TSMC and Graphcore Prepare for AI Acceleration on 3nm
anandtech.com
anandtech.com
It's a bit worrying how all this innovation, with the possibility (perhaps even likelihood) of completely cornering the market, is all in one country, that is very close to another country, that doesn't want it to be its own country.
That's actually good news for Taiwan. TSMC is already very important for everyone. If it becomes the only player in high-end chip making, there is a good chance western countries won't let China invade Taiwan.
They also need to train the new employees in the US, it'll take time to get great chip engineers there, and get Taiwanese volunteers to move to the US.
I love reading through random tech journals, the type with highly industry-specific ads in them, as an insight into the worlds other people live in. Jobs and every day problems I will never experience first-hand.
One of the single most eye-popping experiences like that was an ad in a chip industry quarterly I found somewhere that was breathlessly advertising that their latest tool (a machine the size of a garage) now had an MTBF of "just" 27 hours instead of the previous 2-3 hours, a massive tenfold improvement! Cutting edge stuff, apparently, compared to the competition. The really impressive part apparently was that by cutting down on maintenance time, it could be "online" for up to 90% of the time instead of just 30-50% of the time or somesuch. Apparently that's impressively good in this space.
The rest of the ad (and much of the journal) kept going on and on (and on!) about how their tool has easy-swap parts, can keep the vacuum during repair, has tool-less panels, quick access, no need for heavy lifting, etc...
I don't think I'm exaggerating too much by saying that nearly 50% of all technical development in the fab industry is about reducing the maintenance effort, and hence staffing costs.
Put ads and positive press in trade journals you know your customers read. It increases the percentage of their minds you occupy.
In-person contact does that too. They aren't mutually exclusive strategies.
A lot of this equipment is so expensive, that the cost of a few trade journal ads is negligible compared to the amount of revenue involved.
If the question was why would Intel invest into making the chips in US - from recent news it seems like US understands how dependent it is on other nations for silicon manufacturing, which poses many questions. The biggest one seems to be national security, which looking from the side is the only factor that gets thing done in US.
You will want to read up on The Republic of Formosa, WWII and the history of Taiwan at some point. There are enough Chinese nationals on this website to downvote us all but suffice to say, it is widely regarded at the federal level that Taiwan could come under siege by the Chinese Communist Party at anytime and be used as a bargaining chip with the West along with Hong Kong, the DPRK armistice and Western financial interests in Macau. We need to begin evacuating Hong Kong and Taiwan immediately back to the USA --in fact, China just seized a boat of people fleeing Hong Kong last night, the first time they have done that (and on what charges, nobody knows, not even the Chief of Police of Hong Kong). As the President said today, we are going to break it off cold with China and as you expand your knowledge of the situation, you will realize that China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and the people of Taiwan do not.
And there is a good chance that it may never be, just like Foxconns Wisconsin facility.
What will it do for chip production?
Maybe you'd lose against other modern, well integrated forces. But there is a lot of the world whereby forts, trenches, gun emplacements are still their best. And they are simply butter to the modern military knife.
Barring major catastrophe,(ww3, another american civil war, a pandemic that kills large % of younger population etc) it will take far more than 10 years to decline past that point.
The Iraq Military Exercise (I can't call that a war.) is a clear example of that.
The US lost the Afghanistan war, is slowly losing Irak to Iran, lost all face and is getting humiliated in Syria, failed at preventing Russia impose its presidential candidate, is alienating its european allies (see the Iran sanctions debacle), is supporting the savage Saudi Arabia -- who is losing the war in Yemen.
No you didn't win anything, you temporarily held territory, you wasted enormous resources, and were in fact beaten by goat herders in the end.
Without putting the whole country in a concentration camp and re-educating for 20 years and without providing an alternative economic model, a central administration in Afghanistan is irrelevant wether you do it for "a few year" or decades.
This meant that America became heavily reliant on local war lords (some of whom had dealings with the Taliban) to ensure security and maintain order. This undermined the government they were trying to build in Kabul and contributed to a culture of corruption. None of which endeared the common afghan to their newly formed institutions. The Taliban exploited these weaknesses with classic insurgency tactics and gradually took territory from the weak central authorities.
This was all entirely avoidable, America just didn’t stay focused on the mission.
Sure, there are sanctions, because Russia actually annexed Crimea.
Russia knows very well that teritory grabbing in itself is pointless in the 21th century, Russia grabbed enough territory to nullify any chance Ukraine or Georgia will join NATO.
