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TSMC's 2nm process will reportedly get another price hike — $30,000 per wafer for latest cutting-edge tech
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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This is what a lack of competition looks like.
However.... Twice the price of 4nm? The gains are fairly marginal from what I gather. I don't think many will bother.
It's both lack of competition and the end of Moores law. We've effectively reached the end of silicon gate sizes and the tooling complexity required to keep shrinking process nodes and increase transistor density is increasing exponentially, so semiconducters no longer get cheaper... and it's starting to push these cutting edge nodes outside of economic viability for consumer products. I'm sure TSMC is taking a very healthy profit cut for sure but the absolute magic they have to work to have 2nm work at all is beginning to be too much.
It's been talked about a lot. Lots of people have predicted it.
It does eventually have to end though. And I think even if this isn't the end, we're close to the end. At the very least, we're close to the point of diminishing returns.
Look at the road to here-- We got to the smallest features the wavelength of light could produce (and people said Moore's Law was dead), so we used funky multilayer masks to make things smaller and Moore lived on. Then we hit the limits of masking and again people said Moore's Law was dead, so ASML created a whole new kind of light with a narrower wavelength (EUV) and Moore lived on.
But there is a very hard limit that we won't work around without a serious rethink of how we build chips- the width of the silicon atom. Today's chips have pathways that are in many cases well under 100 atoms wide. Companies like ASML and TSMC are pulling out all the stops to make things smaller, but we're getting close to the limit of what's possible with the current concepts of chip production (using photolithography to etch transistors onto silicon wafers). Not possible like can we do it, but possible like what the laws of physics will let us do.
That's going to be an interesting change for the industry, it will mean slower growth in processing power. That won't be a problem for the desktop market as most people only use a fraction of their CPU's power. It will mean the end of the 'more efficient chip every year' improvement for cell phones and mobile devices though.
There will be of course customers calling for more bigger better, and I think that will be served by more and bigger. Chiplets will become more common, complete with higher TDP. That'll help squeeze more yield out of an expensive wafer as the discarded parts will contain fewer mm^2. Wouldn't be surprised to see watercooling become more common in high performance workstations, and I expect we'll start to see more interest in centralized watercooling in the server markets. The most efficient setup I've seen so far basically hangs server mainboards on hooks and dunks them in a pool of non-conductive liquid. That might even lead to a rethink of the typical vertical rack setup to something horizontal.
It's gonna be an interesting next few years...
I mean technically moores law has been dead for 15 years. The main reason we went to multi-core was we couldn't keep up otherwise.
The reason we went multicore was because the frequencies weren't scaling, but the number of transistors were. We've been around the 2-300ps clock cycle for a long time now.
And now chiplet systems and 3dvcache
If we're talking about what Moore originally formulated, then the law isn't just about transistors. He actually claimed that the cost per integrated component is cutting in half every x months. The exact value of x was tweaked over the years, but we settled on 18 months.
If we were just talking about transistor count, the industry has kept up. When we bring price into the mix, then we're about an order of magnitude behind where we "should" be.
When he wrote it, the first integrated circuit had only been invented about 6 years prior. He was working from only 6 years of data and figured the price per integrated component would continue to drop for another decade. It's remarkable that it lasted as long as it did, and I wish we could find a way to be happy with that. We've done amazing things with the ICs we have, and probably haven't found everything we can do with them. If gate sizes hit a limit, so what? We'll still think of new ways to apply the technology.