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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

> But the logical endpoint of the relentless rise in manufacturing costs is that, at some point, one company, in all likelihood TSMC, could be the last advanced fab standing.

Most established, capital-intensive markets are winner-take-all, where a few big players control the bulk of the market. And they usually remain at the top of the market until some fundamental paradigm shift occurs that causes the market to shrink.

TSMC will be top dog for a while, until something happens that causes the market for custom made silicon to collapse. Just like Intel was top dog until something came along to replace the market for x86. Or like Microsoft was King Dingaling until people moved to mobile computing.

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> TSMC will be top dog for a while, until something happens that causes the market for custom made silicon to collapse.

Contrary to many popular technological opinions, Moore's Law will be dead for a while. We're nearly at our physical limits. When this is ceiling is hit, we'll start seeing numerous more competition enter the fray. This is because the research part will be too large for one company to innovate itself out of (TSMC will be the first to hit the ceiling and the competition will reach the same ceiling in a short time. Together, they may advance our scientific understanding but I think governments would need to get aggressively involved). This is afundamental scientific limitation. There is no emerging research that will overcome this problem (zero theoretical research that can be used for engineering the manufacturing needed for the next advancements).

3D transistors are next but that's not growth at an exponential curve. We're looking at a linear growth future for a while.

P.S. I'm 33 and I expect within the next 6-15 years that we'll hit this limit and be at this limit for most of my working career unless we start seeing some seriously massive investment to unearth more advanced physics that we can implement at the pico-level. If you disagree, I'd love to hear what you think that will allow Moore to continue because I've read numerous studies and essentially all have zero tangible implementations.

It will be “Moore” if you talk about “improving performance” (not that the law actually is) as vendors start integrating more and more custom silicon to accelerate various things (eg neural engines, more dsps, etc). So you may still see computers get faster and faster even though it’s not the CPU itself being the one getting faster. That being said cpu design isn’t dead. It’s just more expensive for companies than the traditional “well a new process node will fix it” like the work Apple did with the M1 (which they took advantage of the newer process mode to really put the nail in the coffin).

As a software engineer this feels like heresy, but I can't wait for the day computers stop getting faster. Shoddy software design has been bailed out time and time again by Moore's law. I'm excited by the prospect of a software industry where "tell the client to buy a faster computer" is no longer an acceptable excuse.

For example, there's room for a clean, native cross-platform application toolkit that does everything that electron does. But we don't have that. Instead application developers use electron (trading my CPU & RAM for their time). And people get angry at Apple for "only" shipping 16 gigabytes of RAM in their computers rather than angry at lazy app developers. And we don't invest in the tooling we'd need to actually fix the problem. (In this case, Electron but small and native).

Another example - as an industry we know how to make fast compilers (eg Go, Jai, V8, LuaJIT, etc). But instead most new languages (rust, pony, zig, etc) are built on top of LLVM. LLVM used to be super fast - but now even in debug mode its sluggish.

There's usually nothing wrong with old computers & phones, but we throw them out anyway because software developers buy faster computers then take shortcuts.

Bloated software creates demand in hardware. And demand drives supply. When CPU speeds stopped increasing they started adding more cores and created SMT. As Moore's Law is ending they start adding specialized coprocessors (M1). Circling back to the 80s.

All these fancy new hardware technologies are not aimed at particle physics, HFT, or fringe high performance shops. They are aimed at consumer grade shitty software and a whole industry who is driven by deadlines and non-technical managers.

The change in the software industry has to come from within.

Dumb question, how about quantum computing, organic or parallel processing... sorry.. complete noob here but enjoying your high flying discussions that conflate so much stuff :-)

That's what they've been saying for the last 10 years or so, but the last decade really saw a huge leap in terms of computing. Machine learning has taken off, big data operations have reached an unprecedented scale and the latest chips from apple have blown everything else out of the water by a mile. Surely there must be a lot of advancement at chip level for all this to happen?

> That's what they've been saying for the last 10 years or so, but the last decade really saw a huge leap in terms of computing.

Yes. I acknowledge the nay-sayers and the history of them on this topic

But to your point of ML being a solution. Honestly, I have a difficult time seeing how ML will give the manufacturing engineers enough tangible/actionable steps to take to make this happen. We need a new physical framework to be able implement an engineered solution. But maybe it's like eating an elephant (one bite at a time).

