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TSMC: Ecosystem for 2nm Chip Development Is Nearing Completion
- guidedlight 3y agoDid IBM beat them by over 2 years? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/ibm-creates-the-worlds-first-2-nm-chip/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/ibm-creates-the-worl...
- babypuncher 3y agoI'm guessing not, since right at the top of that article, the average density of IBM's 2nm process is compared directly to that of TSMC's 3nm.
- Detrytus 3y agoIf you compare densities however, IBMs 2nm process claims 333MT, and the actual (not "estimated" as per article from 2021) density of TSMC 3nm is 215MT.
- rnk 3y agoThat number 333MT means millions of transistors per square millimeter, I get from that linked ars tecnica article. That seems like a much better way to compare different technologies in chip fabrication, because of the well known fact that these gate widths have lots of nuances that impact how many gates per unit of space can be used. Why don't we just use "millions of transistors per mm^2"? The concept seems obviously useful, until now I never thought of it.
- hexaga 3y agoSeems like a Goodhart's law situation to me. It would not stretch my credulity very much to see MT/mm^2 rapidly become just as nuanced (as feature size) if it were used for primary marketing.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y agoOne problem is that the measurement depends on what you're using the transistors for. You can fit more logic tranistors per mm^2 than cache transistors on recent nodes (capacitance is really annoying).
- diziet 3y agoThere is likely a giant difference between demonstrating a process vs scaling it to high yields at volume production.
- fooker 3y agoIBM is great at flashy demos that don't pan out in the end.
- mrtksn 3y agoHave the 3nm process used in Apple's A17 Pro chip delivered on the promises? The initial tests seemed to indicate that there's barely any efficiency over the previous node. Are the new nodes for real on the performance and efficiency? The "nm" doesn't mean much since a while but at least we were getting considerable improvements from node to node, is that still the case?
- aurareturn 3y agoYes it has. Apple fixed the recent watt and temperature issue. In addition A17 Pro delivers significantly more transistors. Lastly, N3E will be an improvement over N3B that Apple used.
- scrlk 3y agoN3E will be an improvement in cost, but cutting down on the number of EUV layers vs. N3B will have a negative impact on transistor density. Seems like N3B is a bit of a flop: simply too expensive for anyone but Apple.
- aurareturn 3y agoIt will have lower density but higher performance, lower power, cheaper, and better yield. With all these things combined, you can easily just design a bigger chip with more or same amount of transistors.
- Varloom 3y agoAlmost everyone is moving to N3 from N4 (not N5), the performance jump is not as impressive as the numbers which are based on N5->N3.
- thunderbird120 3y agoIts hard to get a good impression without more data points but the improvements we're seeing in the A17 on N3B are not very impressive relative to chips like the A16 made on N4P. It's really difficult to see the full picture but most signs seem to point to N3B being a marginal improvement for a significant increase in cost. For nearly anyone but Apple that is difficult to justify which is why Apple is the only big customer for N3B right now. We'll see how things change once TSMC gets N3E in mass production but it might not make things much better. N3E will probably feature lower average transistor density than N3B thanks to SRAM regressions so its difficult to tell if its performance will be meaningfully better than N3B in real world cases. It will be cheaper though, which is the important part.
- vardump 3y agoHow small the features need to be until electromigration destroys the devices in a matter of days/weeks/months? Although I guess "3 nm" is nowhere near that small in reality.
- 0dayz 3y agoIt's going to be very exciting if we get it down to picometer, even if it is the equivalent to 0.9nm.
- kylehotchkiss 3y agoSounds like the next round of iPhones may be even lighter if they can keep using these improvements to reduce battery sizes