TSMC officially begins 5 nm production
notebookcheck.net
notebookcheck.net
That being said, I'm not too worried about Intel, they have such a diverse silicon portfolio(FPGAs, Optane, etc.) that I'm sure they'll be fine in the end.
My $0.02.
There will be additional efficiencies to be found, and TSMC may continue to have an edge on a business-process level, but if shrinking stops, I'd expect the market to become as competitive as vehicle manufacturing currently is, by 2040.
I'm still smarting about that dropping 3 weeks after we rolled new servers out at work.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15217/intels-manufacturing-ro...
Roadmaps are just speculation at this point.
If I remember correctly, a silicon atom and the spacing between them make ~0.2 nm If you think that starting at 2nm we are getting closer and closer to this physical limit is utterly wrong: Because what we call 2nm is not a 2nm transistors. Today transistors (7nm) have some parts that are on the hundred of nanometers! What I would like to know is how much reducing those parts will bring performance? Maybe those parts of a transistor actually matters far less?
TSMC did not exist 33 years ago, so 20 years is a very long time especially with the full weight of the Chinese government thrown in.
-SMIC is shipping 14nm finFETs, with a 7nm-like process in R&D. -Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) recently entered the 3D NAND market with a 64-layer device. A 128-layer technology is in R&D. -ChangXin Memory Technology (CXMT) is shipping its first product, a 19nm DRAM line. -China is expanding into compound semis, including gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC). -China’s OSATs are developing more advanced packages.
About 20 years ago China started developing its own 3G flavour as a way to develop its technology and to catch up. People were saying that they were quite far behind and that this might only sell in China (which it mostly did).
But today we see the result of this long term investment with Chinese companies front and centre in cellular an 5G.
I feel that chip manufacturing has shot up to an even higher priority for them now, so I'm thinking that the landscape may look very different from now in 20 years...
So I think everything is good til 2030.
Engineering in the billionths of a mm, alien technology to anyone born when I was born in 1980.
If you want to compare manufacturing processes then simply compare transistor densities. That way you will avoid the paradox of thinking that the physical limitations of an old transistor design apply to a chip that is using a completely different design. Here is a list of different possible designs [0].
[0] https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/FET-T...
There are really a lot of density boosters on the table to move the industry to N1 without much actual physical scaling.
Buried metal, CMOS-on-MOS, cells micro-optimisation, high-k on more things, vertical GAA...
If they can get to 0.5 na on 3500, then you don't even need to double pattern to reach N1 with all of the above
wikichip has five nodes listed under "5 nm lithography process", two of which are TSMC's:
- N5
- N5P
so N1 would be a hypothetical future process that can produce '1nm' "features".
I feel like I've been seeing these "can't shrink further very soon" claims (including the claim of hard, insurmountable physical limits) for about as long as fusion was 20 years away.
Now, you have huge entities like AWS that can, for example, move things like ALB, RDS, SQS, or Aurora off of Intel on little more than a whim.
Basically, the leverage on the customer side is consolidated now, and the barrier to leave you is lower.
Whom is Amazon going to sell low-bin Gravitons to? It isn't cost effective to run them, just like it's not cost effective to use low-binned Intel or AMD chips in datacenters. It's intrinsic to the way all chips are manufactured.
Making your own low performance chips makes clear economic sense, as the producer and consumer of all output. But there have been decades of people trying to make their own high-performance chips as both consumer and producer, and they inevitably fail. And it's not super black and white, whose "subsidizing" whom, in the chip business - datacenter purchasers get cheaper chips because Intel can sell lower-binned parts to enthusiasts, while enthusiasts get cheaper parts because datacenters pay more. Same thing is observed for GPUs, product segmentation in chips is a real synergy and not zero sum.
Who knows if that will succeed, for the idiosyncratic reason of the foundry business being separate from the IP business. Did it really just take a corporate reorg? Maybe AMD was right.
But my point on how easy it is now, as compared to the past, for large swaths of customers to move away from Intel, stands. Moving to AMD or some 3rd party ARM provider are options outside of Graviton that can be done quickly.
While I recognized that this is indeed the case, I'd not considered some of the recent plays that Apple has been making. Forget those Gravitons. Forget those low volume datacenter ARM chips too. Also forget those high-binned EYPC and Xeon chips.
What happens when those rackmount Mac Pro machines go to Apple silicon? Datacenters are already paying a premium for processors, but these are much better at performance-per-watt, and Apple can afford to cut the prices on the first and second generation ones to make it up in volume and then ratchet up the prices later once they've got the marketshare.
They'd just run their internal clusters with the high binned parts, and the low binned parts would go into their AWS budget tiers.
Tada! Now they've got the best, and unloaded the rest onto suckers while billing them for the privilege.
And low bin chips are still going to be more power efficient than the previous generation.
The answer is nothing. If it isn't already, TSMC will eventually pass the cost onto Apple.
