4 ms·

Completely agreed, and it's hitting a dangerous point where not enough companies are putting in the necessary investment. I studied quite a bit of both VLSI/chi

by rm999 12y ago

Completely agreed, and it's hitting a dangerous point where not enough companies are putting in the necessary investment. I studied quite a bit of both VLSI/chip design and economics in college, but I never fully understood what was behind Moore's Law until I read this quora comment: http://www.quora.com/Moores-Law/For-how-long-will-Moores-Law-continue-to-hold/answer/David-Crawley-1 http://www.quora.com/Moores-Law/For-how-long-will-Moores-Law... Here's a snippet: >The limits of Moore's Law is not driven by current technology, after all if we knew how to go smaller we probably would have done it. The limits of Moore's Law are really a matter of cost. Each new node shrink increases the technology development cost in a fairly predictable way by about 40%. The result is that Moore's Law is limited by economics. > ... > When [Intel] figures out that they don't have invest so heavily to stay ahead then Moore's Law will slow Moore's Law doesn't exist in a vacuum - the cost to keep Moore's Law going has been increasing exponentially, and fewer and fewer companies have been able to keep up.

tormeh 12y ago
Well, Intel can't slow down unilaterally - they have suppliers and a whole network of companies that depend on having everything on schedule. I guess they could slow down as long as they give a couple of years of warning, though.
sliverstorm 12y ago
it's hitting a dangerous point where not enough companies are putting in the necessary investment. That is, of course, because they are reaching the point where they couldn't recoup the cost. Intel has tremendous volumes and margins, which will allow them to scale to more expensive nodes more quickly than much of the rest of the industry.
- sitkack 12y ago
  They also need those hyper-dense transistors to achieve designs, not just for boosting margins via smaller parts.
hyp0 12y ago
This 40% cost increase will eventually pressure them to increase revenue/volume, perhaps by that Apple-Intel rumour a few years back...
- ZenoArrow 12y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if at some point later on (when it's almost impossible to move to a new process node) that Intel starts developing ARM chips again (they did it before with StrongARM and XScale). With the manufacturing advantages that Intel have they could easily become the largest player in that market, giving them an easy to get cash injection.
  - seunosewa 12y ago
    ARM processors are much cheaper than Intel X86 processors, so it won't be much of a cash injection.
    - jp555 12y ago
      A family would share one or two X86 CPUs replaced every 3-5years. But very soon I'll probably have at least half a dozen ARM CPUs within a few meters of me wherever I go, all with much shorter replacement cycles.
      - kevinchen 12y ago
        And, Intel could charge more for them since nobody else can match their process capabilities. It may not be a ton of money, but it's better than having a factory sit idle in a hypothetical future where x86 chips are mostly used in servers and higher end workstations.
    - adventured 12y ago
      Qualcomm is likely to hit a $9.x billion annual profit run-rate in the next four quarters. By comparison Intel's profit for 2013 was $9.6 billion. If Intel had been smart about it, the moment they saw the iPhone (not to mention Jobs asked Intel to come up with a solution for the iPhone), they would have fired up a new ARM chip and went after the smart phone market. By not doing so, they likely left tens of billions of profit on the table. Shareholders should be furious.
plainOldText 12y ago
After reading the article, the first thing I started thinking was why do we need to wait for 2 years to double the number of transistors on a chip. Why can't be advance faster; only to discover your comment a little later. Thanks. This is just one of those instances which makes me realize how much I appreciate the existence of a place such as HN.
JoachimS 12y ago
The semiconductor industry is that - an industry with numerous companies providing the materials, equipment, operations etc needed for Intel, TSMC, Samsung to build and run their fabs. In order for this to work, there is a need for coordination. The manufacturers of steppers for example must be able to deliver a stepper that can draw features with the needed resolution at a given time. Since the development takes time, they and everybody else needs to communicate and decide how fast Moores law progress. Moores law thus represents what all parties agree to are what can be achieved and can meet the end user requirements over time. The industry organisation responsible for this is ITRS - The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors: http://www.itrs.net/ http://www.itrs.net/ If one wants to see the predictions for Moores law, ITRS have documents available that are well worth studying. When I worked on ASIC design for mobile handsets we looked at these documents for product roadmaps since we could predict the power consumption, gate density etc for future process nodes. Intel can to a higher degree than many others move forward at their on pacing. But they don't make their own fab from scratch nor produce their materials all by themselves. This means that even if Intel is able to develop a process in the lab that provides smaller feature size, efficiency and whatnot than what is agreed upon. But they can't move that much faster than the rest of the industry if they want to manufacture chips in commercial quantities.
- danieltillett 12y ago
  Great post. I knew that there must have been some mechanism to keep Moores law ticking over but I never knew how it was co-ordinated.
- zokier 12y ago
  > But they can't move that much faster than the rest of the industry if they want to manufacture chips in commercial quantities. Maybe not, but on the other hand Intel began mass-producing 22nm CPUs in 2011, while TSMC has began volume production on their 20nm process this year.

