4 ms·

If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows?

If there's really such a bottleneck around ASML, why not design some extra chips for legacy processes that presumably already have well known design workflows? I mean we're not talking AMD FX and Core 2 Duo here, it's Raptor Lake and Zen 3, it's perfectly viable and still being sold in droves right now.

irdc 6mo ago
That’s what the likes of AMD with their chiplet design have been doing. There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.
- moffkalast 6mo ago
  This is gonna sound super dumb, but I'm not sure how they aren't being profitable if there are shortages, just price things beyond break even level? The average person can't even tell the difference between a Core 5 and a Core 5 Ultra, you can practically sell them at the same price and I'm not even sure they'd notice when actually using them. The performance jump is relatively minor and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.
  - MadnessASAP 6mo ago
    It mostly comes down to the consumer market not being significant enough by itself. A consumer may not notice a 10% increase in performance per watt or dollar. A large office building probably will, and a datacenter definitely will. I don't think I'm being entirely hyperbolic when I say the consumer market only exists to put devices that can connect to and feed the datacenter loads into the general populations hands.
  - irdc 6mo ago
    Part of those prices aren't something the manufacturer can adjust. Whether you're building 60nm or 20nm chips, you need pretty much the same silicon wafers, the same ultra pure water, the same chemicals and the same personnel. And as a bonus, you're not gonna be getting as many of the same chips on that wafer. And sure, a chip layout can be shrunk; but that requires a whole new recertification cycle.
frangonf 6mo ago
Isn't exactly this what China is doing? Apart from poaching ex ASML employees? Now reaching 7nm, and just throwing up more energy to catch up in FLOPS like Jensen said?
simne 6mo ago
Because very large share of market now are datacenters. Difference from desktop is dramatic - for desktop really acceptable very simple chips with bad energy efficiency, but DCs already deal with extremely high power consumption, as they typically "compress" so much consumption in one rack, that constantly working near to physical constraints.
- moffkalast 6mo ago
  That's the AI hype narrative, but aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market? That's tiny compared to consumer volume, though revenue is likely on par given the higher cost per unit.
  - simne 6mo ago
    > aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market? Yes and no. If just formally calculate, yes, servers are small market volumes. But, they are much less constrained financially, than private person, so from same fab one could earn much more money if sell to server market, than if sell to consumer market.
    - zozbot234 6mo ago
      I don't think that's correct, server chips aren't really "more expensive" than consumer chips when you correctly account for performance. Older-gen server chips have comparable performance to new top-of-the-line consumer chips and sell for a similar price. Newer-gen server chips in turn are priced at a premium over the current value of the older-gen, to account for their higher performance. The lower financial constraints don't enter into it all that much.
      - adrian_b 6mo ago
        For many years until about a decade ago (more precisely until the launch of the Intel Skylake Server processors) the server CPUs had a performance per dollar comparable to desktop CPUs so the expensive server CPUs were expensive because of their higher performance. But since then the prices of server CPUs have ballooned and now their performance per dollar is many times worse than for desktop CPUs. Server CPUs have very good performance per watt, but the same performance per watt is achieved with desktop CPUs by underclocking them. The only advantage of server CPUs is that they aggregate in a single socket the equivalent of many desktop CPUs, including not only the aggregate number of cores, but also the aggregate number of memory channels and the aggregate number of PCIe lanes. Thus a server computer becomes equivalent with a cluster of desktop computers that would be interconnected by network interfaces much faster than the typically available Ethernet links. While for embarrassingly parallel tasks a server computer will cost many times more than a cluster of desktop computers with the same performance, it will have a much less disadvantage or it might even have a better performance/cost ratio for tasks with a lot of interprocess/interthread communication, where the tight coupling between the many cores hosted by the same socket ensures a lower latency and a higher throughput for such communication. The owners of datacenters are willing to pay the much higher prices of modern server CPUs because the consolidation into a single server of multiple old servers brings economies in other components, due to less coolers, less power supplies, less racks, simpler maintenance and administration, etc. While the prices of server CPUs at retail are huge, the biggest costumers, like cloud owners, can get very large discounts, so for them the difference in comparison with desktop CPUs is not as great as for SMEs and individuals. The large discounts that Intel was forced to accept during the last few years, to avoid losing too much of the market to AMD, were the cause why Intel's server CPU division has lost many billions of $.

