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TSMC confirms 3nm tech for 2022, could enable epic 80B transistor GPUs
- b34r 6y agoThe M3 processors are going to be sooooo fast. Can’t wait.
- ChrisLTD 6y agoI wonder if Apple will buy up all the capacity for the new process node again.
- xiphias2 6y agoOf course. M1 is a huge success and I see more friends of mine buying Apple devices with multiple months of their salaries at this point instead of getting an AMD laptop with more RAM and SSD for half the price.
- nevi-me 6y agoBut would Apple be content with going from 5nm to 3nm nodes so "quickly"? Given that AMD has been able to squeeze out their Zen 2 and 3 IPC without the need to change nodes completely, it could make sense for Apple to do the same.
- spacedcowboy 6y agoYes. The answer to that is yes. And Apple almost certainly have had the designs in simulation and test/initial sampling already. CPU design isn't an overnight thing.
- ogre_codes 6y agoApple fundamentally has more units to spread their designs across. Also, for Apple performance per watt is king. Getting 5% better battery life for a phone is massive. For a desktop or even a laptop, it's nice, but maybe not worth paying the premium for TSMCs latest die shrink.
- petra 6y agoMost Apple users aren't techies. So a macbook user can now feel he has the best computer and nobody else is even close. Nobody else is being manufactured using that magic. Maybe he'll even brag about that. How much is that worth to Apple ?
- Scarbutt 6y agoWhat AMD laptop costs $600 and has more than 16GB of RAM?
- xiphias2 6y agoIn Hungary you get a Macbook Air with 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM (cheapest M1) for $1440: https://www.alza.hu/macbook-air-m1/18884163.htm https://www.alza.hu/macbook-air-m1/18884163.htm 16GB with 1TB SSD is not available, but the official price is $2960: https://www.apple.com/hu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-h%C3%BCvelykes-modell https://www.apple.com/hu/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-h%C3%BC... My girlfriend found a 14'' 16GB 1TB AMD 4000x laptop for $1050 there and loves it (ACER Swift 3)
- ericpauley 6y agoLooks like VAT in Hungary is as high as 27% (is this the rate that applies in this case? VAT-inclusive pricing disguises this tax.), which accounts for much of the price difference.
- xiphias2 6y agoYes, 27% VAT + high tariffs are a toxic combination. At the same time for non Apple products there is maybe some dodging of taxes going on (like a company registered in Slovakia), you never know why a product is relatively cheap there, but you can guess.
- Olipro 6y agoI always used argep.hu for pricing computer bits. Dunno who's better
- r00fus 6y agoM1 is a good value - I am honestly amazed Apple didn't increase price points given the performance gains relative to the entire field, let alone their previous generation.
- _ph_ 6y agoApples pricing can be pretty funny from the outside. They certainly charge a ridiculous amount of money for memory and storage upgrades, on the other side some things are surprisingly cheap. Think of the entry level iPad for example. And now the Mini with the M1 getting cheaper than its predecessor. Short term, Apple could ask any price for the new M1 Macs. However, they have a longer term view with their pricing structure. For sure, they are having way less costs per device, as they don't have to pay the huge sums, Intel asks for their processors. The costs for Apple should be considerably down and they do relay that to the customer.
- mekster 6y agoI suppose it was a wise movement to use that as a way to increase OS market share. I still see people not liking macOS without even trying it out which is funny but if more people start using it around them, those average joes might start giving them a try which in turn gives Apple profit.
- Ar-Curunir 6y agoBut worse build quality and CPU and laptop power and... At this point it’s not clear if Apple machines are overpriced in any way; they beat all their competitors at their price point.
- xiphias2 6y agoSure, when she asked me about it, I told her to get it, try it for 2 weeks, and bring it back if she doesn't like it. The value depends on the usage. I wouldn't run photoshop +illustrator together with 256G of SSD and 8GB of RAM (which my girlfriend uses a lot), but M1 is amazing for web browsing, which my friend does mostly.
- willtim 6y agoWhat exactly do you mean by "build quality"? Do you just mean built from glass and aluminium? (hardly obvious choices for a laptop). IMHO, Apple can hardly claim to be leading in "build quality", what with glued-in batteries, un-repairable designs and keyboard reliability issues that have been ongoing for years.
- mschuster91 6y ago> Do you just mean built from glass and aluminium? (hardly obvious choices for a laptop). Aluminium bodies are way less prone to "oilification" (aka visibly shiny areas where one's palm rests), and I have yet to see any Windows laptop where the touchpad is comparable with MBPs in both size and quality (palm tracking, gestures). > what with glued-in batteries, un-repairable designs and keyboard reliability issues that have been ongoing for years. Battery replacements are possible even for someone with only moderate experience in hardware work, but I agree with you that the process is more complex than it used to be. Regarding the keyboard: get a 2019 16-inch MBP, it has a keyboard with real keys and a physical esc key.
