4 ms·

But even if you believe that, what do you do with that (mis) information? TSMC has continued to improve the process, and we've seen Apple and AMD design perfor

• derefr 4y ago
  A mass misbelief in the continuation of Moore's law into impossible sub-molecular scales. There is no more low-hanging fruit of "just make the optics more precise to make the lithograph smaller"; every process-node step we're taking now is rather a "side-step" involving solving increasingly-complex puzzles to make the same-sized features do more per molecule. It's code golf, at a hardware level. And as in code golf, there's a pretty low ceiling as to how intricately interwoven features can become. You can't eliminate the fundamental need to have all those features in the code (circuit) in some sense. The actual visible effect of this is an economic one: we've gone from spending linearly more marginal CapEx per fab process-node upgrade, to spending geometrically more marginal CapEx. Each process node under 8nm has been twice as costly to design as the one before it. This is untenable.
  • patmorgan23 4y ago
    I wonder if at some point the industry will shift to focus on higher yields, economies of scale, and software that uses the hardware more effectively.
• sjburt 4y ago
  The particular measurements of the elements are not interesting, but the transistor densities are meaningful. I would expect a 1nm chip to achieve densities 100x a 10nm chip. That seems unlikely.