How Much Smaller Can Chips Go?

nk497 writes "To see one of the 32nm transistors on an Intel chip, you would need to enlarge the processor to beyond the size of a house. Such extreme scales have led some to wonder how much smaller Intel can take things and how long Moore's law will hold out. While Intel has overcome issues such as leaky gates, it faces new challenges. For the 22nm process, Intel faces the problem of 'dark silicon,' where the chip doesn't have enough power available to take advantage of all those transistors. Using the power budget of a 45nm chip, if the processor remains the same size only a quarter of the silicon is exploitable at 22nm, and only a tenth is usable at 11nm. There's also the issue of manufacturing. Today's chips are printed using deep ultraviolet lithography, but it's almost reached the point where it's physically impossible to print lines any thinner. Diffraction means the lines become blurred and fuzzy as the manufacturing processes become smaller, potentially causing transistors to fail. By the time 16nm chips arrive, manufacturers will have to move to extreme ultraviolet lithography — which Intel has spent 13 years and hundreds of millions trying to develop, without success."

Comments

Don't make them smaller

[AhabTheArab]

Make them bigger. More space to put stuff on them then anyway. Tostito's Restaurant style tortilla chips can fit much more guacamole and salsa on them than their bite size chips. Bigger is better when it comes to chips.

Re:Don't make them smaller

[ibwolf]

Distant parts of the chip then have a communication lag, but yes, this will really help. Certainly much less lag than communicating with something outside the die.

Wouldn't that suggest that three dimensional chips be the logical next step. Although heat dissipation would become more difficult, not to mention the fact that the production process would be an order of magnitude more complicated.

Re:Don't make them smaller

[TheDarAve]

This is also why Intel has been investing so much into in-silicon optical interconnects. They can go 3D if they can separate the wafers far enough to put a heat pipe in between and still pass data.

Re:Don't make them smaller

[rimcrazy]

Making 3D chips is the holy grail of semiconductor processing but is still beyond reach. They've not been able to lay down a single crystal second layer to make your stacked chip. They have tried using amorphous silicon but the devices are not near as good so there is no point.

We are already seeing the outcrop of all of this, as next years machines are not necessarily 2x the performance at the same cost. I really think that money would be better spent helping all of you coders out there in creating a language/compiler programing paradigm that can use 12 threads efficiently for something beyond rendering GTA. I certainly don't have the answer and given that that problem has not been solved yet, neither does anybody else at this time.

Its a very very hard problem. It is going to be interesting here in the next few years. If nothing changes, your going to have to start becoming accustom to the fact that next years PC is going to cost you MORE not less and thats really going to suck.

Re:Don't make them smaller

[quo_vadis]

You are incorrect about the reason for lack of 3D stacking. Its not that we cant stack them. There has been a lot of work on it. In fact, the reason flash chips are increasing in capacity is because they are stacked usually 8 layers high. The problem quite simply is heat dissipation. A modern CPU has a TDP of 130W, most of which is removed from the top of the chip, through the casing, to the heatsink. Put a second core on top of it, and the bottom layer develops hotspots that cannot be handled. There are currently some approaches based on microfluidic channels interspersed between the stacked dies, but that has its own drawbacks.

The Atoms

[Ironhandx]

They're going to hit atomic scale transistors fairly soon from what I can see as well, the manufacturing process for those is probably prohibitively expensive but that is as small as they can go(according to our current knowledge of the universe at least).

I can't imagine Intel has all of its eggs in one basket on Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography though. Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.

Re:The Atoms

[Lunix Nutcase]

Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it.

You haven't followed much of the history of Itanium's development have you?

Re:The Atoms

[hankwang]

I deal with EUV lithography for a living. Not at Intel, but at ASML, the world's largest supplier of lithography machines and the only one that has actually manufactured working EUV lithography tools.

Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.

You are misinformed. On our Alpha development machines, working 22 nm devices were already manufactured last year. (source) We are shipping the first commercial EUV lithography machines in the coming year (source, source) A problem for the chip manufacturers is that the capacity on the alpha machines is rather low and needs to be shared among competitors.

There is a temporary alternative; it is called double patterning (and triple patterning, etcetera). The first problem is that you need twice (thrice) as many process steps for the small features, and also proportionally more lithography machines that are not exactly cheap. The second problem is that double patterning imposes tough restrictions on the chip design; basically you can only make chips that consist mostly of repeating simple patterns. That is doable for memory chips, but much less so for CPUs. Moreover, if you want to continue Moore's law that way, the manufacturing cost will increase exponentially, so this is not a long-term viable alternative.

You can bet that the semiconductor manufacturers have looked for alternatives. But those don't exist, at least not viable ones.

Why do they need to?

[Revotron]

Why does Intel need to push the envelope that hard and that fast just to create a product that will, in the end, have extremely low yield and extremely high cost?

Just so they can adhere to some ancient "law" proposed by one of their founders? It's time to let go of Moore's Law. It's outdated and doesn't scale well... just like the x86 architecture! *ba-dum, chhh*

Re:Why do they need to?

[mlts]

At the extreme, maybe it might be time for a new CPU architecture? Intel has been doing so much stuff behind the scenes to keep the x86 architecture going, that it may be time to just bite the bullet and move to something that doesn't require as much translation?