irdc 6mo ago

That’s what the likes of AMD with their chiplet design have been doing. There’s also the issue of older process nodes not being profitable enough anymore, which explaines why at the height of the chip supply crunch older ARM chips were in short supply but there was ample stock of the 20nm feature-sized RP2040.

moffkalast 6mo ago
This is gonna sound super dumb, but I'm not sure how they aren't being profitable if there are shortages, just price things beyond break even level? The average person can't even tell the difference between a Core 5 and a Core 5 Ultra, you can practically sell them at the same price and I'm not even sure they'd notice when actually using them. The performance jump is relatively minor and the bottlenecks are elsewhere.
- MadnessASAP 6mo ago
  It mostly comes down to the consumer market not being significant enough by itself. A consumer may not notice a 10% increase in performance per watt or dollar. A large office building probably will, and a datacenter definitely will. I don't think I'm being entirely hyperbolic when I say the consumer market only exists to put devices that can connect to and feed the datacenter loads into the general populations hands.
- irdc 6mo ago
  Part of those prices aren't something the manufacturer can adjust. Whether you're building 60nm or 20nm chips, you need pretty much the same silicon wafers, the same ultra pure water, the same chemicals and the same personnel. And as a bonus, you're not gonna be getting as many of the same chips on that wafer. And sure, a chip layout can be shrunk; but that requires a whole new recertification cycle.

frangonf 6mo ago

Isn't exactly this what China is doing? Apart from poaching ex ASML employees? Now reaching 7nm, and just throwing up more energy to catch up in FLOPS like Jensen said?

simne 6mo ago

Because very large share of market now are datacenters. Difference from desktop is dramatic - for desktop really acceptable very simple chips with bad energy efficiency, but DCs already deal with extremely high power consumption, as they typically "compress" so much consumption in one rack, that constantly working near to physical constraints.

moffkalast 6mo ago
That's the AI hype narrative, but aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market? That's tiny compared to consumer volume, though revenue is likely on par given the higher cost per unit.
- simne 6mo ago
  > aren't server CPUs only like 25% of the total market? Yes and no. If just formally calculate, yes, servers are small market volumes. But, they are much less constrained financially, than private person, so from same fab one could earn much more money if sell to server market, than if sell to consumer market.
  - zozbot234 6mo ago
    I don't think that's correct, server chips aren't really "more expensive" than consumer chips when you correctly account for performance. Older-gen server chips have comparable performance to new top-of-the-line consumer chips and sell for a similar price. Newer-gen server chips in turn are priced at a premium over the current value of the older-gen, to account for their higher performance. The lower financial constraints don't enter into it all that much.
    - adrian_b 6mo ago
      For many years until about a decade ago (more precisely until the launch of the Intel Skylake Server processors) the server CPUs had a performance per dollar comparable to desktop CPUs so the expensive server CPUs were expensive because of their higher performance. But since then the prices of server CPUs have ballooned and now their performance per dollar is many times worse than for desktop CPUs. Server CPUs have very good performance per watt, but the same performance per watt is achieved with desktop CPUs by underclocking them. The only advantage of server CPUs is that they aggregate in a single socket the equivalent of many desktop CPUs, including not only the aggregate number of cores, but also the aggregate number of memory channels and the aggregate number of PCIe lanes. Thus a server computer becomes equivalent with a cluster of desktop computers that would be interconnected by network interfaces much faster than the typically available Ethernet links. While for embarrassingly parallel tasks a server computer will cost many times more than a cluster of desktop computers with the same performance, it will have a much less disadvantage or it might even have a better performance/cost ratio for tasks with a lot of interprocess/interthread communication, where the tight coupling between the many cores hosted by the same socket ensures a lower latency and a higher throughput for such communication. The owners of datacenters are willing to pay the much higher prices of modern server CPUs because the consolidation into a single server of multiple old servers brings economies in other components, due to less coolers, less power supplies, less racks, simpler maintenance and administration, etc. While the prices of server CPUs at retail are huge, the biggest costumers, like cloud owners, can get very large discounts, so for them the difference in comparison with desktop CPUs is not as great as for SMEs and individuals. The large discounts that Intel was forced to accept during the last few years, to avoid losing too much of the market to AMD, were the cause why Intel's server CPU division has lost many billions of $.