AMD struck gold with TSMC right?
5nm started risk production were direct from TSMC report. They are expecting even faster ramp than 7nm. And TSMC has a history of being very conservative.
Their approach has been iteration rather than a leap like Intel did. And you can bet it will arrive on scheduled for next year's Apple iPhone.
There are roadmap, tools, technique for 3nm ( As explained in the Article ) and even 2nm. So none of these are pipe dreams. As long as these customers can keep paying top dollar to be on leading node, TSMC seems to have no problem with innovating. The question is when will these clients slow down and stop paying every year because leading node is too expensive. Basically the cost of designing leading node is doubling every two year. So we are seeing something like the inverse of Moore's Law.
For consumer electronics, there is genuinely no benefits now going to smaller nodes, but for something like a "single chip supercomputer" type products, made with the most over the top semi tech, there is no better client than them.
For them, they are basically turning joules into ad clicks, and thus money, much akin to that bitcoin thing, which up until few years ago was one of the biggest semiconductor consumer globally.
I agree. And this is where the market dynamics changes, it will be interesting when the cost / economics model changes how things will unfold. Especially Amazon as they are already designing their own ARM CPU for Cloud Services.
Intel's 10nm and 7nm never went into Risk Production, Intel could lie about their progress because they were the only user of their Fab. And they never gave a precise definition, progress of their node, as they are not a Foundry business. Compared to TSMC Hundred of Customers relies on them being open and transparent with their progress. As long as Intel could continue to sell their Chips, it really doesn't matter which node they are on. Which is the reason Why Intel Custom Foundry never took off, they have held information to closely to themselves, and didn't treat their customer as parter in the likes of Samsung and TSMC.
[0]: Higher frequency UV light is more tightly focused, but also imparts more energy. At some point the blasting power of a single photon does damage on a scale larger than the wavelengths involved, at which point EUV will take you no further.
This is something being said every few years. There were times when people were telling of 1 micron being "the wall."
Also, current HW design is really inefficient. Think about all the crud between some front-end developer and the server powering the webpage on the backend, vs a ‘native’ app. That’s a good analogy to current HW design and real total-badass low level HW design.
But anyway, undesirable quantum effects have been problematic for almost a decade, and were overcome with a variety of techniques (inc FinFET).
The size of transistors themselves were not changing much during last few node transition, what shrunk was the space and wiring in between of them.
The node size represents the equivalent 'gate' size of a standard transistor with similar performance characteristics.
By using better transistor designs, you can make the effective gate size much smaller than the actual gate size.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound
It is derived through quantum mechanics and via the Plank constants and black hole physics.
Basically any more information squeezed together would turn into a black hole.
Though ordinary (non quantum) thermodynamics limits information density well before this bound.
As to what happens in the next decades with the good old Silicon stuff. Well, nobody knows just yet, but 3nm is what anyone realistically talks about, and just sci-fi tech after that.
[0] https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/10/e1600911.full
https://old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/8pdxo7/nvidias_ceo_...
We like to think of all the big chips from Intel, AMD, Nvidia, etc or of bleeding edge mobile processors from Apple or Qualcomm. The reality is that these are a small fraction of the total market for chips. The vast majority of chips are made at 28nm or larger because the cost of production is so much lower.
Supply and demand is another big factor. As supply increases, prices will drop down to bare minimums and if costs can't be reduced enough, there will be expensive fabs sitting around doing nothing. Even if GF has enough money to design and make the fab, that doesn't mean the demand is high enough for them to charge enough to recover their costs.
Instead of spending that money on 7nm, they can spend it refining their 22, 14, and 12nm lines to improve efficiency and lower production costs. With TSMC or Samsung pouring those billions into 7 and 5nm, there's a good chance at GF pulling quite a bit ahead in the slightly older nodes. Once they have done this, those bulk chip makers using 28nm will start moving to smaller nodes. There's quite a tidy sum of profit to be reaped here. Given how every consumer has dozens to hundreds of these small chips for every cutting-edge chip in their home, appliances, or car, there is cumulatively a huge savings to be had in product and energy costs.
Their older designs, which will still be produced in large numbers for some time I assume, are using 180nm.