- mrtksn 6y ago> un-repairable designs Quality actually means no need to repair and use it till becomes obsolete. That's why Apple's stuff have drastically higher re-sell value than the competition. Only repair shops fancy to repair stuff, the rest of us prefer it not breaking down in first place.
- amelius 6y ago> AMD laptop with more RAM and SSD for half the price. So you're saying a hypothetical laptop with two AMD cpus inside is more powerful than a M1-based MacBook, yet still less expensive.
- runeks 6y agoIf TSMC are smart they will reserve some capacity for AMD, in order to keep AMD as a customer. Apple has no alternative, so no reason to give Apple exclusive access (unless Apple pays a ton for it).
- ashtonkem 6y agoOr, use all that Apple money and build more capacity. Perhaps even try to get money out of the US federal government in exchange for an agreement to build new factories in the lower 48.
- frakkingcylons 6y agoTSMC has announced they will build a 10nm fab in Arizona. But strategically speaking, Taiwan has an interest in keeping the latest and greatest fabs in Taiwan. It’s an incentive to keep the US invested in their defense.
- szundi 6y agoAnd a good incentive now that Intel loses ground slowly.
- baybal2 6y agoYou don't need latest, and greatest process to make chips for missiles.
- austinprete 6y agoSure, but you might need it to keep several trillion dollars of GDP afloat and ensure economic stability, which is a precursor for national security.
- ogre_codes 6y ago> Apple has no alternative, so no reason to give Apple exclusive access Likely billions of reasons. It's likely Apple pays a significant premium to get that capacity. AMD might not even mind this arrangement. Apple is essentially funding these die shrinks and AMD benefits down the road.
- manquer 6y agoApple has not really "bought up all the capacity" it was just PR spin. they had simply booked three months worth while TSMC is still ramping up the 5nm process. Apple market share is simply not large enough to do that. Yes their numbers are huge, but there are lot more people who cannot or will not buy laptops priced $ 1,000+ than there are ones who are ready to pay that globally.
- no_wizard 6y agoIt’s not just the M1 though. I believe they are going to be if they aren’t already using TSMC for all their chips so iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch if I recall correctly. That’s a lot of capacity. Ultimately they’re in this huge success mode which is great! They just have to be careful Not to overbuild additional supply and end in a situation where demand tempers for some reason and they are now in a glut
- ajross 6y agoTo first approximation, it's not the M1 at all. In terms of silicon area, Apple ships iPhones, with a few other products mixed in. But mostly they just make iPhones.
- hajile 6y agoAndroid devices outsell the iPhone almost 10 to 1. I'd wager that Qualcomm's 5nm orders will be very close to Apple's current order.
- legulere 6y agoI think Android chips have less die area though (because they have less cache) and many android devices are rather cheap and have SoCs produced on older processes.
- hajile 6y agoSnapdragon 865 is 83.54mm^2 (7nm) Apple A12 is 83.27mm^2 (7nm) Apple A13 is 98.48mm^2 (7nm+) Apple A14 is 88mm^2 (5nm) Not a very big difference. Remember, Qualcomm's chip includes a modem while Apple's does not (at present). Qualcomm has also been putting a lot of resources into other areas like neural processors. Their upcoming 888 claims 26 TOPS (vs 11 TOPS for Apple) Cache is a very common misnomer too. A14 has 8MB of shared L2. 888 has 4MB of shared L3 plus 1MB for the X1 core and 0.5MB per each A78 core. It also has 3MB of what they call DSU cache which serves as a kind of general cache for everything on the chip that needs to hit memory. That's actually 1.5MB more total cache than Apple offers.
- dbbk 6y agoSerious question, what is the hypothetical limit of this? 1nm? Can you go lower than that?
- mic_ozar 6y agoThe spacing between silicon atoms is 0.235nm.
- szatkus 6y agoFor quite some time these nanometers is only a name. The only limitation right now is imagination of people working in TSMC and other (also money, I guess). Here's a video of Jim Keller presenting Intel's share of tricks for a few future generations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
- tambourine_man 6y agoWhat a great talk, thank you for sharing.
- lldbg 6y agoWe still have ways to go. The node name (3nm) in this example is pure marketing, there is no feature that is 3nm small on the die(s). Smallest feature size is rather 10-30 nm, and you can (again, side of napkin calculation) squeeze in 100 atoms in that space.
- civilized 6y agoIs there any rationale at all for the name? Maybe it's about how precisely things like corners can be etched, even if the smallest features are much larger than that?
- ebruchez 6y agoDon't look for a rationale. See this recent article "The Node Is Nonsense: https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_2020/the_node_is_nonsense.html https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_20... It goes in depth into this topic.