If they're starting with designs that are very energy/heat efficient then couldn't they fuse off the bad parts of the dies and then glue like 10 of them onto a single interposer and still have a tdp competitive with x86 server parts?
To the same customers as higher-bin Gravitons. It'll just be sold in the form of services, where you don't get to see the CPU directly.
Man, I would not know if amazon was bribing anandtech or something, but the gravitron2s are they're wiping the floor here with Intel and Amd when it comes to performance per cost and even holding their own single threaded which I did not expect.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-grav...
Times of crisis are also interesting, maybe intel will have to find new ideas to get his status back.
Nice timing.
Recently TSMC uses names like N7 and N5 for their processes, because they're no more related to actual nanometers on chips. Same for Intel, but they stick to their traditional naming.
That had a diverse portfolio 25 years ago. They sold all of it off and now only have a handful of money makers.
First, Intel and the semiconductor consortium started the garbage definition of a technology node about 10 years ago, when pitch levels stopped following Moore's law.
Now TSMC and all Intel competitors straight up started lying through their teeth. I'm sure what TSMC is calling '5nm' is a complete joke even in face of the horrible redefinition 10 years ago.
Don't believe me? See for yourself:
- nVidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was announced in 2016. base clock 1481 MHz, 11.34 TeraFLOPs FP32, on a 471 mm2 die [1].
- Four years later, RTX 3080 Ti, base clock 1905 MHz, 21.1 TeraFLOPs FP32, on a 700 mm2 die [2].
- 21.1 / 11.34 = 1.86x improvement in raw TeraFLOPs.
- 700 / 471 = 1.486x die size increase
- 1905 / 1481 = 1.286x base clock increase
- 1.486 * 1.286 = 1.91x
Conclusion: nVidia could use the bigger die size and the higher base clock to deliver 1.91x the performance using the same 16nm technology node (theoretically). But instead, using the 7nm node, they're delivering even less of a performance bump, 1.86x, when in reality it should've been 7.64x (= 4x * 1.91x, considering two node jumps, and the die-size and base-clock bump).
[1] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-1080-ti.c2...
[2] https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3080-ti.c3...
GTX 1080 - 11b transistors (2016)
RTX 3080 - 45b transistors (2020)
From Wikipedia
"Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years."
That's just... insane. That's five transistors for every person on the planet. In 700 mm2.
[Edit: And a number that people have some intuition of how big it is.]
An impressive feat for sure but it is just using brute force to increase performance nowadays.
GTX 1080: 42.81 mm^2 per billion transistors. 41.53 mm^2 per TFLOP. 0.97 billion transistors per TFLOP.
RTX 3080: 15.55 mm^2 per billion transistors. 33.17 mm^2 per TFLOP. 2.13 billion transistors per TFLOP.
They scale well for transistors against die size, and TFLOP against die size, but terribly in transistors per TFLOP? That can't be right.
Checking https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3080-ti.c3... I now see it says "Based on speculation / placeholder", which makes me think it's all just totally made up, and not reliable evidence to declare the death of Moore just yet.
I could design you a chip that is nothing but FP32 multipliers and adders that has, theoretically, a ridiculous TFLOPS per mm^2, but it would be next to useless in any real workload.
For the same number of SMs, you're also paying substantial area for the tensor cores, ray tracing acceleration, independent thread scheduling, different I/O to support memory technologies, more NV link, larger caches, etc. That stuff didn't happen for free.
A simply die shrunk 1080 would have had more TFlops than what we have, but it wouldn't be as interesting of a product.
The new nm numbers simply try to extrapolate transistor density using an old numbering scheme that everyone is familiar with.
Note that the marketing name is meaningless, has nothing to do with feature sizes. Also note that "Intel 10nm" is denser than "TSMC 7nm" and Intel's planned "7nm" should be denser than "TSMC 5nm".
In the last 12 months, Intel's net profit was $21,000,000,000.
I don't work for Intel so I don't know, but I'd wager that any chip node that TSMC can produce, Intel can produce as well. Intel has access to the same equipment and plenty of profit to work with. They either choose not to, or, they simply choose not to advertise the capability.
For TSMC, as a foundry, their manufacturing capability is a selling point. For Intel, it is a strategic advantage. It makes sense for TSMC to announce what node they are capable of. It does not make sense for Intel to do so. Intel sells chips based on the chips' capabilities. Not on Intel's manufacturing capabilities.
Also in the article:
> Interestingly, however, Intel's CFO has previously admitted that 10nm yields aren't great and will actually be lower in profitability than their older 22nm process
I'm looking for more than assumptions and inference based on public information. Sure, Intel might not have the capability to build at 5nm even if they wanted to, but a lack of public evidence that they are building at that node does not mean they can't.
Yeah right.
Cambodia, North Korea, Myanmar, Mongolia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, Laos, Thailand, Nepal, Russia, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan
Which of those are leading the world in "high tech"?
