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Intel Finds Moore's Law's Next Step At 10 Nanometers (ieee.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Sometime in 2017, Intel will ship the first processors built using the company's new, 10-nanometer chip-manufacturing technology. Intel says transistors produced in this way will be cheaper than those that came before, continuing the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law -- and contradicting widespread talk that transistor-production costs have already sunk as low as they will go.
In the coming years, Intel plans to make further improvements to the design of these transistors. And, for the first time, the company will optimize its manufacturing technology to accommodate other companies that wish to use Intel's facilities to produce chips based on ARM architecture, which is nearly ubiquitous in modern mobile processors.
In the coming years, Intel plans to make further improvements to the design of these transistors. And, for the first time, the company will optimize its manufacturing technology to accommodate other companies that wish to use Intel's facilities to produce chips based on ARM architecture, which is nearly ubiquitous in modern mobile processors.
When will someone throw down and bring down or at least challenge intel's monopoly...
One cannot imagine how freaking tired I am of hearing about Moore's Law - there's no law, there's never been one. There was a mere observation that the number of transistors doubled every 18 months or so.
Whoever decided to call this observation a law must forever be held up to shame. And the ones who keep repeating this nonsense.
Moore's Law isn't dead, that's why Intel already has the 3rd 14nm CPU family and is planning another one, Coffee Lake, in 14 nm before moving on to 10nm.
Intel isn't making 4 different CPU families on 14nm cause the process works so well and is so cheap.
First 14nm, Broadwell, was released 2014, released abysmally late and very underperforming, and the first 10nm is expected to be released 1h 2018. They may sample a few trial wafers in 2017, but there won't be a chip sold. 4 years is not what Moore's Law promised back then, and the Tick-Tock model is totally dead and buried as well.
This IEEE Spectrum rag sounds worse like Popular Mechanic with that much paid cheerleading bullshit.
It is speed that matters. In the old day when we make the transistors smaller they got faster. That hasn't happened in along while now.
The problem with that analogy is that the definition of a scientific theory is just that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
At least part of the problem is that the reason those markets are lucrative is because of patents.
If I spend X billion dollars developing Y, I need to be able to (at least) make X billion dollars back.
You, on the other hand, with Y in hand because of weak patents, and no need to have spent X billion dollars to get there, will be selling Y under the price that I can afford to, because you didn't spend X on developing it. So I go out of business. Which means next time you need methodologies, you won't be getting them from me. Because you killed me by entering the market without paying the same costs I did.
These problems are very serious when you're talking about very expensive development and/or manufacturing. They affect drug companies, chip manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers, etc. Some types of development and/or manufacturing require big costs to bootstrap, and no, bottom line, it's not reasonable to allow the next-in-line operation to bypass those costs at the early entry entity's expense.
Patents have a limited term, either 14 or 20 years, depending on the type; this sets fairly discrete bounds on what you can, and can't, do. Unlike copyrights, patent law hasn't (yet) fallen off the edge of the earth into the blatantly unreasonable.
In the US, this all stems from article I, section 8, clause 8, of the constitution (emphasis mine):
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's what a scientific law is: a relation between measured observations. It can be purely empirical.
There's a law for centrifugal force, and it isn't even a real force!
It should be more clearly stated, Like Cole's Law.
Cole's Law: When making cole slaw for a large group, there will be 50% left over even when you account for Cole's Law.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
Thanks to "trusted computing" and all the other innovation and backdoors they've brought to chips, I don't want a new intel processor anymore.
It's more of a guideline, really.
According to this law, our computers are 1024 times more powerful today, than they were 15 years ago. And they are.
But the user-experience still sucks. Web-browsers are still bloated and slow — and need an occasional restart. You still can't talk to computers reliably — Alexa is considered the best, yet it is pathetic. Being able to reliably show something to a computer will take another 15 years, if not more.
Spammers may be able to generate spam faster, but reliably detecting and blocking their crap — without occasionally blocking real e-mails — remains elusive.
The fanciest UIs — be they by open source or commercial projects — would just stupidly hang or otherwise behave erratically every once in a while.
Hardware-makers may be doing their jobs, but the software-engineers aren't doing theirs... Not well enough, anyway.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Let's assert this is uniformly true.
So let's say we reduce the patent term to 2.5 years so it's not old news. After 2.5 years, you can do whatever you like with any invention.
This, in turn, means that the time the creator has to recoup their inventing costs is 2.5 years; no longer. Because after that, a competitor will enter the market having spent nothing to get where the creator spent all that money.
This will considerably reduce the amount that can be spent on new inventions without losing one's shirt; and that, in turn, will severely retard the advance of the very technologies you are so eager to get for free.
But there's more, and if anything, it's worse. Here 'tis: While no consumer is very likely to wait 20 years to get their hands on something, two to three years? That's not unthinkable at all. I kept my last phone five years. I've kept my computer eight years. So what happens here is that the market for the initial product, at the higher price that has to pay for the development costs, over the shorter period of time, will shrink, because the consumers will be thinking "if I just wait a couple years, this will be much less expensive." And not because initial high prices have defrayed the development costs; no, this is because for the me-too manufacturers, there are no development costs. So what you end up with is even less recovery of development costs.
While I'm with you in that development is hard, and in tech, it's fast, the problem is it is expensive, and if you want the money spent to do the development in a capitalist economy, then something like the patent system has to be in place.
