6 ms·
> 3nm technology would feature an estimated 60 percent gain in density of logic transistors and reduce power consumption by 30 percent to 35 percent at the same
by yazaddaruvala 4y ago
> 3nm technology would feature an estimated 60 percent gain in density of logic transistors and reduce power consumption by 30 percent to 35 percent at the same rate compared with 5nm technology
I'm really looking forward to the new Gravitons and the M3 Pro/Max/Ultra MacBooks! and what they will be able to achieve.
- amelius 4y agoAnd Apple will take all the credit for TSMC's achievements, as usual.
- r00fus 4y agoYou do realize that TSMC is heavily bankrolled by Apple right?
- keepquestioning 4y agoWho has the details of this strategic relationship? Remember Apple's infamous $200 billion cash-pile during the peak iPhone era of 2010-2016? How much of it went to TSMC?
- AnonMO 4y agoThey are currently just under $50 billion and have bought back $130 billion+ in shares since 2018 I would most if not all of their reserves went into buybacks.
- discordance 4y agoAnd ASML will remain in the shadows
- congoe 4y agoSo will Zeiss
- lotsofpulp 4y agoASML has a market cap of $227B, and is 37th in rankings of market cap worldwide. Hardly in the shadows. TSMC is in 12th at $395B. For curiosity’s sake, Zeiss is #1,327 at $11B. Not bad though, P/E of 41, so market thinks it has quite a future. https://companiesmarketcap.com/carl-zeiss-meditec/earnings/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/carl-zeiss-meditec/earnings/
- roneythomas6 4y agoTo be fair Intel and Samsung are also ASML EUV customers.
- Night_Thastus 4y agoApple is one of TSMC's largest customers. Their presence in the market alone shifts how TSMC designs its processes and does business in general. I don't think TSMC gives a hoot about "who takes credit" considering how much $ they're getting out of this arrangement.
- wmf 4y agoApple chose to use N3, AMD chose to use N4, and Intel chose to use 7. I think it's fair to give Apple credit for making a tradeoff that leads to a better product.
- picture 4y agoSmaller transistors does indeed reduce dynamic power consumption as transistors can switch with less charge, however the leakage current (static power consumption) will rise, more than the already significant amounts. I'm not sure how much actual energy savings will come from this in an application like laptops. Also, increased density isn't a huge deal as, while it reduces the die size which reduces the cost, it also likely costs more than an already mature process. It can help with increasing the amount of logic gates in series before needing to be pipelined to the next clock cycle, but that's not that big of a deal either
- Symmetry 4y agoLeakage power will rise all else being equal, but there are plenty of things designers can do to counteract that for reasonable costs.
- baybal2 4y ago[dead]
- rowanG077 4y agoReducing logic density will still allow for lot's of more SRAM for a chip of the same size. Even if SRAM won't scale. More SRAM is almost always a cheat code for squeezing more performance out of a design.
- paulmd 4y agoLogic and SRAM are completely different things in this context. SRAM actually has had almost zero scaling since N7 while logic has more than doubled in density (2x theoretical / 1.5-1.6x real-world shrink at N5 relative to N7, for example, and then N3 gives about 30% real-world shrinks to logic, although that’s less than expected and the good shrinks are going to come from the later N3E node). As a result we will probably see the pendulum swing back from cache-heavy designs. Going ham on cache was an obviously advantageous strategy at 7nm, you can basically look at it as N7 having been two full node families ahead of the curve on sram density (Samsung is only catching up at 3nm/2nm). But since SRAM hasn’t scaled at all in the last 2 nodes it’s becoming comparatively more effective to spend your transistors on logic instead. You still want big caches of course (and cache can be easily stacked ala AMDs v-cache) but it’s more worthwhile to spend more heavily on logic than it was on 7nm.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago> what they will be able to achieve. Who? TSMC and Arm?
- whoIsYou 4y agoI just don't know what is left to achieve really. I have an M1 pro and I just don't really hit any bottlenecks in my workflow as is (unless I am building some obscenely large legacy codebase) It just seems to me that we are hitting a point of diminishing returns in terms of CPU performance because honestly, the speed of my laptop could triple and it would not noticeably affect my experience in any way. The main areas of improvement that I would actually notice are better battery life, and faster RAM and SSDs (faster networking as well)
- blovescoffee 4y agoBetter battery life is equivalent to more efficient power consumption (that the 3nm process improves on).
- mcbits 4y agoThis is more GPU than CPU, but I want to infer 3D models from my security cameras in real time so I can do some CSI "turn left and look behind it" shit. And use the overlapping textures for superresolution so I can shout "enhance!" and read the license plate reflected in the perp's eyeball. As for reading e-mails and so on, yeah, we've pretty much reached peak e-mail.
- barganzo 4y agoIf you can’t do that stuff right now with today’s CPUs, in sub-realtime, then throwing more/faster CPU at it won’t make it possible.
- mcbits 4y agoI haven't described anything that can't already be done (well, reading a license plate in an eyeball was mostly an exaggeration). It just can't be done affordably in real time on a home computer. And it's just the first few out of many examples to come to mind. I think people fall into the trap of conflating "this is what I do with my computer" with "this is what my computer is for." Obviously if computers are only for doing the things you can already do with them, then they won't benefit much from improvements.