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ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

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Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#81
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dead wrong. You are limited by the speed of causality. Even if the universe is infinite your growth rate would cease to be exponential since the speed of causality is linear and the reachable sphere is growing only by the third power.

5% growth per year and two thousand years later you coloinize thousands of observable universes. The observable universe has a length of 90 billion lightyears.

And no, time dilation won't save you unless you think of dumb ideas like cloning yourself so that the humanity that spreads is considered "you". Otherwise you will only get to go to a single planet.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#83
post #7

Everything 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’m not into hardware at all. But my friend is. He works on niche application chip firmware. What he tells me boggles my mind. And I think there’s a ton that can be improved on that side for sure. The whole tool stack is so arcane. Most people working in this field are older and conservative. No one wants to change anything.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#84
post #7

Everything 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 us software types may be more sad about the end of the "free lunch" than the buying public. The 90s in particular had amazing performance increases, but you also needed to buy a new computer (which were more expensive then) every ~3 years, or upgrade roughly every 18 months if you wanted to stay near the top. Anyway, my optimization skills will stay in demand :)

I am just an average dev working in python and occasionally c++, but I'd like to improve my skills and learn more about optimization. Would you be able to point me to a structured resource (book, course) where I can learn more about optimization?

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#85
post #83
post #7

Everything 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’m not into hardware at all. But my friend is. He works on niche application chip firmware. What he tells me boggles my mind. And I think there’s a ton that can be improved on that side for sure. The whole tool stack is so arcane. Most people working in this field are older and conservative. No one wants to change anything.

Yeah, well. I'm a software guy, not a hardware person. But think about it if the hardware guys were like "move fast and break things". It's amazing how much space the hardware people (Asics) have given us the to experiment and explore on their incredibly robust platforms.

Maybe some of them needed to be mature and conservative.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#86
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you considered that things are complicated enough now it can't be boiled down to single number comparisons?

Sure, but I know that there have been various proposals for a better number. Different companies just couldn't decide on which proposal they like the best.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#87
post #2

Surely 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.

Exactly, they don't want a runaway winner among their customers.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#88
post #85
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not into hardware at all. But my friend is. He works on niche application chip firmware. What he tells me boggles my mind. And I think there’s a ton that can be improved on that side for sure. The whole tool stack is so arcane. Most people working in this field are older and conservative. No one wants to change anything.

Yeah, well. I'm a software guy, not a hardware person. But think about it if the hardware guys were like "move fast and break things". It's amazing how much space the hardware people (Asics) have given us the to experiment and explore on their incredibly robust platforms. Maybe some of them needed to be mature and conservative.

I’m not advocating for another extreme. But the things he told me could be certainly improved a lot without breaking things. In fact things are breaking already. I’m taking even basic things like tools. He tells me many devs have no intellisense of any sort which leads to slow dev pace and bugs. Poor CI setups. Papering over old languages with codegen but not doing it properly thru AST. But literally just string concat in Python. Leads to lots of hard to track bugs. Lots of examples like this.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#89
post #7

Everything 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…

We arent. There are materials which could make cpus eg 1000x faster, but their life span would be e.g year or two and cost would be 10000x >Tons of non-moores law ideas are here: What?

>> >Tons of non-moores law ideas are here:

What?

Those were all things that don't affect transistor scaling. Well some depend on having high density chips, but they don't enable denser chips. Chiplets and stacked die are the things being done because transistor scaling is near its limit.

15 years ago people were looking at those things but they didn't make sense because we could just move to the next node. So they were deemed future possibilities for when scaling wouldn't be cheap and easy. They are no longer "future" tech, they are present day. Meaning scaling is about over, and we are pulling out all the stops on other ways to go fast.

Re: ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips

#90
post #30

A 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.

That didn't use EUV and wasn't cost effective, it doesn't mean much of anything.
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