Itanium comes to mind here because it offers a dizzying amount of registers, both FPU and CPU available to programs. To boot, it can emulate x86/amd64 instructions.

Virtual machine technology is coming along rapidly. Why not combine a hardware hypervisor and other technology so we can transition to a CPU architecture that was designed in the past 10-20 years?

Re:Why do they need to?

[mlts]

x86 and amd64 have an installed base. Itanium doesn't. This doesn't mean x86 is any better than Itanium, in the same way that Britney Spears is better than $YOUR_FAVORITE_BAND because Britney has sold far more albums.

Intel has done an astounding job at keeping the x86 architecture going. However, there is only so much lipstick you can put on a 40 year old pig.

Re:Why do they need to?

[quo_vadis]

Um, actually Intel has done a lot of work on the architecture and microarchitecture of its processors. The CPUs Intel makes today are almost RISC like, with a tiny translation engine, which thanks to the shrinking size of transistors takes a trivial amount of die space. The cost of adding a translation unit is tiny, compared to the penalty of not being compatible with a vast majority of the software out there.

Itanium was their clean room redesign, and look what happened to it. Outside HPCs and very niche applications, no one was willing to rewrite all their apps, and more importantly, wait for the compiler to mature on an architecture that was heavily dependent on the compiler to extract instruction level parallelism.

All said, the current instruction set innovation is happening with the SSE, and VT instructions, where some really cool stuff is possible. There is something to be said for the choice of CISC architecture by Intel. In RISC ones, once you run out of opcodes, you are in pretty deep trouble. In CISC, you can keep adding them,making it possible to have binaries that can run unmodified on older generation chips, but able to take advantage of newer generation features when running on newer chips.

Plank's Law

[cosm]

Well I can say with absolute certainty that they will not go below the Planck length.

Re:I miss the pressure AMD used to put on Intel

[Revotron]

The latest revision of my Phenom II X4 disagrees with you. The Phenom II series is absolutely steamrolling over every other Intel product in its price range.

Hint: Notice I said "in its price range." Because not everyone prefers spending $1300 on a CPU that's marginally better than one at $600. It seems like Intel has stepped away from the "chip speed" game and stepped right into "ludicrously expensive".

Re:This question

[localman57]

why will it be any different this time?

Because sooner or later, it has to be. You reach a breaking point where the new technology is sufficiently different from the old that they don't represent the same device anymore. I think you'd have to be crazy to think that we're approaching the peak of our ability to solve computational problems, but I don't think its unreasonable to think that we're approaching the limit of what we can do with this technology (transistors).

Re:Maybe we will start seeing more cores?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have an uncanny ability to predict the present!

Re:Maybe we will start seeing more cores?

[phantomfive]

It has always been about making it smaller. Clock speed was able to increase because the chips got smaller. We were able to add more cores per die because the chips got smaller. Moore's law is about size: it doesn't say computers will get faster, it says they will get smaller.

What we are able to do with the smaller chips is what's changed. Raising the clock speed worked for years, and that is the best option, but because of physical problems, in the latest generations we weren't able to do that. So the next best thing is to add cores. Now the article is suggesting we may not even be able to do that anymore.

I will tell you I've been reading articles like this for as long as I've known what a computer was, so if you're a betting man, you would do well to bet against this type of article every time you read it. But in theory it has to end somewhere, unless we learn how to make subatomic particles, which presumably is outside the reach of the research budget at Intel.

Re:I miss the pressure AMD used to put on Intel

[Rockoon]

What are you talking about? AM2 boards support AM3 chips.

You also present a false dichotomy, because upgrading isnt ONLY about buying suboptimal hardware and then upgrading it later. Anyone who purchased bleeding edge AM2 gear when it was introduced can get a bios update and then socket an AM3 Phenom II chip. They still only have DDR2, but amazingly Phenom II's support both DDR2 on AM2 and DDR3 on AM3.

So that guy who purchased a dual-core AM2 Phenom when they were cutting edge can now socket a hexa-core AM3 Phenom II.

Its amazing what designing for the future gives your customers. Intel users have only rarely had the chance to substantially upgrade CPU's.

I'd say you haven't

[Sycraft-fu]

For one, Itanium is still going strong in high end servers. It is a tiny market, but Itanium sells well (no I don't know why).

However in terms of the desktop, you might notice something: When AMD came out with an x64 chip and everyone, most importantly Microsoft, decided they liked it and started developing for it, Intel had one out in a hurry. This doesn't just happen. You don't design a chip in a couple months, it takes a long, long time. What this means is Intel had been hedging their bets. They developed an x64 chip (they have a license for anything AMD makes for x86 just as AMD has a license for anything they make) should things go that way. They did and Intel ran with it.

Ran with it well, I might add, since now the top performing x64 chips are all Intel.

They aren't a stupid company, and if you think they are I'd question your judgment.

Better software

[Andy_w715]

How about writing better software. Stuff that doesn't require 24 cores and 64GB of RAM?

Re:"Extreme Ultraviolet"

[sunbane]

Because X-rays are .01 - 10 nm light and EUV is 13.5nm light... so nothing to do with the word, as much as engineers like to label things correctly.