Don't get me wrong, as an eastern european, I hate what Russia stands for, but militarily and geostrategiclly, they know very well what they are doing, because they cannot aford not to, unlike the USA.
You cannot win a war if you fail to reach your strategic objectives -- then it's not a war, but a bar brawl you "won".
1. Secured strategic access to Iraq's oil resources. 2. Establish a permanent military presence in the region. 3. Removed the the de facto government.
1. The US was in no danger of remaining without oil, the price of oil skyrocketed after the US invasion, and the "access" was certainly not worth trillions of dollars that the war cost, not to US as a whole.
2. The US already had a military presence in Saudi Arabia, and without the vicious circle of violence it itself caused, the US had no reason to maintain a permanent military presence in Irak.
Just see the recent Soleimani debacle -- the US is one such debacle away from being kicked out of Irak after blowing those trillions, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, helping spawn Daesh, causing economic devastation in Irak and the region.
In 2008, the US imported 600.000 barrels of oil per day from Irak -- that's when oil peaked at ~150 -- but if the whole year the oil stayed at 150$/barrel, and the US just stole it without paying Irak anything, that's just 32 billion USD.
It would take the US 60 years to recuperate all the money it would have spent on Irak war if it was to steal all the oil from Irak at the levels of 2008, or 380 years at todays import levels and valuations (assuming the oil was war booty -- it is not).
There is no way the war was started over oil, that would be beyond dumb.
My personal theory is it was just the industrial-military oligarchs who started the war as to forever saddle the US taxpayer.
That, and US construction and oil companies.
A quick, unexpected, massive deployment of significant US military assets to Taiwan would put Beijing in a very difficult position. Either Beijing attacks, and starts a shooting war with the US – which would do massive damage to the Chinese economy; or else, Beijing doesn't and loses a lot of face in the process.
It would be a rather risky, high stakes gamble, but one in which the US might come out in front.
I think COVID has shown Chinese society/government/people are much better equipped for big shocks than the US is so if it's a protracted thing they would have a huge advantage.
Also I'm not sure how people of Taiwan would react to such deployment. Neither Taiwan nor China recognize each other as a separate country. They both claim to be the righteous government to one unified China.
Until then, it’s vapor ware. I’d refer to this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21530810
This is easy to do when you don’t have to use any standard benchmarks (MLPerf) and do not allow anybody to verify any claims.
is it big data analytics from the largest socnets ?
I mostly think about ML for self driving vehicles but I'd like to know where else it's applied.
Sigh, another post... another top comment not understanding that marketing name =/= any actual feature size anywhere on the chip.
I've been reading threads like this for 10+ years now, and somehow this knowledge has still not permeated the tech culture here and on reddit.
The measurement that was used originally for 'L' was the gate length.
As designs shrunk below 40nm, it became impossible to shrink _every_ dimension proportionally. In particular, for planar silicon, gate length stops shrinking around ~30nm, but other things could still shrink. This meant that transistor density could still increase, but the relative geometry of wires/gates/spacing/etc. had to change, so it was no longer possible to specify the full geometry with a single number.
But people liked the single number as a handy way of comparing processes, so marketing kept using it as a way to compare processes. The way they decided to do that was mostly to try and keep the proportionality between the transistor density of a process and 1/L^2.
To the extent a "feature size" number of a process means anything, it means "the relative transistor density of this process is equivalent to what you would get if you had used the old (>40nm) geometry, and shrunk 'L' to the specified feature size". Even that relationship has degraded in recent years - now it's more like "we calculate the new feature size as the size of the previous process divided by sqrt(2)".
Regardless, as stated in the parent, there is no single dimension of any recent process that corresponds to the '3nm' number.
There's lots of resources online that describe this, but for an overview, you could start here (describes pre- and post-Dennard scaling): http://www.eng.biu.ac.il/temanad/files/2017/02/Lecture-4-Sca...
https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs250/fa09/lectures/lec01.pd...
(To the casual reader: Note how the dimensions all have no unit. There are measured in L as indicated by the parent.)
What would be even more useful is an actual answer to the underlying question the OP seems to be making: how much further until one of the many dimensions you are talking about simply runs out of Si atoms?
In other words, however "made-up" the 3nm marketing number may be, physics limits should still dictate a lower bound for it, and the OP seems to be wondering what that is.
For example, stacked chips are increasingly being used but are fundamentally limited by heat transport. Maybe when we get into sub-1nm "sizes" the process nodes will be defined by how well they transport heat out of volumetric chip designs? Or we'll switch to twisted graphene superconductors for certain components which increases efficiency without necessarily shrinking feature sizes. Etc.
