91–97 of 97 posts
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…
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.
Certainly. We're near the top of the computational capacity for silicon chips. However, the computational capacity of a cubic centimeter of our universe is mind bogglingly enormous, what we can do now is a drop of water in the ocean (or much much smaller). There are lots of other ways to compute and many of them in active development. Folks have been saying exponential growth is over for many decades now. It may have…
However if you like the topic and want to read some fiction involving it, try the Jean Le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajanieme (sp?)
Just 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…
This was interesting, though idt it's been standardised: https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-better-way-to-measure-progress-i.... Measure node by factors of density of logic, memory, interconnects all together, which is pretty well balanced.
> ASML is expected to supply 10 units of the High-NA EUV equipment to the market next year, and Intel has reportedly secured six of them ouch
How 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 wonder why Nvidia doesn't establish it's own fab business. It might be a good fit for them.
Their pockets are flush from crypto and now AI.