121–130 of 260 posts
I write a lot of software for my job (although it’s not my title) and I’ve been thinking of trying for pure software jobs even if the work is more boring (I do semiconductor R&D)
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Even that is not exactly the same. Cells, or logic gates per mm° is too rather ambiguous, as different implementations of same logic families do things differently, and the metric gets even wronger for different logic families. The best I believe will be a whole cell library metric using some lowest common denominator blocks like registers, adders, bus pieces etc
I'm going to be that person and say it doesn't matter. Either you're a consumer who really only cares about a finished product's performance or you're a chip designer who has the time and money to research past the nm number. All us armchair semiconductor fabrication experts can have a good old time arguing ove who's 2nm is better. The real world will continuing doing it's thing. *I know this is hacker news and some…
There will be a large-ish excel spreadsheet somewhere to do the comparison.
The nm number is for press releases and non-technical investors.
Selfishly... so will all this CapEx by TSMC, Samsung, and Intel put pressure on wages? I’m in the industry at a large company getting 3% raises, 10% of comp as stock, and a salary about 1/3 less than a software dev. All while being highly reviewed. I write a lot of software for my job (although it’s not my title) and I’ve been thinking of trying for pure software jobs even if the work is more boring (I do semiconduct…
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Serious question as someone totally naive on this. A few hundred billion dollars seems like an extremely good deal to lead this area of technology - why don't we see funding for this at a government level? I mean, we now have a 2 trillion dollar infrastructure plan. Is there an impediment I'm not aware of? Or maybe it's not as good of a deal as I think?
> why don't we see funding for this at a government level Because America fell asleep at the wheel while Taiwan did not. TSMC and other Taiwanese chip manufacturers benefited from a government that saw the need to be a part of high value manufacturing. Meanwhile America of the 90s and 2000s assumed that it would be the most powerful country in perpetuity and so it wouldn't matter where something was being produced as…
1. TSMC were spending ~$30B per year on capital expenditure already. 2. Since leading edge node is forever increasing in cost, the next 3 years, i.e 3nm in 2022 and 2nm in 2024 are expected to be higher. ~$100B investment aligned with their initial plan / trend / target anyway. 3. So really the major news is stopping ( or to be precise, delaying ) price reduction. Which is unusual but understandable given the current…
There aren't many companies that can compete with 100 billion dollar capex demands. While the loans are freely available, the development risk remains. TSMC has a proven track record pushing into the latest node - intel does not. Samsung has been a little bit behind for a while while keeping pace. Following this trend - 2nm will have something on the order of 200 billion in capex outlays. Given that being first to ma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even that is not exactly the same. Cells, or logic gates per mm° is too rather ambiguous, as different implementations of same logic families do things differently, and the metric gets even wronger for different logic families. The best I believe will be a whole cell library metric using some lowest common denominator blocks like registers, adders, bus pieces etc
Honestly, SRAM bits per square mm seems like a perfectly fine metric for me. While I recognize that the memory-to-logic density varies, sometimes significantly, between processes, (a) SRAM cells are optimized to within an inch of their lives ("within a nm of their lives"?), including often being revised in minor process updates, so accurately reflect the capabilities of the process; (b) many chips, including the ones…
How much would it cost to start a design semiconductor business? On the low end of the budget.
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I can kinda see the value of getting a million PS3 cpus for in your new drone swarm or industry controllers. But how is gathering generic decades old hardware going to help? For Computation as a service its not that valuable or easy to install. And for reuse in 'new' devices it's even more questionable. All this stuff barely just works in this specific configuration.
I'm only doing a few things on machine with around 32GHz worth of processing power (# of processors * GHz) that I couldn't do on my 80486 running 33MHz with a few MB of RAM. Emacs starts up a little bit faster. Pages in Chrome are more interactive than in Lynx, Mosaic, or Netscape. My word processor fits more text. On the whole, that 1000x increase in performance mostly bought the ability to have most of the code tha…
We could do it if we had to, of course.
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You should look at the stockpile sizes. Unless Russia gets involved it would not be a balanced situation at all.
The stockpile is a ridiculous measurement. How many would it take to have mutually assured destruction? A dozen? One of the most worthless dick measuring contests in history.
In case of China, or Russia, thousands.
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There aren't many companies that can compete with 100 billion dollar capex demands. While the loans are freely available, the development risk remains. TSMC has a proven track record pushing into the latest node - intel does not. Samsung has been a little bit behind for a while while keeping pace. Following this trend - 2nm will have something on the order of 200 billion in capex outlays. Given that being first to ma…
On the bright side, the new processes will have a longer life. When your 135nm process is replaced by 14nm within a less than a decade, there's a huge gap there and the old process isn't worth much. If you go from 14nm to 2nm, you can still use 14nm for a lot of price sensitive customers.