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ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
- borissk 3y agoSurely ASML would prefer that Samsung and Intel could keep up with TSMC on manufacturing the latest and greatest CPU/GPU/SoCs. So not hard to believe that they'll sell the first next gen machines to Samsung.
- DeathArrow 3y agoI think ASML will be happy to sell to whoever wants to buy. The more, the better.
- kuchenbecker 3y agoExactly, they don't want a runaway winner among their customers.
- nathan_phoenix 3y agoHow far does a $762 million deal get you? Doesn't seem like such a huge sum for priority access to next gen 2nm machines, but also hard to judge as a layperson...
- lucubratory 3y agoJust based on some price familiarity with previous generations and extrapolating forward, that does seem like a contract for one machine with a gold-plated service contract or two machines with a good service contract. It seems to me more like a pilot program, but Samsung is a very significant player in semi so idk... I'm not familiar enough with this industry. It could just be because it's very early in the generation.
- Culonavirus 3y ago> How far does a $762 million deal get you? Oh, you know, a billion here, a billion there, who counts anymore, right? (The other posters already aswered this one, seems like two top of the line machines?) Anyways... the numbers being invested at the top of this game are completely nuts. The future like in Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't seem that crazy! It begins with Metaverses, Neuralinks, LLMs, hundreds of billions of spending in the hardware/silicon business (boosted by AI demand) and ends in, well play Cyberpunk. They may even get the year right.
- DeathArrow 3y agoI like how users talk about hundreds of millions or billions like it's just small change for them.
- fennecbutt 3y agoLmao that's only like the price of 2 of the new high NA EUV machines. I believe they're slated to be 350-400M€ ea.
- huijzer 3y agoAnyone here who knows what are the benefits of going from, say, 4 or 3nm to 2nm? ASML talks about energy cost per function mostly, but it’s not as clear cut as transitions in the 2000s were if I‘m not mistaken.
- refulgentis 3y agoConcisely, but eliding: smaller transistors consume less power. Using smaller transistors, you can get the same performance at a lower power budget, or more performance at the same power budget.
- analognoise 3y agoYou get less dynamic power loss. Static power hasn’t been as forgiving for a while now though.
- phkahler 3y agoEverything over the last years tells me we are very close to the end game in chip production. 1. power stopped scaling 2. clocks stopped - 4x over 20 years? 3. node names became fiction. 4. EUV now differentiates the top from everyone else. 5. IPC improvements are a trickle. 6. Tons of non-moores law ideas are here: A) GPUs B) chiplets C) stacked die D) specialized accelerators 7. Governments are now involved in dividing up the tech. Since its finally mature / done. It has been incredible to watch the progression over the last 50 years.
- Dalewyn 3y agoEvery time someone says we've hit peak microprocessing, we in fact have not hit peak microprocessing.
- ahartmetz 3y agoThat can be true while approaching an asymptote. Unless there is a switch in technology (optical, different materials, whatever), I don't expect much for the time being. At least in CPUs and especially in single core performance. GPUs and other massively parallel devices are easier to improve with 3D techniques and such.
- DeathArrow 3y agoI think there was a lot of research to use other kind of materials beside silicon for making chips. One of them was carbon. I even heard about optical chips, using light instead of electricity.
- colechristensen 3y agoI'm guessing we're not done, we're just reaching the endgame with silicon dies. Next steps will be new tech sometimes with a long lead time until it has been developed to the extent that it's competitive with silicon. Things like integrated photonics (or a completely photonic CPU), quantum computers, or diamond instead of silicon (or other materials instead of silicon). Are we not still getting exponential growth in capability vs time?
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoJust for size reference, the SARS-CoV-2 (covid) virus is 100nm in diameter. A banana is 200,000,000nm, just in case you were wondering.
- huytersd 3y agoJust for completeness, “2nm” is more like 12-45nm actual transistor size. So on average about 5 of these transistors could fit inside a single SARS-CoV-2 viron.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoInteresting - 100 micro bananas - I didn't realize these nominal node sizes had gotten quite so far from actual measurements!
- projektfu 3y agoSo it's not the vaccine, but Covid itself, that is going to deploy the 5G chips into people's bodies?
- huytersd 3y agoIt’s insane how small transistors are now. Technically you could have a full 2 bit adder inside a single virion within a generation.
- DeathArrow 3y agoWell, so instead of giving money to Intel, you go get infected by your virus of choice. You still have to manage heat, though. I wonder how can you install software, or does it come in ROM?
- layer8 3y agoThat's a lot of banana chips.
- amelius 3y ago
- gjm11 3y agoNigel Tufnel, chief scientist at TSMC, explains the merits of the latest hardware from ASML: "This is a fab, but it's very special because if you can see, the numbers all go down to 2nm. Look, right across the board. 2nm, 2nm, 2nm, 2nm ..." "And most of the fabs go down to 3." "Exactly." "Does that mean it's ... smaller? Is it any smaller?" "Well, it's one smaller, isn't it? It's not 3. You see, most fabs are going to be running at 3. You're on 3 on your fab -- where can you go from there? Where?" "I dunno." "Nowhere, exactly. And what we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?" "Put it down to 2." "2. Exactly. One smaller."