I'm just throwing those possibilities out. The point is we can't predict when scaling will ultimately end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor
This has nothing to do with the mass produced transistors (yet!) those are 10s of nm across even in 3 or 5nm.
Does this mean there’s actually a lot more room to shrink things?
If the transistors were laid out on a square grid (they aren't - it's rectangular), each square would be 76nm on a side. This area includes the transistor itself, the contact area (to connect the transistor to wires) and the required spacing to prevent the transistors from interfering with each other.
That's interesting - are they just entirely making that up then? What's the 3nm supposed to represent?
It seems like it's one thing to pick a specific dimension length to measure even if it's not proportional to all of the others, and another to just pick one that isn't represented at all.
The exact details are under NDA but to get a 'very' approximate idea of the scale of things one can look at the 5nm Wikipedia page.
They list the metal pitch as 30nm in TSMC's N5 node so in general two pieces of metal cannot be within 6 'pixels' of one another. One gets a rough guess on the distance between transistors by looking at the gate pitch (roughly 10 pixels in this case) but that measurement comes with a lot of caveats too.
Keep in mind this is when you're going out of your way to make something tiny but there are many good electrical engineering reasons to make the transistors larger still, and quite a lot of them are.
A progression over 5nm. That is all.
Yes it's sad that node sizes are marketed in the same way the GHz race was at one stage and equally the disparity is greater when comparing nodes like for like.
For example, if the parent comment had said, "Yes, the control over small numbers of atoms is interesting. Although transistors are going to be much larger than that, it is cool that the shrinking feature size allows [making up a "fact" here for demonstration purposes] edges of transistors to be sharper and a little closer together, so yields are higher for a given transistor density," then it would be more useful and better received.
Also, remember "today's 10000": https://xkcd.com/1053/
(it was in the grey when I commented, but i upvoted it so I think that brought it back into the black)
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation
However, long fiber causes latency problems- those wrap around links will slow do any global reductions you need to do.
It's amazing that there are 2 terabyte USB sticks for US$40.
There aren't. There are scam products that claim to have 2 terabytes capacity though.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Kingston-DataTraveler-Ultimate-GT...
Here's the 2TB USB drive I was talking about.[1] It's on Amazon, so it's probably fake.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/jing-Compatible-Computer-High-Speed-D...
But considering we now have 1TB microSD cards, its definitely feasible to make a flash drive with such capacity
Mark Cerny says this is a concern for PS5 which will have user expandable SSD storage. Unlike SATA drives, the M.2 standard doesn't define z-height, and the drives that meet the PS5 min spec are too thick right now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_thermodynamics
Of course, however, heat dissipation presents similar challenges.
- density
- heat
- resistance
GraphCore’s claims are just that, claims. Some of these have been debunked already by people with access to the hardware (eg promised 10x speed ups were more like 1x).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHyV_-9JXu4
Chips produced by EUV work the same as any other chip. And even chips that are made with EUV are only using EUV for the very finest features - they're still using plenty of 'regular' lithography for the dozens of other lithography steps.
How to make a chip: 1. Slice pure silicon into a wafer. 2. Apply a thin coating of a light-activated chemical which does something to the wafer (etch, build up metal, dope[1] silicon, etc.). 3. Shine light through a mask which exposes a pattern into the silicon wafer. 4. Rinse off the un-activated chemical. 5. Repeat steps 2-4 many times for each layer. 6. Slice the wafer up into rectangular chips 7. Package the chips into a plastic, metal, ceramic, package with exposed metal contacts which can be soldered to a circuit board.
Why EUV? Extreme Ultraviolet - really small wavelength. When you're trying to expose really small structures you need a really small wavelength.
Why is EUV so hard? EUV is extremely high energy so it destroys everything, and it takes a huge amount of energy to create the light source. Also: quantum things.
Apparently that’s according to Intel folks discussing it before they can produce it though. We’ll only really know when it’s ready. A lot of times, you make compromises to get something to market... so maybe even Intel 7nm won’t end up being “Intel 7nm” ;)
Watt/TeraFlop is a much more tangible way to understand why this is cool.
True. But it should be significantly better/smaller than TSMC 5nm which is claimed to be 1.85x density over TSMC 7nm, which they are using now to make a chip with 59 Billion transistors.
The only other players to compare to are Intel and Samsung.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_device_fabricati...