
  No, it means System on Integrated Chips https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/SoIC.htm#SoIC_CoW https://3dfabric.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technolog...

trianglem 6y ago

I’m naive on this topic but what makes TSMC pretty much the only fab on the world that can do this? Do they have technology the west doesn’t? Know how? Why isn’t there a fab in the US, it can’t be just labor costs?

Gibbon1 6y ago
The US closed most of it's fabs decades ago, except for Intel.
- ipsum2 6y ago
  A few of Globalfoundries' fabs are in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries
impulser_ 6y ago
Intel is working on 3D stacking as well. TSMC is building a plant in Arizona.
jjcon 6y ago
Intel fabs are in the usa
whazor 6y ago
EUV is hard and expensive. You need massive clean rooms and a huge laser. Afterwards you need to scale up and actually become profitable, which is even harder. One EUV machine costs 145 million dollars, and you are not going to buy a second one before the first one works well enough. That is why TSMC has now half of all the machines. Many manufacturers gave up making fabs and went to TSMC for production. I do think the proximity of Taiwan to China is a huge help for both fast turnaround of tools/machines as in workers. China themselves are banned from having the latest chip technology. Taiwan is often used as a proxy for western countries to be near China.
- brundolf 6y ago
  $145 million dollars is pocket change to Big Tech. It must just be that they don't think it would be profitable enough to compete when they can buy. If they ever stopped being able to buy, I'm sure they'd get to work real quick. I could also see Apple in-housing their chip fab at some point sooner, just for the sake of continued vertical integration. It doesn't hurt that they have the deepest pockets too. The interesting question is whether or not they'd ever take orders from third parties.

coolspot 6y ago

I have read somewhere that there is no benefit of making multiple layers of transistors per chip because you get to thermal limits pretty quick. We barely can keep 1 layer whithin operating temperature.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
Yes and no. You do run into thermal limits, but you can control how much power you draw by adjusting voltage and clock speed. Somethings are more "transistor" hungry than "cycle" hungry. That said, I expect the early uses might be in mixed mode (linear and digital devices in the same package) and things that benefit from a huge cache or pre-programmed ROM. There are also things like diamond substrates that improve the thermal transfer characteristics as well which helps you to draw more heat from the package than just silicon. This was a feature of "silicon on sapphire" processes and perhaps we will see some "silicon on diamond" parts.
areoform 6y ago
I've always wondered why advances in 3D chips haven't taken advantage of nano-fluidics. One radical new chip design could be very micron-sized coolant pipes for wicking away heat. The "coolant" could perhaps be gallium for rapid heat transfer. Micro-valves could open/close as parts of the chip draw more power, pumping more fluid through them, and cooling them faster. Every problem has a solution, we must be creative enough to discover & build it.
- XorNot 6y ago
  Microfluidics is one of the most complex fields to commercialize a product in, and is littered with dead startups. The short answer is that the scale change changes the behavior of everything - pumps and flow just plain don't work the way they do at larger scales, and the forces created by surface tension and hydrophillicity become large relative to the strength of the mechanical parts.
  - areoform 6y ago
    What's the breakthrough needed to make chips like these a reality?

lifeisstillgood 6y ago

So what I take away from this is that one company, TSMC, is at the forefront of chip manufacture (with Apple M1 and now Google), whilst being a few miles away from a Chinese administration that sees a recalcitrant province not an independent country. Our societies are like inverted pyramids- balancing on surprisingly small foundations that can tip over with more ease than we care to admit.

tasogare 6y ago
This is why the recent weapon deal finalized by the current POTUS was so important. A lot of people there are disappointed by the result of the US presidential elections, since the probable soon-to-be president have a very ambiguous stance on the matter. It would be nice if other powers such as France were to offer arms deal, particularly ships and aircrafts (it did in the past). Taiwan is a very nice place with a lot of talents, influences, languages and a working democracy. It would be a real shame if all of this were whipped by China.
- onion2k 6y ago
  No amount of weapons could stop China invading Taiwan if they chose to.
  - kilroy123 6y ago
    This is not true. If the US stepped in to defend Taiwan, militarily, the US nuclear arsenal would be enough.
    - blackrock 6y ago
      If you’re not aware, China also has nukes. And they can also hit every square inch of the United States. There is something call MAD, that keeps the United States scared of launching nukes against China.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      All China would need to do is ban exports of Chinese goods to the US in retaliation and the US would be completely crippled and unable to function as a country within 3 months. There is literally no scenario where the US would ever nuke China.

Bayart 6y ago

http://archive.is/hMrUc http://archive.is/hMrUc

ninedays 6y ago

The very first paragraph : > “ Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is working with Google and other U.S. tech giants to develop a new way of making semiconductors more powerful.” The title is unfortunately misleading as it makes it look like only Google and TSMC are “pushing the boundaries” whereas it also includes other tech companies.

option 6y ago
and compared to others like AMD and NVIDIA, Google’s share of chips is negligible
- AlotOfReading 6y ago
  Do you have numbers on that? Google was one of the largest manufacturers in the world for a couple years there. It wouldn't surprise me if they were still up there.
  - selestify 6y ago
    What years were those? Why did they stop?
    - AlotOfReading 6y ago
      Around 2012ish-2014ish, Google was producing massive amounts of hardware for their own internal infrastructure. They didn't stop (and actually added popular consumer devices), but the overall market has simply exploded in size even faster.
  - thunkshift1 6y ago
    Are you serious?? I don’t think that has happened.
    - Mr_P 6y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if Google's TPU's pushed them far over the edge on this. I'd bet TPUs running inference for Ads models can basically print money for the company. They've also already been building their own network chips for some time. So, given the scale of their datacenters, I think it's entirely reasonable that they'd outpace nvidia.