If you think we can somehow transition the US from capitalism to... something that sees that all development efforts are fully funded and everyone gets to benefit... well, let's just say I don't see it anywhere on the horizon and leave it at that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What is the diameter of a silicon atom in nm? Anybody know?
When will someone throw down and bring down or at least challenge intel's monopoly...
Being several generations of process nodes ahead of one's competitors, like TSMC or GSMC or other fabs, is not a monopoly. Intel has consistently had a policy of investing their money in state of the art fabs everywhere they have it, and they happen to have a big volume driver w/o becoming commodity, like memory. This is what the old US businesses used to do - invest cash into enhancing their company value
If you are talking about the x86/x64 ISA and related patents that allow a company to make x86 CPUs, it's a duopoly, and AMD holds the cards on the x64. Only problem - AMD has gone fabless, and despite that, I have yet to see any good CPUs from them, since no fab comes even close to Intel's
I used to be anti Intel and pro RISC. But there is no doubt that Intel has easily been the most innovative tech company in the US, if not the world. They took their stab at going away from x86 THREE times, but failed: finally, went the AMD route on this one. In fact, given that all other fabs that manufacture in volume are located outside the US - mainly Taiwan, Japan and China, Intel ought to be the model of what a US tech company should be like
Murphy will eventually supersede Moore.
Just sayin...
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
I attended a course by Yale Patt from U. Austin, who is one of the "popes" of Computer Architecture research (see this ranking, for example), where he discussed Moore's Law.
He argued how Moore's Law was not a physical law, nor a technological or market-driven law. But it was a real law and had a very large impact.
Instead, he argued very accurately that Moore's Law was actually a psychological Law: given that it provided the baseline for the expected performance (or transistor count) increase, every company would struggle to get to that point, knowing that otherwise the others would get it and make a much better product. Therefore, Moore's Law became somehow a self-fulfilled prophecy. Note how the ITRS still provides yearly predictions for the (still exponential, in some cases) improvements in semiconductor technology fabrication.
So definitely you are right in that it was a mere observation -- but this observation drove the evolution of electronics for more than 50 years (enough to be labelled as "Law", isn't it?)
Moore's Law is as much fiat as observation. "Transistor density of integrated circuits shall double every 18 months. Make it so!"
Samsung which has a stake in global foundaries will break Intel's monopoly over expensive chip fabrication. In fact AMDs new Ryzen x86 chip is built by them and so are their .14 NM GPUs and even Nvidia's. Cell phones beat Intel as a result :-)
So monopoly ride is soon over. ARM is new king nowdays anyway
http://saveie6.com/
Intel says transistors produced in this way will be cheaper than those that came before, continuing the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law -- and contradicting widespread talk that transistor-production costs have already sunk as low as they will go.
Err, what now? I thought smaller transistors were desirable for performance reasons. Has the marginal per-transistor cost been what's holding us back all these years?
I was under the impression that the costs for microprocessor fabrication had to do with their design and then building the foundry. The per-unit cost (and thus per-transistor cost) is utterly negligible, right?
This is a salient point because it implies that in decades to come we're eventually going to see a steep drop-off in prices for not just CPUs, but also RAM and flash memory once enough patents expire and enough high-output fabs come online, which promises to be a utterly world changing solution-in-search-of-a-problem. (Specifically, I predict this will be the point at which AI really takes off.)
You could say the same about Ohm's law - it was just the empirical observation that current through something was directly proportional to the voltage across it. And that's not always true, but it's true widely enough for it to be a useful law.
When it costs 10^7 USD to put up just one factory, you're going to heavily incentivize the equipment supplier who is a 1 month outlier on the schedule.
This isn't a month-long Usenet thread, which is what Godwin's Law applies to.
Slashdot discussions automatically extinguish in about three days so Godwin's Law really can't ever apply to them.
No you can't. One is physics and the other was a guy called Moore setting a long term goal.
Well, how about Newton's law?
That also stems from observation of a common exclusion-less repeatedly occurring phenomenon.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
I think it's cockney ;)
Ge' a fu'ing dictio'ary
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Then why am I able to measure it? :)
Experimental set-up: Tie a stone (tightly) to a rope, hold one end of a (coiled) spring in your hand, the other end holds the rope.
Swing it around and see the spring expand in length ==>> force!
They dubbed this the centrifugal force, although a better name would have been 'centrifugal reaction force'.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
So I am sure you are tired of hearing about Newton's laws too then.
The original post was "there's no law, there's never been one. There was a mere observation".
Ohm's law was also a mere observation at the time it was made. There was no theoretical understanding behind it. That didn't stop it being called a "law".
Moore's "law" is a trend, not a law or theory. Trends change... ;-)
This used to be the case when the industry was going from 1 micron to the sub micron scales - 0.65, 0.5,0.35. After it got to the 0.18, that has been less true, as fabs have migrated from 200mm to 300mm wafers, and the proposition has grown a lot more expensive for migrating from 300mm to 450mm wafers. Just going from 200 to 300, factories had to be re-tooled, and the changes are even more disruptive while going from 300mm to 450mm. So the add-ons you are estimating in staying w/ an old process is overtaken by the add-on costs of retooling for a 450mm process. Also, while you do get more die/wafer on the 450mm, the processing time is longer, thereby reducing the throughput of the processes.
The only advantage of going to shrinks at this point are reductions in power consumption, and/or increases in performance. But the market will still expect price reductions, even if these newer processes invoke cost increases
It's not just the law. It's reality as well. The law says that you can't resort to unfair means to eliminate your competition. But it says nothing about making superior products and making your competition unattractive that way.