- whatch 6y agoI like how the article starts with "Monster chip foundry TSMC..."
- runeks 6y ago> TSMC reckons its 3nm node will pack in somewhere north of 250 million transistors per square millimetre of silicon [...] > TSMC is already producing chips for Apple’s iPhones on its new 5nm node, which is good for 173 million transistors per square millimetre [...] 3nm™: a transistor is 1 / 250e6 = 4e-9 square millimeters, which is sqrt(4e-9) = 63.2 nanometers by nanometers. 5nm™: a transistor is 1 / 173e6 = 5.78e-9 square millimeters, which is sqrt(5.78e-9) = 76.0 by 76.0 nanometers. So is it reasonable to say that 3nm™ -- compared to 5nm™ -- is closer to 63.2 / 76.0 * 5 (nm™) = ~4.16nm™? Ie. a reduction in feature size of ~17%?
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago3nm, 5nm, 7nm are all marketing names now since the fabs switched to 3D transistors and not a measure of any exact feature size. When examined via electron microscope, TSMC's 7nm is just slightly denser than Intel's 14nm++ and not half the size. “You need to understand that this naming scheme reflects only the process. It’s just the process called 14nm or 7nm … It could be called Intel Blueberry Construction 5 or if it is called AMD Strawberry Process 3, it would give you the same amount of information as having 14nm or 7nm (in the name).” https://www.time24.news/2020/09/der8auer-compares-tsmcs-7nm-process-with-intels-14nm-using-electron-microscope.html https://www.time24.news/2020/09/der8auer-compares-tsmcs-7nm-...
- skavi 6y agoThey appear to already be acknowledging that fact by using the trademark symbol.
- acje 6y agoI once read a 350 micron CMOS spec of about 100 pages. Probably just a subset of the spec. Detailing the hundreds of different feature sizes. There is no way you can compact that into a single three digit number only describing the smallest feature size of the gate. I believe it has been regarded as naming/marketing for decades, but the future is not evenly distributed. It used to be indicative of density and denard scaling, but now physics and geometry is more complicated and other factors distorts that relation to such a degree that there is soon more noice than signal in communicating minimum feature size.
- lucioperca 6y agoSmall enough for all kind of quantum shenanigans going on.
- sroussey 6y agoThis has been the case for a long time. One of my first jobs was in a fab computing these effects of a new process. That was in 1992.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y agoMind you, this is not 3nm as in physics, rather 3nm™ as in marketing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jguimont 6y ago> Intel 7nm is estimated to deliver around 200 to 250 million transistors per square millimetre > TSMC reckons its 3nm node will pack in somewhere north of 250 million transistors per square millimetre of silicon Why is a 3nm process would yield the same transistor density as a 7nm one? Is it an error in the article or there is something I do not understand?
- cultus 6y agoFrom what I understand, it is usually the minimum size rather than any kind of average.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sroussey 6y agoIt used to be based on a feature size of logic based transistors, but as node shrinks happened the design of transistors changed, so the number didn’t make sense any more. Different companies measure different things, and it is a marketing designation now. Intel has tried to be more scientific about their naming, but see where that got them.
- api 6y agoClock speeds became similar by the 90s at least since things like instructions per clock and instruction level parallelism can make lower clock speed chips faster than “faster” chips on most code.
- raxxorrax 6y agoRidiculous really that we now have it as a metric. Transistor count is more sensible, but even that is just a very indirect and approximative measure of performance. But yes, it is shown again that they should have lied. Just don't do it too much on sensitive topics like emissions... There probably isn't that much room for improvement anymore since we reach atomic magnitudes.
- 6y ago
- ilaksh 6y agoDoes anyone know any details about the actual types of 3D stacking and other techniques that are going into this "3nm"?
- wtallis 6y agoTSMC's 3nm will still be FinFETs rather than any of the more 3D-ish transistor designs: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16041/where-are-my-gaafets-tsmc-to-stay-with-finfet-for-3nm https://www.anandtech.com/show/16041/where-are-my-gaafets-ts... Other "3D stacking" tech you may have been hearing about is packaging tech that isn't really tied to particular fab nodes—and that's one of the main motivations for advanced 3D packaging: you don't need to make all your chiplets on the same process.
- supernova87a 6y agoI'm super curious -- how does chip manufacturing yield go with node size? Do they need to design even more defect-tolerant designs if the density of random environmental contamination stays about constant? (Is that true?) Or do they need the clean rooms, solvents, filtration, etc. to improve just as much with every jump in node size? I was also wondering, since Apple is not marketing on Ghz and playing the Intel game, how do they deal with variable chip manufacturing yield? Is there a narrow band or minimum chip speed that they'll accept and toss anything performing below? Does the SoC become so physically larger that yields also go down by any significant amount, and any defects at such small sizes become much more troublesome?