China's only consequential tech company is Huawei. South Korea has Samsung, SK and LG. Taiwan has TSMC, Pegatron, Quanta. Japan has Sony, Nintendo, Canon, Hitachi, Panasonic and one or two others that are relevant.
It's amazing how far ahead the US remains after so many decades.
Apple, Intel, AMD, Cisco, nVidia, Qualcomm, Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Micron, Texas Instruments, Lam Research, Applied Materials, Western Digital, Seagate, Broadcom, NetApp, Adobe, Facebook, Salesforce, VMWare, Dell EMC, HP, Intuit, Marvell, Oracle, Analog Devices, Microchip Technology, Citrix, Xilinx, Maxim Integrated, KLA Corp, Tesla, Illumina, Agilent, Intuitive Surgical
That's a partial list of large US tech companies. Asia has nothing like it, and that's before getting into the vast number of US software & cloud services companies (Workday, ServiceNow, Splunk, Twilio, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palo Alto Networks, Akamai, etc.), of which Asia has no comparable list.
Besides that, Asia isn't a country, it's silly to pretend they're somehow one unit. They're all competitors. It's equivalent to pretending Europe or Latin America operate as combinations.
Show me the Asia equivalent of AWS (Alibaba's 1/5th size clone?). The world lags embarrassingly, the US has a ten year lead in cloud services.
Tencent is a gaming & entertainment company. Baidu is a languishing search company that never got outside of China. Alibaba is an advertising platform that does nothing special. ByteDance is mostly social media, there's nothing special about that either (see: FB, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest, etc).
China is the only individual country that comes close to competing with the US in tech and they're still well behind in most tech segments and surpass the US in none other than digital payments.
Add Nikon to the list, especially in the context of chip fabbing (They and Canon are one of the few companies that make fab equipment not necessarily of the same caliber as ASML, but similar vein.).
Lenovo?
These same engineers looking to go would rather relocate to Germany or the US than China. Either way there is a serious brain drain going on here where the brightest want to leave. Taiwan is a wonderful place but I question its stability over the next few decades.
I was told a decade ago by my professor that chip makers were facing an issue with electrons jumping across these tiny circuits, and couldn't go much smaller. I'm continuously surprised.
But that's not really what is happening here. The first thing is that those are feature size, not the size of the dopant region. They are like the size of the pixels on a screen, where the transistors get drawn. The second thing is that this limit is for silicon crystals, and top of line chips are now built in 3D with mixed materials, so you can have an entire crystal that is smaller (at least in one dimension) than that limit.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
There's are 2.8GHz processors at the top of that benchmark with a 3100 score and one near the bottom with a 539 score, as well as everywhere in between.
My dad uses a computer with C2Q CPU and it's still fast enough for everyday use.
Edit: to be clear, he's still wrong, we had quite untrivial IPC increase during all these years. I just wanted to point out that he's comment probably was based on empirical data.
I've got a 13 year old laptop that runs today's OS's and development software a little slow but ultimately just fine, and if it weren't for a low limit on installed RAM it would be more than "ultimately" just fine.
That would've been absolutely laughable even 10 years ago, much less 20. You'd be lucky to be able to run a then-current OS on 2-3 year old hardware in the 90's through early 2000's.
Some years later I got a 486. The difference was night and day.
Some years later I got a Pentium 150. The difference was night and day.
Some years later I got a Pentium III. The difference was night and day.
Some five years ago I had a i7 2600k. I now got a Ryzen 3800x. Is it faster? Yes. Is it night and day? For what I do every day, no.
Within an architecture, yes, but between architectures performance of different usage patterns may vary wildly.
> which cannot go above 5Ghz
this is objectively false. Intel is shipping (limited amounts of) chips that boost over 5GHz, and IBM is shipping its z15 z/architecture CPU which clocks at 5.2 GHz, and shipped its ancestor, the zEC12 CPU clocking in at 5.5Ghz (!), in 2012.
In a very loose sense.
It's clock speed * instructions per clock. But even that is misleading, as the number of instructions per clock is not a fixed quantity and hasn't been for decades now. It's also impacted by the instructions that came before and the ones predicted to come next.
> this is exactly why ancient Core Duos, made in 2007 are still perfectly usable for office applications and even lightweight development
They are suitable because these applications are not very demanding. A Core2Duo at the same clock speed of a modern processor will be much slower.
> cannot go above 5Ghz
Can, and have. But the cost-benefit of increasing clock speeds further is not favorable.
As of 2014, the Guinness World Record for the highest CPU clock rate is an overclocked, 8.723 GHz AMD Piledriver-based FX-8370 chip
Besides being hard to cool, it causes chemical, delamination and other changes to the chip, eroding it.
"In 2001, Pat Gelsinger—then Intel‘s CTO—predicted that within a decade the energy density of chips would be equivalent to the surface the sun if nothing was done."