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Not really. These are wafer-scale chips, which (as far as I'm aware) were first introduced by Cerebras. Cost reduction for cutting-edge products in the semicon
by dgfl 2y ago
Not really. These are wafer-scale chips, which (as far as I'm aware) were first introduced by Cerebras.
Cost reduction for cutting-edge products in the semiconductor industry has historically been driven by 1) reducing transistor size (by following the Dennard scaling laws), and 2) a variety of techniques (e.g. high-k dielectrics and strained silicon, or FinFETs and now GAAFETs) to improve transistor performance further. These techniques added more steps during manufacturing, but they were inexpensive enough that they allowed to reduce $/transistor still. In the last few years, we've had to pull off ever more expensive tricks which stopped the $/transistor progress. This is why the phrase "Moore's law is dead" has been circulating for a while.
In any case, higher performance transistors means that you can get the same functionality for less power and a smaller area, meaning that iso-functionality chips are cheaper to build in bulk. This is especially true for older nodes, e.g. look at the absurdly low price of most microcontrollers.
On the other hand, $/wafer is mostly a volume-related metric based on less scalable technology and more conventional manufacturing (relatively speaking).
Cerebra's innovation was in making a wafer-scale chip possible, which is conventionally hard due to unavoidable manufacturing defects. But crucially, such a product (by definition) cannot scale like any other circuit produced so far.
It may for sure drop in price in the future, especially once it gets obsolete. But I don't expect it to ever reach consumer level prices.
- adrian_b 2y agoWafer-scale chips have been attempted for many decades, but none of the previous attempts before Cerebras has resulted in a successful commercial product. The main reason why Cerebras has succeeded and the previous attempts have failed is not technical, but the existence of market demand. Before ML/AI training and inference, there has been no application where wafer-scale chips could provide enough additional performance to make their high cost worthwhile.
- ryao 2y agoCerebras has a patent on the technique used to etch across scribe lines. Is there any prior work that would invalidate that patent? By the way, I am a software developer, so you will not see me challenging their patent. I am just curious.