Samsung still has to solve yield and capacity problems. It wasn't only process node advantage that made customers form lines in front of TSMC shop.
ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
61–70 of 97 posts
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#62Everything over the last years tells me we are very close to the end game in chip production. 1. power stopped scaling 2. clocks stopped - 4x over 20 years? 3. node names became fiction. 4. EUV now differentiates the top from everyone else. 5. IPC improvements are a trickle. 6. Tons of non-moores law ideas are here: A) GPUs B) chiplets C) stacked die D) specialized accelerators 7. Governments are now involved in divi…
I think there was a lot of research to use other kind of materials beside silicon for making chips. One of them was carbon. I even heard about optical chips, using light instead of electricity.
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#63Everything over the last years tells me we are very close to the end game in chip production. 1. power stopped scaling 2. clocks stopped - 4x over 20 years? 3. node names became fiction. 4. EUV now differentiates the top from everyone else. 5. IPC improvements are a trickle. 6. Tons of non-moores law ideas are here: A) GPUs B) chiplets C) stacked die D) specialized accelerators 7. Governments are now involved in divi…
Depends what you consider as part of chip production. If you consider new instructions and the related software as new chip production, then the performance improvements have continued quite dramatically. Single chip inference has gone 1000x over the last 10 years according to Bill Dally from Nvidia [1] at 10 minutes (probably not original source). Main gains according to the video have been different numeric types (…
So going from 65nm to 3nm only gave us 2.5x speed? If by speed we only understand frequency, then it might be true. But speed depends also on IPC and having more transistors means higher IPC.
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing we're not done, we're just reaching the endgame with silicon dies. Next steps will be new tech sometimes with a long lead time until it has been developed to the extent that it's competitive with silicon. Things like integrated photonics (or a completely photonic CPU), quantum computers, or diamond instead of silicon (or other materials instead of silicon). Are we not still getting exponential growth in…
It's impossible for growth to be exponential indefinitely. Eventually it'll end up as a sigmoid curve. Secondly, progress isn't smooth. It comes in phases and leaps, and it's possible for it to stagnate for a long time.
I think we are only limited by the amount of matter and energy in the Universe. We are far from reaching any limit.
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
So it's not the vaccine, but Covid itself, that is going to deploy the 5G chips into people's bodies?
It’s insane how small transistors are now. Technically you could have a full 2 bit adder inside a single virion within a generation.
Well, so instead of giving money to Intel, you go get infected by your virus of choice. You still have to manage heat, though.
I wonder how can you install software, or does it come in ROM?
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#66Atomic radius (average distance from the center to the outermost isolated electron) of copper 135pm, silicon 0.11pm. 2nm is 7 copper atoms or 9 silicon atoms.
Maybe we can construct transistors using subatomic particles. If only we can convince those quarks and bosons to do calculation for us...
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#67How far does a $762 million deal get you? Doesn't seem like such a huge sum for priority access to next gen 2nm machines, but also hard to judge as a layperson...
I like how users talk about hundreds of millions or billions like it's just small change for them.
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#68Just to head off the inevitable comments about how 2nm isn't really 2nm: yes, we know, it's just a convention in the industry to indicate relative performance. It's basically a marketing term, more than anything else. The numbers VLSI engineers actually care about are things like millions of transistors per square millimeter (MTr/mm^2), power per bit in picojoules (pJ), transistor rise times in nanoseconds, etc... In…
I really hope they can all decide on a better number which everyone agrees on soon. It's ridiculous having to look up each time if Intel 10nm is the same as which one from TSMC again and all of that. There have been some contenders, but the lure of saying "hey, I have the smallest number, so my process is best!" is just too strong it seems.
>I really hope they can all decide on a better number which everyone agrees on soon.
How about 2nm, 2nm Ultra, 2nm Ultra Pro and 2nm Ultra Pro Max.
Or, like Intel used to call iterations of their 14nn technology, 10nm, 10nm+, 10nm++, 10nm+++ and 10nm++++.
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#69A few days ago it was reported that Chine companies started producing 5nm chips (model Kirin 9006C) - many years earlier than US government expected they will be able to do so. With this insane progress I will not wonder if Chinese companies start mass producing 2nm chips earlier than anyone else.
I would expect another decade until China will be on par with the West. And another few years on top if they'll overtake it.
Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips
#70Surely ASML would prefer that Samsung and Intel could keep up with TSMC on manufacturing the latest and greatest CPU/GPU/SoCs. So not hard to believe that they'll sell the first next gen machines to Samsung.
I think ASML will be happy to sell to whoever wants to buy. The more, the better.