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Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

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Re: Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

#71

Post by bjourne »

PaulHoule wrote: post #70

Moore’s law is alive but the benefits are diminishing. Until 2005 or so, shrinking transistors automatically increased speed and reduced power consumption. When that ran out of steam, the industry went to multi core and massive parallelism with GPUs. Until recently each shrink also lowered the cost per transistor, but that seems to have run out also and has something to do with why Intel was stuck at 14nm for so long…

The reason Intel was "stuck" at 14 nm was because it took Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) many years longer to become viable than was predicted. Prices may have more to do with the EUV market being dominated by ASML which has serious trouble producing lithography machines fast enough to meet demand.

Re: Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

#73

Post by jakogut »

PaulHoule wrote: post #70

Moore’s law is alive but the benefits are diminishing. Until 2005 or so, shrinking transistors automatically increased speed and reduced power consumption. When that ran out of steam, the industry went to multi core and massive parallelism with GPUs. Until recently each shrink also lowered the cost per transistor, but that seems to have run out also and has something to do with why Intel was stuck at 14nm for so long…

Something to consider is that smaller chiplets have higher yields than monolithic dies given the same defect rate, which can certainly have an effect on price.

Re: Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

#74

Post by bjourne »

wongarsu wrote: post #59
BirAdam wrote: post #53

Unless I’m missing something, the article did mention Moore’s law proper with transistor density doubling every 18 months, but then meandered to talk about other things. M1 has 16 billion transistors thanks to TSMC. Each new node has delivered on Moore’s law with AMD and Apple. I don’t doubt that Moore’s law will stop. I can even say that it Moore’s law may have failed from time to time, but the spirit of the law liv…

One interesting point is that even if Moore's law stops or slows down, chiplets allow us to increase transistor count independently of transistor density. Thus keeping alive the spirit of the law (processors get more and more transistors).

Maybe. How many times can you double the size of a 25mm^2 chip before it becomes impractically large?

Re: Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

#75

Post by PartiallyTyped »

PaulHoule wrote: post #70

Moore’s law is alive but the benefits are diminishing. Until 2005 or so, shrinking transistors automatically increased speed and reduced power consumption. When that ran out of steam, the industry went to multi core and massive parallelism with GPUs. Until recently each shrink also lowered the cost per transistor, but that seems to have run out also and has something to do with why Intel was stuck at 14nm for so long…

GPU prices are so insane because shareholders must make money, because NVDA miscalculated the crypto demand and doesn't want to hold the bags again (cf gtx 1060), and because NVDA artificially limited the supply of [rtx 30xx] cards.

Re: Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

#76

Post by PaulHoule »

bjourne wrote: post #71
PaulHoule wrote: post #70

Moore’s law is alive but the benefits are diminishing. Until 2005 or so, shrinking transistors automatically increased speed and reduced power consumption. When that ran out of steam, the industry went to multi core and massive parallelism with GPUs. Until recently each shrink also lowered the cost per transistor, but that seems to have run out also and has something to do with why Intel was stuck at 14nm for so long…

The reason Intel was "stuck" at 14 nm was because it took Extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) many years longer to become viable than was predicted. Prices may have more to do with the EUV market being dominated by ASML which has serious trouble producing lithography machines fast enough to meet demand.

If it’s not one thing it’s another.

If progress continues then they will need some other expensive machine. Either that or they’ll try to stretch the life of EUV the same way Intel tried to delay EUV with extreme multiple patterning.

It seems to me though that the ASML machines ought to get some competition from something more like a free electron laser.

Re: Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

#77

Post by WithinReason »

bjourne wrote: post #74
wongarsu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One interesting point is that even if Moore's law stops or slows down, chiplets allow us to increase transistor count independently of transistor density. Thus keeping alive the spirit of the law (processors get more and more transistors).

Maybe. How many times can you double the size of a 25mm^2 chip before it becomes impractically large?

Until you turn it into a 25mm^3 chip

Re: Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

#78

Post by [deleted] »

PaulHoule wrote: post #70

Moore’s law is alive but the benefits are diminishing. Until 2005 or so, shrinking transistors automatically increased speed and reduced power consumption. When that ran out of steam, the industry went to multi core and massive parallelism with GPUs. Until recently each shrink also lowered the cost per transistor, but that seems to have run out also and has something to do with why Intel was stuck at 14nm for so long…

[deleted]

Re: Moore’s Law is dead – Long live the chiplet

#80

Post by gilbetron »

urthor wrote: post #60
theaeolist wrote: post #20

Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.

> single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html It's amazing how often this is parroted. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the numbers knows this is actually not true at all. Better caching, branch prediction, plus vast amounts of SRAM. There's been a slow & steady increase in the vast variety of single threaded workloads grouped together…

Sorry, doubling in 10 years vs doubling in 18 months effectively is plateauing! Especially since it isn't really a consistent 10% growth per year, but a decelerating growth over that decade. Furthermore, much of the purported single thread performance is taken from a small set of benchmark tests, and so chip makers just optimize them for those tests. Generic single thread performance has undoubtedly not doubled in that 10 years.
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