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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.
Not sure would say Intel has a monopoly, but there is a huge capital cost involved in adopting each new generation of fabrication facilities, to the point where there are very few companies that can take a seat at that table - that is the reason why most chip design companies outsource their fabrication requirements to one of the companies with the desired/required technical facilities.
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.
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 because we're hitting multiple problems. We have heat, die size, and electrical limitations(bleed over in the substrates). It means in the end, that having multiple physical cores on one chip is the only direction that things will be going until those other problems can be solved. There's also the other issues with memory across the system bus being too slow and causing problems. HBM solves some of those issues, but it's still too cost prohibitive to use on CPU's at least right now. Where in the case of GPU's it's not.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
People don't realize this. Even without patents, no one else is close to 10 nm yet.
You mean besides the three companies that have already (Samsung) or will shortly (TSMC, Toshiba) beat Intel to 10nm?
... not understanding that Intel invented lying about node size.. and hasnt even produced a true 22nm yet.
Intel fumbled the ball on this node. Their process advantage is gone, and combined with their vertical integration disadvantage, will see them fall farther and farther behind. Thats why they have recently done massive layoffs and are now blanketing press releases about a new "cloud strategy."
Intel knows that they are now in a bad position. Their competitors also know it. Contrary to popular shalshdot belief, the list of Intels main competitors do not include AMD or even ARM. Intel is a fabrication company. Its main competitors are TSMC, Samsung, Toshiba, and Global Foundries, and there are dozens of smaller competitors, and all of them are now eating into Intel at all node sizes. Samsung arrived at 10nm mass production first, and TSMC is following closely behind.
of course some anonymous coward will now say that Samsung isnt producing true 10nm
Rate these things on transistor density and you will see that Intel is behind Samsung now, and will soon also be behind TSMC and Toshiba.
"His name was James Damore."
Moore's Law isn't about performance, it's about economy.
Actually, it is about density.
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?
x86 is dying, and 2017 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, Netcraft confirms.
Go Google AMD Zen aka Ryzen. Intel has a worthy competitor if true? It's not out yet but was demoed last week beating an Intel broadwell 8 core CPU :-)
Also I am 40. In my 20s AMD made superior x86 chips over Intel! No you did not misread that? Google slashdot pentium IV vs AthlonXP from early last decade for a laugh? The pentium IV sucked! It was hot and single core and had inferior performance over the AthlonXP. AMD also invented 64 bit computing for x86. Intel wanted the horrible Itanic proprietary Mercedes to replace x86. Intel crippled the pentium IV making it just 32 bits and trolled the virtues of lWisc or whatever funny architecture it was for servers.
Thanks AMD for saving x86 and bring us 64 bit computing to mere mortals outside of MDF rooms. Now go kick Intel's ass again?
PS I still support Intel as my virtualization stuff is tuned for their chip. In 2 years that may change with KMS and Hyper-V supporting Ryzen if they hit it big
http://saveie6.com/
That's because we're hitting multiple problems. We have heat, die size, and electrical limitations(bleed over in the substrates). It means in the end, that having multiple physical cores on one chip is the only direction that things will be going until those other problems can be solved. There's also the other issues with memory across the system bus being too slow and causing problems. HBM solves some of those issues, but it's still too cost prohibitive to use on CPU's at least right now. Where in the case of GPU's it's not.
GPU ram is different than CPU ram for a good reason. THe data is fast but narrow. CPU needs wide loads and ram optimized for that. GDDR 5 is great for a few things fast where the GPU goes massive parallel. BUt it would cripple your i7 easily which needs more bandwidth and lower latency.
http://saveie6.com/
x86 is dying, and 2017 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, Netcraft confirms.
I appoint you king of 2017. Make it so.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The way Intel, Samsung, and TSMC measure transistor size isn't the same. Some of Intel's 22nm transistor structures were smaller than TSMC's 16nm. I do agree Intel's lead has shrunk, but just because one process is called 14nm and another 10nm doesn't really matter - transistor density and production yields are what are important.
This tends to follow typical trends of "industry leader" vs "also-ran". What would an industry leader have to gain by establishing well-defined standards? In contrast, standards are critical for the also-rans to compete.
Don't think for a minute that AMD wouldn't do the same were they in Intel's shoes. They play nicer because they're the underdog right now.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Well, AMD has designed better x86 chips than Intel many times over the last two decades. I don't think they've ever been able to match Intel on process, though. If AMD can build their chips on someone else's foundry, then that's good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."