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Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

arstechnica.com

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Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#61

Post by 40acres »

mjfl wrote: post #3

What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?

Reducing process size is a tough, yet straightforward way to improve the efficiency of a chip. But there are other methods too, modern data centers will be looking for power efficiency, innovation in packaging can improve efficiency and make the most of out bad yields. Novel architectures are going to see the light of day now that process reduction is become so difficult.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#62

Post by Const-me »

quickben wrote: post #58
Const-me wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processors are not that fast yet, but computers as a whole are. 20 years ago we had Pentium 3 500MHz, 2 FLOPs/cycle, 1 GFlops. GPU of my desktop PC computes 11 TFlops, that's 4+ orders of magnitude faster. For CPUs alone it's indeed less impressive, $500 for that P3 inflated to $760, the comparable modern CPU is Threadripper 2920X, 16 flops/cycle * 12 cores * 3.5 GHz = 672 GFlops.

That comparison can not be directly made as the 'O' in "FLOPS" is different.

They're math operations on small vectors of 32-bit floating point numbers, they produce same result given same input data.

The only difference is that CPU computes stuff on 4-wide vectors of these numbers (modern CPUs up to 16), that GPU on 32-wide vectors (other modern GPUs up to 64).

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#63

Post by wtallis »

mjfl wrote: post #3

What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?

Multi-chip packages are getting more common, with Intel's EMIB and AMD's new EPYC processors. Only portions of the CPU are moving to leading-edge fab processes while things like the memory controller and iGPU are good candidates to stay on proven processes (eg 14nm).

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#64

Post by bogomipz »

mbell wrote: post #10
mjfl wrote: post #3

What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?

TSMC is already doing risk 5nm production and 3nm seems entirely viable. We won't see a 'wall' until sometime after 3nm (~2025). Depending on whom you talk to, 2nm and smaller process sizes are also viable. I wouldn't expect any serious shift away from silicon processes till 2030.

>"TSMC is already doing risk 5nm production and 3nm seems entirely viable."

What is "risk production?" Is this similar to prototyping? I'm not familiar with this term. Thanks

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#65

Post by faissaloo »

pault wrote: post #13
mjfl wrote: post #3

What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?

My impression is that they know moore's gravy train is over and they're scrambling to figure out new tricks to allow them to sell a new generation of processors every year. Personally, while I'm a little disappointed that processors 20 years from now might not be 4+ orders of magnitude faster than the one I have now, I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I…

I'm hoping we see a big purge of all the cruft that's built up in the software layer over the years because processing power has been expendable.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#66

Post by ethbro »

mjfl wrote: post #3

What are Intel and other semiconductors planning to pivot to when they can no longer reduce process size at a reasonable pace (i.e. now)? Is there a plan, or is it an existential wall?

> Is there a [post-Moore] plan, or is it an existential wall?

Fixed function hardware and more emphasis on efficient software.

We've had decades of software laziness, because anything less than an order of magnitude performance improvement on the software side was best shipped unoptimized, earlier, and just wait for hardware process shrinks.

We'll likely get back to something like the 60s, before the mass-marketing of the PC enabled funding of the relentless process improvements of the 80s, 90s, and 00s.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#67

Post by Dylan16807 »

Const-me wrote: post #62
quickben wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That comparison can not be directly made as the 'O' in "FLOPS" is different.

They're math operations on small vectors of 32-bit floating point numbers, they produce same result given same input data. The only difference is that CPU computes stuff on 4-wide vectors of these numbers (modern CPUs up to 16), that GPU on 32-wide vectors (other modern GPUs up to 64).

A lot of the FLOPS on newer CPUs are like GPUs, yes.

But the comparison is against an old CPU, without big vector units.

Those non-vector calculations are very different, and far more flexible.

A brand new CPU core can do 3-4x as many separate operations per cycle, and is clocked 6-10x as fast.

Having more cores helps but it's still far behind.

Also for a fair price/performance ratio you probably want to compare to the 450MHz model at $230, so only a $350 CPU today ($280 equivalent by august). https://money.cnn.com/1999/08/23/technology/intel/

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#68

Post by CoolGuySteve »

steve19 wrote: post #15
dsr_ wrote: post #2

Semiaccurate claims that this is entirely Intel marketing fluff, and that in reality Intel can't get 10nm yield up to useful levels, now or ever. (that's a tl;dr for https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/04/25/leaked-roadmap-shows... )

Semiaccurate is anti-Intel, they are not a bias free source of information.

The leaked roadmap is not from SemiAccurate though, it's from here: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/151984/roadmap-toont-dat-intel-i...

If you had read the SemiAccurate article you would know that.

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#69

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

liuliu wrote: post #18
dsr_ wrote: post #2

Semiaccurate claims that this is entirely Intel marketing fluff, and that in reality Intel can't get 10nm yield up to useful levels, now or ever. (that's a tl;dr for https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/04/25/leaked-roadmap-shows... )

My understanding is that Intel is doing OK with smaller die size 10nm (Cannon Lake-U / Ice Lake-U) for Ultrabooks. But for bigger dies such as HEDT or server CPUs, the Ice Lake SP is still pretty much in the air with Intel's vague timeline of "sooner than expected end of 2020" claim.

Isn't that “Ultrabook” part the one with the broken GPU that's shipping only in an obscure variant of a cheap Chinese education-only laptop?

Re: Intel Stockpiling 10nm Chips

#70

Post by blihp »

martinpw wrote: post #50
JohnFen wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn't mind being able to buy a computer and not have to worry about upgrading it for 10 years (I think we're pretty close to this point already). Depending on your needs, we're been there for at least 10 years. I don't expect to have to upgrade (not counting increasing memory or storage as "ugrading") or replace any of the systems I own right now until they're over 10 years old. About half of my current machin…

But isn't that just the result of lack of hardware gains limiting new software application areas? If single threaded performance had been doubling every two years for the past 10 years like it did historically, then there would likely be new applications available that made use of that 30x performance gains to deliver functionality that would be popular enough that it would reinvigorate the upgrade process. It seems…

There's more to the lack of radical new applications than faster single core performance. We've had increasingly multi-core systems for over a decade now, but applications have been slow to appear. We've also had increasingly powerful GPUs with compute capability over that time. I think even if single core performance were still increasing at 50% or even 25% per year we'd still be here.

Sure, it requires work to move off the legacy single-thread paradigm but it's also the economics of the software business these days. When you combine the increased control/lockdown by the mainstream platform owners and the decreasing willingness of customers to pay for software in the era of no-cost software, there isn't much incentive for new applications to appear. Notice that all of the major players are mostly focused on services and server side for the heavy lifting these days. It's not because the user hardware can't do it (hell, on the server side, CPUs and GPUs tend to be less powerful per-core), it's that it makes more economic sense for them to not bother doing interesting things on the users device.

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