I will concede this though. IF it were to happen, ML will most likely bring it about. I appreciate you optimism grounded in the technology.

Moore's law level of advancement has been considered no longer keeping pace since 2010.

> I expect within the next 6-15 years that we'll hit this limit

You are talking about fundamental physical limits? Um... No, [1]

"At about 26-28.5 minutes of the Jim Keller:

Jim notes that transistors could reach 10 atoms by 10 atoms by 10 atoms while avoiding quantum effects. People are also working on harnessing quantum effects."

We are so far away from fundamental limits. That even if we assume we could somehow double transistor density every two years, which we dont anymore, there are still at least another 15-20 years before we are close to that limit. And that is not accounting any 3D Transistors.

Realistically we already have Roadmap up to 2030 from TSMC. The only limit we will hit is that the node is too expensive and market could no longer afford the premium. Which You could expect to happen within next 10-15 years.

[1] https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA?t=1677

> Jim Keller

I watched a bunch of Jim Keller's interviews and I just fundamentally disagree with ~'we'll innovate our way out of it'.

TSMC has a roadmap for next 10 years. Which is still far from reaching any technical roadblock.

This is too aggressive a take. Yes, TSMC is 50% of all EUV production right now. But it's only 50%. Samsung has huge resources and is on track to build a 3nm process by 2022/2023, which is not very far behind TSMC (though I don't know if their 3nm processes compare).

Besides just diversifying global chip production, Samsung has the (geopolitical) benefit of being in a country with large US bases and plenty of internal demand for their chips (if the Exynos designers can produce something exceptional).

The internal demand makes Samsung a competitor with its customers. TSMC does not have a similar conflict of interest.

... and IBM was King Dingaling until people moved to desktop computing

p.s. and thus we have doxxed ourselves just a little bit: age group :-)

You're correct - at one point in the late 70s or even the early 80s, IBM was the biggest chip manufacturer in the world but all of the produced chips were used in their own products.

there was even a kind of "cloud computing": "time share computing"[0], since mainframe computers were financially our of reach for anyone but the very largest companies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing

> but all of the produced chips were used in their own products.

Sounds like something Apple would do.

IBM was _the_ prototypical vertically oriented company back in the late 70s before the PC - manufacture chips, build boards, build computers ranging from desktop to mainframes, develop the OS, provide finance for customers, offer integration services. Apple is nothing compared to IBM in its heyday.

When I joined IBM in 1991, it was still a very inwardly focused company. Although it was clear that things were going to be changing rapidly in the industry, it was hard to get employees to understand how precarious things were - until the big layoffs of the mid 90s.

... and Tim Cook spent 12 years with IBM around the time when you joined.

Or a third party decides to enter the market and go for position number 2. Apple could probably do it with the cash they roll - but they don't want to do so. A country could. It sure seems like chips are important enough to warrant a national supply - so international pressures can't weigh on you politically through chip supply.

I've long held the opinion that chip making will eventually go the route of uranium refining and become national strategic capabilities that all great powers will pursue. I'm continually surprised that this doesn't seem to be taking place outside th defence sector.

Honestly I’d blame governments being staffed by people who make their money in more traditional areas. Aka we need a generational change.

Chip making is still advancing too fast for that. If the current processes are about the limit of physics, then eventually yes. Right now it is better to hope your country just does the next leapfrog of technology.

The TSMC model seems appropriate: Don't specialize in the design. Focus on the hardware and take designs from customers.

This is the case, actually. It's just this article is talking about chip production at the bleeding edge instead of the pedestrian chips used in the bulk of electronic devices.

The boring chips made for use in American military equipment are largely produced domestically.

Unfortunately not. Maybe the "family jewels" level secret ICs which we don't even know about, but at least ICs for munitions been all Taiwanese for at least 20 years.

I don't think Apple will get into chips for several reasons, but the main one is sunsetting old fabs. Apple wants only the best and shiniest process for their chips, but any fab inevitably gets overtaken by new technology. What to do with the ageing fabs? Apple would have no use for them, so long term it makes no sense. Better to capitalise TSMC with long term contracts and lock in access to capacity on the best nodes.

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