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IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

nytimes.com

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Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#101

Post by astrodust »

userbinator wrote: post #75
minthd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another issue: currently the biggest bottleneck , cost wise, is in lithography - the process we use to draw the transistors into chips. Because of this issue, the two latest generations of chips are more expensive(per transistor) than an older version - stopping moore's law. And moore's law probably won't return to life, until we learn how to solve that problem, which the current work doesn't help with.

I think we've been wasting far too much processing power in inefficient software for the past few decades, and it's only Moore's Law that let it happen for so long. Now that it's coming to an end, maybe we'll see more emphasis on efficiently optimised software and mindful resource usage.

"Coming to an end"? The sky isn't falling yet. Just because they're having some trouble with one process doesn't mean the whole party is over.

There are other materials to make chips out of besides silicon, gallium arsenide and carbon for instance, each of which has different scaling properties.

There's also ways to make chips more dense by stacking wafers instead of trying to shrink features.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#102

Post by ethbro »

joshuapants wrote: post #95
ethbro wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what you're saying, but do you really think most of a modern Android (to take the theme to its Javaesque extreme) stack is the most efficient way to accomplish processing? Compare that to some of the code people ran through 6502-derivatives. Abstraction may be more efficient in terms of programmer time, and performance efficiency may be high enough so as to be immaterial, but the two shouldn't be conflat…

> do you really think most of a modern Android (to take the theme to its Javaesque extreme) stack is the most efficient way to accomplish processing? Reminds me of a version of this image[1] which has a discussion superimposed over it that says, "but if he had a big enough pile of ladders he could get over the wall!" and someone responds, "welcome to Android optimization." I think we see something similar with Javasc…

Ha! That's the first non- https://interfacelift.com/ image I've put as my background for a while.

The older I get, the more I start seeing over-complexity in stacks as a security risk as well. I feel like there's a fundamental maximum to the number of levels of abstraction one can keep in one's head "enough" to avoid creating layer interaction bugs. Stack overflow, indeed. :)

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#103

Post by [deleted] »

POWERfan wrote: post #47
awalton wrote: post #43

Let's all realize that all of these research branches have been playing around with 10nm and 7nm chips for years now - the fact IBM cobbled together some working chip isn't surprising. Getting it to production is really the vastly more important part. This press release is equivalent to "Scientists Cures Diabetes in Mice" - a breakthrough that happens about a half dozen times a year but has still yet to make it from…

>This press release is equivalent to "Scientists Cures Diabetes in Mice" - a breakthrough that happens about a half dozen times a year but has still yet to make it from the lab to the FDA. Chip manufacturers like Intel and IBM have regularly made good on promises of exponential progress for at least a half century. Comparing them to press release-pushing biomedical researchers is tantamount to a slur.

[deleted]

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#104

Post by joe_the_user »

awalton wrote: post #43

Let's all realize that all of these research branches have been playing around with 10nm and 7nm chips for years now - the fact IBM cobbled together some working chip isn't surprising. Getting it to production is really the vastly more important part. This press release is equivalent to "Scientists Cures Diabetes in Mice" - a breakthrough that happens about a half dozen times a year but has still yet to make it from…

> This press release is equivalent to "Scientists Cures Diabetes in Mice" - a breakthrough that happens about a half dozen times a year but has still yet to make it from the lab to the FDA.

Well, incremental lab improvements of this and that technique do make it into practice all the time. The failure of various biological researches is symptom of some fundamental brokenness or inherent hardness to biological research (biological systems are inherently messy - the ability of biologists to work with uniform, mass-produced mice is actually a hindrance when they try to apply those researches to non-uniform humans, etc). None of these apply to chip manufacture. The increase in quantum effects as one goes down in size may be a barrier to 7nm but it seems like it would a barrier to working one-off chips as well as to final production.

Which is to say, the skepticism doesn't seem to have a basis. A working chip is an important and necessary step to getting to mass production - clearly mass production would be their aim.

Your supposedly better link agrees: "While it should be stressed that commercial 7nm chips remain at least two years away, this test chip from IBM and its partners is extremely significant for three reasons: it's a working sub-10nm chip (this is pretty significant in itself); it's the first commercially viable sub-10nm FinFET logic chip that uses silicon-germanium as the channel material; and it appears to be the first commercially viable design produced with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography."

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#105

Post by nickpsecurity »

It's neat but will only benefit the largest companies with the most elite developers. I've learned a lot about hardware development in past year for purposes of imagining clean-slate, subversion-resistant chips. The work it takes to get the 90nm and below chips working, especially inexpensively, is pretty mind boggling with many aspects still dark arts shrouded in trade secrets. Many firms stay at 130-180nm levels with quite a few still selling tech closer to a micron than a 28nm chip. Tools to overcome these challenges cost over a million a seat.