by rm999 12y ago

tormeh 12y ago

Well, Intel can't slow down unilaterally - they have suppliers and a whole network of companies that depend on having everything on schedule. I guess they could slow down as long as they give a couple of years of warning, though.

sliverstorm 12y ago

it's hitting a dangerous point where not enough companies are putting in the necessary investment. That is, of course, because they are reaching the point where they couldn't recoup the cost. Intel has tremendous volumes and margins, which will allow them to scale to more expensive nodes more quickly than much of the rest of the industry.

sitkack 12y ago
They also need those hyper-dense transistors to achieve designs, not just for boosting margins via smaller parts.

hyp0 12y ago

This 40% cost increase will eventually pressure them to increase revenue/volume, perhaps by that Apple-Intel rumour a few years back...

ZenoArrow 12y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point later on (when it's almost impossible to move to a new process node) that Intel starts developing ARM chips again (they did it before with StrongARM and XScale). With the manufacturing advantages that Intel have they could easily become the largest player in that market, giving them an easy to get cash injection.
- seunosewa 12y ago
  ARM processors are much cheaper than Intel X86 processors, so it won't be much of a cash injection.
  - jp555 12y ago
    A family would share one or two X86 CPUs replaced every 3-5years. But very soon I'll probably have at least half a dozen ARM CPUs within a few meters of me wherever I go, all with much shorter replacement cycles.
    - kevinchen 12y ago
      And, Intel could charge more for them since nobody else can match their process capabilities. It may not be a ton of money, but it's better than having a factory sit idle in a hypothetical future where x86 chips are mostly used in servers and higher end workstations.
  - adventured 12y ago
    Qualcomm is likely to hit a $9.x billion annual profit run-rate in the next four quarters. By comparison Intel's profit for 2013 was $9.6 billion. If Intel had been smart about it, the moment they saw the iPhone (not to mention Jobs asked Intel to come up with a solution for the iPhone), they would have fired up a new ARM chip and went after the smart phone market. By not doing so, they likely left tens of billions of profit on the table. Shareholders should be furious.

plainOldText 12y ago

After reading the article, the first thing I started thinking was why do we need to wait for 2 years to double the number of transistors on a chip. Why can't be advance faster; only to discover your comment a little later. Thanks. This is just one of those instances which makes me realize how much I appreciate the existence of a place such as HN.

JoachimS 12y ago

The semiconductor industry is that - an industry with numerous companies providing the materials, equipment, operations etc needed for Intel, TSMC, Samsung to build and run their fabs. In order for this to work, there is a need for coordination. The manufacturers of steppers for example must be able to deliver a stepper that can draw features with the needed resolution at a given time. Since the development takes time, they and everybody else needs to communicate and decide how fast Moores law progress. Moores law thus represents what all parties agree to are what can be achieved and can meet the end user requirements over time. The industry organisation responsible for this is ITRS - The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors: http://www.itrs.net/ http://www.itrs.net/ If one wants to see the predictions for Moores law, ITRS have documents available that are well worth studying. When I worked on ASIC design for mobile handsets we looked at these documents for product roadmaps since we could predict the power consumption, gate density etc for future process nodes. Intel can to a higher degree than many others move forward at their on pacing. But they don't make their own fab from scratch nor produce their materials all by themselves. This means that even if Intel is able to develop a process in the lab that provides smaller feature size, efficiency and whatnot than what is agreed upon. But they can't move that much faster than the rest of the industry if they want to manufacture chips in commercial quantities.

danieltillett 12y ago
Great post. I knew that there must have been some mechanism to keep Moores law ticking over but I never knew how it was co-ordinated.
zokier 12y ago
> But they can't move that much faster than the rest of the industry if they want to manufacture chips in commercial quantities. Maybe not, but on the other hand Intel began mass-producing 22nm CPUs in 2011, while TSMC has began volume production on their 20nm process this year.