8 ms·
> in the late 2010’s Intel got stuck trying to move to 10nm, thanks in part to their reluctance to embrace the vastly more expensive EUV lithography process TB
by scrlk 2y ago
> in the late 2010’s Intel got stuck trying to move to 10nm, thanks in part to their reluctance to embrace the vastly more expensive EUV lithography process
TBH, it's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. I don't really blame Intel for deciding to go with self-aligned quadruple patterning for 10 nm, but combining it with cobalt interconnects was probably biting off more than they could chew.
FWIW, Intel was funding EUV R&D since 1997: https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN091197.HTM https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/1997/CN0911...
That press release had an interesting prediction:
> Intel projects that the microprocessor of the year 2011 will contain one billion transistors, operating at over 10 gigahertz and delivering 100,000 MIPS (millions of instructions per second).
They weren't that far off in estimating the transistor count and MIPS: the i7-2600k released in January 2011 had 1.16 billion transistors [0] and delivered 117k MIPS [1] @ 3.4 GHz. The clock speed prediction was way off due to the failure of Dennard scaling in the early-mid 00s.
[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-intel-core-i7-2600k-testing-sandy-bridge-in-2019/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/14043/upgrading-from-an-intel...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#CPU_results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second#CPU_re...
- hangonhn 2y agoIn addition, SMIC in China managed to get to 7 nm without the use of EUV. Also early EUV yields were actually quite low.
- wetpaws 2y ago7nm means nothing, it's an arbitrary marketing number
- schmidtleonard 2y agoDid SMIC get 7nm to yield or is it limping but propped up for PR purposes like Intel 7?
- enraged_camel 2y agoThe latter. China isn't even close to achieving high-yield 7nm.
- hangonhn 2y agoIt's in volume production. This is what Huawei uses for its Mate 60 phones. They've sold 30 million units. From articles I've read the features on the chip are actually quite precise, which lead people to think the yield is at least decent. How they will get to 3nm is another question but back when Intel made its decision, 7nm was on the horizon so choosing to not go the EUV route is not as dumb as it may look now.
- api 2y ago> Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. We need to learn to recognize the difference between something that's never going to happen for either physical or economic/social/structural reasons, and something that is just really difficult and takes a long time. I always think of this when I think about fusion and the irritating "fusion is 20 years away and always will be" meme. In reality fusion has been edging closer, and closer, and closer for decades. Like EUV lithography it's just incredibly hard and requires a ton of capital and time and some of the smartest people on Earth to make it a reality. The same logic applies to things like a working HIV vaccine, life extension, or human space flight and space settlement. The reason there's never been a year of the Linux desktop on the other hand has to do with the full picture of what's required to mass market a desktop OS and support that, not just the technical problems, as well as business reasons around what Microsoft does to incentivize vendors to stay in their ecosystem. Linux desktops are just about ready today but no mainstream laptop/desktop PC vendor is going to sell them for a long laundry-list of non-technical or para-technical (legacy software base) reasons.
- SoftTalker 2y agoI'd say Linux desktops have been good enough for a long time, but never broke into the mainstream for the reasons you cite. ChromeOS is the closest thing I guess, but outside of schools and a few other institutional uses, Chromebooks are not very popular.
- davidw 2y agoThey're pretty incredible machines for the price. I bought one a year and a half ago in an emergency, as the networking on my laptop died over the course of a few days and I needed something for browsing and email. I got the Linux dev environment set up on the Chromebook and I actually kept it instead of getting a new expensive laptop.
- ghaff 2y agoThey are. The problem is that they are for the educational market. Especially with Google's exit from hardware, they're basically mostly cheap devices for kids. And, if you do build a nice one, you could probably get a lower-end MacBook Air for about the same price which would be almost as low-maintenance to use if you wanted it to be.
- ghaff 2y agoIntel was also being at least a bit disingenuous in public at the time although they probably also thought they could make those frequencies work. But a very senior Intel exec told me, at the time IBM was showering them with a lot of public snark, that of course they new about the upcoming issues but Microsoft was so worried about multicore scalability that Intel had to play along.
- wmf 2y agoNobody used EUV for 10 nm though. Even 7 nm doesn't need EUV. This kind of error calls the rest into question.
- throwaway48476 2y agoIntel 10nm and TSMC 7nm are equivalent.
- wmf 2y agoIntel 10 nm and TSMC 7 nm don't need EUV.
- encom 2y ago>year of the Linux desktop A tangent, and I realise this phrase is a meme, but it has always bothered me. Nobody has ever defined what year of the Linux desktop actually means, so it's a phrase without any real meaning.
- fluoridation 2y agoRoughly speaking, that running Linux as a desktop OS would be easy enough that even non-technical users would be able to do it with difficulties comparable to, say, Windows XP.
- flo123456 2y agoWhichever for me was in 2010 when I set up Ubuntu for my grandma and put a Firefox shortcut on her desktop and she never had any issues with her computer again. Very simple use-case but it was a lot better served than by Windows Vista at the time. These days it’s even better served by an iPad though.
- fluoridation 2y agoIME, that works as long as the user does nothing but browse the web and nothing in the environment or the computer changes. Things get tricky the moment any of those assumptions are invalidated. And that's because the user is not really operating the computer, but just using it to access the web. That it's a "desktop" is only an implementation detail.
- segasaturn 2y agoBy that metric the Year of the Linux Desktop was in 2012 with the introduction of Chromebooks.
- mjevans 2y agoThe goal posts always seem to move. Windows is an ugly pain in the butt to create install media for (when you're not on the native OS), and it's just as bad to Install on random hardware. Maybe more so since it's less likely to ship network drivers for random wifi gear and lan connections. Even Debian has non-free blobs for drivers with the (at least 'Live' versions) these days, finally. Repair shops are the next big thing I hear. The goal posts always move if it isn't exactly what someone already knows.
- mrsilencedogood 2y agoSo did the year of the EUV lithography happen? What year was it? (Genuinely asking, I don't know anything about chips - I'm the kind of programmer who is profoundly comforted by pretending like my CPU is like a really fast version of the thing I did in CompE 201, as opposed to reality which i gather is a bit more like a demonically possessed stone that glues together a bunch of barely understood physics that kind of "even out" at macro levels but seem pretty f'd up at quantum levels).
- scrlk 2y ago2019, when TSMC N7+ entered high volume manufacturing.
- SSLy 2y agoOK, and in Intel's fabs? They're still not on EUV, right?
- scrlk 2y agoIntel 4 was their first EUV process, which entered HVM in September 2023.
- throwaway81523 2y agoDoes doing an EUV chip when you already have tons of non-EUV fab take more technical wizardry than writing a huge check to ASML for the EUV machine? EUV is in the mask making step, right? Obviously your wafer fab has to be tuned to your masks but EUV lithography itself (i.e. ASML making the machine) is waaay more difficult from what I can tell.
- sroussey 2y agoYes and no. More difficult in that it is different and smaller and there are issues to work out every time that happens (I once worked in a fab changing nodes). But some things are easier downstream, skipping the multi-patterning business for example. Though that multi-patterning stuff was pretty smart!
- PaulHoule 2y agoI remember seeing headlines every 18 months or so that Intel was laying off 10,000 engineers for no good reason. Made me think I didn’t want to go to work for them because I might be next.