So, seeing another process shrink doesn't excite me given we haven't tapped the potential of what we already have. Lots of technologies help: EDA; FPGA's: S-ASIC's; multi-project wafers; ASIC-proven I.P. And so on. Yet, even 350nm still isn't very accessible to most companies wanting to make a chip because the tools, I.P., and expertise are too expensive (or scarce sometimes). Yet, the benefits are real in so many use-cases (esp security). I'd like to see more companies dramatically bringing the costs down and eliminating other barriers to entry with affordable prices.

Example of the problems and what kind of work we're looking at: http://eejournal.com/archives/articles/20110104-elephant/

Example direction to go in: http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2008/08/megahard-corp-open...

I think the best model, though, is to do what the EDA vendors did: invest money into smart people, including in academia, to solve the NP-hard problems of each tool phase with incremental improvements over time. I'm thinking a non-profit with continuous funding by the likes of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Wall St firms, etc. A membership fee plus licensing tools at cost, which continues to go down, might do it. Start with simpler problems such as place-and-route and ASIC gate-level simulation to deliver fast, easy-to-use, low cost tools. Savings against EDA tools bring in more members and customers whose money can be invested in maintaining those tools plus funding hardest ones (esp high-level synthesis). Also, money goes into good logic libraries for affordable process nodes. Non-commercial use is free but I.P. must be shared with members.

Setup right, this thing could fund the hard stuff with commercial activity and benefit from academic/FOSS style submissions. With right structure, it also won't go away due to an acquisition or someone running out of money. Open source projects don't die: they just become unmaintained, temporarily or permanently. Someone can pick up the ball later.

Thoughts?

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#106

Post by kale »

escherplex wrote: post #79
NathanthePie wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible that when nobody is working in the room, the lights aid in maintaining a sterile environment. At specific wavelengths (~245-265 nm), (UV) light inactivates quite a few living things. As light is quantized, the purpleish color you see is due to e- stepping down.

My UVC bulbs deployed in a FL home water treatment system pipe out UV in the region of 253.7nm. An ophthalmologist friend pointed out that unfiltered long term exposure to these wavelengths first catalyzes conjunctivitis (pink eye) then conditions go down hill from there. It's suggested that you don't stare directly at sources of this purplish color for any protracted periods.

Nope. Our bio hoods have a toggle switch. Lights off is in the middle, lights on is one direction, UV sterilization is the other direction. To turn the lights on, you have to turn the UV off.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#107

Post by [deleted] »

mikeyouse wrote: post #89
vegabook wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that most semiconductor predictions come true, whereas biomed predictions are much less reliable. Unfortunately, that is a reflection on the latter's practitioners as they are aware of their poor odds yet still publish.

I think this is unfair. Scientists often have a narrow-scope breakthrough in an extremely technical area and when they're asked to dumb it down for a wider audience, the tech press / university PR team runs wild. Something like curing diabetes is going to taken hundreds or thousands of small incremental improvements and breakthroughs so when they say "Could lead to a cure!!" they're usually correct but the nuance is…

[deleted]

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#108

Post by intrasight »

Keyframe wrote: post #86
valarauca1 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M68k was produced on a 3500nm process, which at 7nm you can fit 2 whole M68k dyes within an original M68k's transistor.

That would mean that with 7nm process once could fit ~136000 (68000*2) M68ks in its original dye. Mind-boggling.

Mind duly boggled.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#109

Post by timelined »

tinco wrote: post #53
monk_e_boy wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have an ultra-clean room. It has a window.

My university has clean rooms, they have windows, the hallways have windows too so you can peek in from outside. Always great to show to visitors :) (at night they have weirdly colored lighting, pink, purple, so it looks really funky, no idea why)

Certain parts of the cleanroom will look yellow--these are the spaces where they do lithography with resists that are openly accessible to the air. UV-sensitive resists will chemically crosslink in UV light, so they put on filters on the fluorescent lights (or use special lights) that keeps the wavelength away from the higher-energy blues and towards the lower-energy yellows and reds.

Re: IBM says it has made working versions of 7nm chips

#110

Post by timelined »

QuantumRoar wrote: post #44
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silicon-germanium (so still has silicon in it). I'm curious what comes after :)

III-V semiconductors like Gallium Arsenide have a high mobility and are probably tested right now in Research labs around the world for CMOS-transistors (it is already in use for something like solar panels). But there's always the problem of how to scale these things as well as silicon based manufacturing. Further out is still some stuff like graphene or carbon nanotubes. Of course, the structure of the transistor i…

IBM was one of the first big companies to develop/commercialize SOI technologies.
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