- tomcam 3y ago> Nigel Tufnel Deep cut
- smoldesu 3y ago"Nigel gave me a drawing that said 2nm. Your understanding of pitch width and packaging technology is not my problem. I do what I'm told."
- tromp 3y agoNice Spinal Tap parody... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven
- ezequiel-garzon 3y agoThanks to both! I didn't know about it, so I needed the clarification. The scene: https://youtu.be/4xgx4k83zzc https://youtu.be/4xgx4k83zzc
- iaseiadit 3y agoYou joke but it does seem like we’re near the end of the line. We can go from 3 nm to 2 nm to 1 nm, but we can’t go negative nanometers. That’s it.
- 3y ago
- kaycebasques 3y agoJust read this in Chip War (p. 333) by Chris Miller: > Gelsinger has cut a deal with ASML to let Intel acquire the first next-generation EUV machine, which is expected to be ready in 2025. If Intel can learn how to use these new tools before rivals, it could provide a technological edge. Is the book talking about the same tech or different? If the same, does it mean that Intel only gets a year or two of headstart?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jiggawatts 3y agoJust to head off the inevitable comments about how 2nm isn't really 2nm: yes, we know, it's just a convention in the industry to indicate relative performance. It's basically a marketing term, more than anything else. The numbers VLSI engineers actually care about are things like millions of transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm^2), power per bit in picojoules (pJ), transistor rise times in nanoseconds, etc... In those metrics, steady gains have been made, it's just that the actual component sizes haven't matched up to the gains recently. Instead, new types of technologies like "gate-all-around" have been used to eke out more performance instead of simply shrinking everything proportionally.
- sgift 3y agoI really hope they can all decide on a better number which everyone agrees on soon. It's ridiculous having to look up each time if Intel 10nm is the same as which one from TSMC again and all of that. There have been some contenders, but the lure of saying "hey, I have the smallest number, so my process is best!" is just too strong it seems.
- jasonwatkinspdx 3y agoHave you considered that things are complicated enough now it can't be boiled down to single number comparisons?
- sgift 3y agoSure, but I know that there have been various proposals for a better number. Different companies just couldn't decide on which proposal they like the best.
- verall 3y agoSince Intel changed their node names you can roughly assume that for a given node TSMC > Intel > Samsung. This might change in the future if Intel gets their shit together but I'm not buying their stock yet, they look like the Boeing of microchips to me.
- 3y ago
- qwoiej 3y agoA few days ago it was reported that Chine companies started producing 5nm chips (model Kirin 9006C) - many years earlier than US government expected they will be able to do so. With this insane progress I will not wonder if Chinese companies start mass producing 2nm chips earlier than anyone else.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DeathArrow 3y agoI would expect another decade until China will be on par with the West. And another few years on top if they'll overtake it.
- astrange 3y agoThat didn't use EUV and wasn't cost effective, it doesn't mean much of anything.
- nabla9 3y agoAtomic radius (average distance from the center to the outermost isolated electron) of copper 135pm, silicon 0.11pm. 2nm is 7 copper atoms or 9 silicon atoms.
- mathematicaster 3y agoAnd for our next trick ... ... pattering to drive transistor switching rather than just transistor etching!
- nabla9 3y agoSingle-atom transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor
- DeathArrow 3y agoMaybe we can construct transistors using subatomic particles. If only we can convince those quarks and bosons to do calculation for us...
- PaywallBuster 3y ago> ASML is expected to supply 10 units of the High-NA EUV equipment to the market next year, and Intel has reportedly secured six of them ouch
- fennecbutt 3y agoI believe that's just the pilot (ie training) version with the full version coming a bit later after
- DeathArrow 3y agoSamsung still has to solve yield and capacity problems. It wasn't only process node advantage that made customers form lines in front of TSMC shop.
- DeathArrow 3y agoI wonder why Nvidia doesn't establish it's own fab business. It might be a good fit for them.
- dataking 3y agoAFAIK the cost of producing semiconductors on a leading-edge node are so high you are forced to aggegate demand across seveal chip designers. Intel offering foundry services is evidence of this dynamic. Edit: grammar.
- DeathArrow 3y agoTrue, but aside the internal demand I don't see why can't they get external customers. I think Samsung did the same.
- jabradoodle 3y agoI assume they don't want to loose focus on software, which is currently their moat.
- fennecbutt 3y agoEconomics, I'm guessing. They got enough money floating around recently that they would've done it by now, if it made em more money. Their pockets are flush from crypto and now AI.
- sdflhasjd 3y agoIs there a good comparison of how each fabs nanometer metric (aka version number) lines up?
- yread 3y agoASML also recently shipped high NA (0.55) EUV machine to Intel. This brings resolution from 13nm to 8nm