- Tuna-Fish 6y ago> Do they need to design even more defect-tolerant designs if the density of random environmental contamination stays about constant? (Is that true?) Or do they need the clean rooms, solvents, filtration, etc. to improve just as much with every jump in node size? We are way past that already. Any external contamination, even one stray atom, can cause a defect in any reasonably modern lithography process. There are parts of chips where thicknesses are measured in "monolayers" -- that is, the thickness of the material in that position is one uniform layer of atoms.
- willis936 6y agoDo the photolithography machines operate in vacuum? If not, why not?
- genericone 6y agoYes, they do, all layering steps additive and subtractive are done in vacuum environments.
- themule 6y agoIf it can be it is in a vacuum. Almost everything is crazier than you think. Many times whenever yields work they just blindly repeat the process - it's a freaking awesome science.
- noelherrick 6y ago> TSMC is promising at least 250 million transistors per square millimetre for its 3nm node, the reality may turn out nearer 300 million. [...] > TSMC is already producing [...] its new 5nm node, which is good for 173 million transistors per square millimetre. [...] > Intel 7nm is estimated to deliver around 200 to 250 million transistors per square millimetre. So falls somewhere in between TSMC’s 5nm and 7nm nodes for density. If my math is correct, Intel 7nm could be as good as TSMC 3nm for density - it definitely looks better than 5nm. I also believe this will be the first EUV node for Intel, so that would make sense that it's competing more with TSMC's EUV powered nodes.
- eximius 6y agoTSMC is killing it. I feel like it would be a strategic investment for the US to take a much larger stake in it and hopefully bring some of that fabrication talent stateside with Intel waning.
- swalsh 6y agoTSMC is absolutely killing it, but Samsung is catching up too. https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-samsung-chip-wars-tsmc.html https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-samsung-chip-wars-tsmc.h... Still, I think there's a pretty reasonable argument to be made about our dependence on foreign entities for such critical infrastructure. Intel seems to be falling behind pretty quickly.
- mrtksn 6y agoWow, 116 billion $ investment. Where this goes? High salaries? Expensive minerals? What makes it as expensive as small country's GDP?
- bitdizzy 6y agoState of the art chip fabs require some of the most advanced technology we've developed, the purest materials we can produce, and the most stringent environments we can maintain.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoExactly. Fabs have air quality restrictions that make surgical rooms look like trash dumpsters, relatively, as far as cleanliness goes.
- tooltalk 6y agoThat's over 10 years, or just over $10B in CAPEX and R&D per year. That sounds a lot, but the company routinely spends $20B-$30B in CAPEX every year. In comparison, Samsung's annual marketing budget (advertising, sales promotion and incentive) easily exceeds that amount. That being said, Samsung really wants to go beyond memory chips and is serious about the foundry business.
- bitwize 6y agoI guarantee you that Apple is already planning 3nm Apple Silicon while everybody else is just getting their 5nm shit in one sock.
- amelius 6y agoYes, if Apple doesn't take all the available production slots.
- tiffanyh 6y agoCould Apple acquire TSMC or is it state owned?
- hajile 6y agoRegulators across the globe would flat-out say no.
- tiffanyh 6y agoNot trying to stir the pot but genuine question - why would national states not approve this? Samsung (another phone manufacturer like Apple) has it's own Fab. And regardless of Intel latest troubles, they are still the dominant fab for non-mobile devices (desktop/laptop/server)
- hajile 6y agoThe EU is already investigating Apple as a monopoly. There have been similar vibes from the US. They would see a TSMC purchase as a big monopoly play and squash it. The theory is that at a certain point, vertical integration is so extensive that you are keeping all the profits along the entire chain and nobody can compete on price. That's a very bad place for government-enforced monopolies like Apple (standing on the back of government-enforced patent and copyright monopolies).
- stjohnswarts 6y agoTaiwan will never let TSMC go as long as it's a national treasure like it currently is. I think for a similar reason the UK will buck the Nvidia buyout of ARM
- amelius 6y agoThey could still buy all the top talent.
- baybal2 6y agoFew more generations, and we will see 1BT per mm².
- raducu 6y agoFew more generations with the new Moore's law, means a decade?
- baybal2 6y agoGive that full generational gains are definitely slowing, yes, but there is no "iron wall" yet for squeezing a 4 fold gain. Existing fin/gaa fets can get at least 2 times smaller themselves in both dimensions. 20nm gate length does not look impossible. Device spacing can get smaller with existing tech, and trench to wall move will add to that. Metal is actually the biggest worry from what I heard. Lab scale demos for metal capable of 1BT/mm² were done long ago, but contact, and line defect rates are still unworkable, and arise from very fundamental metal deposition physics issues. A completely new approach to building middle end, and M0 may be needed.