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IBM Research Alliance Has Figured Out How To Make 5nm Chips (cnet.com)

Posted by msmash on from the 'breakthrough' dept.

IBM, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung said Monday that they have found a way to make thinner transistors, which should enable them to pack 30 billion switches onto a microprocessor chip the size of a fingernail. The tech industry has been fueled for decades by the ability of chipmakers to shoehorn ever smaller, faster transistors into the chips that power laptops, servers, and mobile devices. But industry watchers have worried lately that technology was pushing the limits of Moore's Law -- a prediction made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that computing power would double every two years as chips got more densely packed. From a report: Today's chips are built with transistors whose dimensions measure 10 nanometers, which means about 1,000 fit end-to-end across the diameter of a human hair. The next generation will shrink that dimension to 7nm, and the IBM-Samsung development goes one generation beyond that to 5nm. That means transistors can be packed four times as densely on a chip compared with today's technology. "A nanosheet-based 5nm chip will deliver performance and power, together with density," said Huiming Bu, IBM's director of silicon integration and device research. Take all those numbers with a nanograin of salt, though, because chipmakers no longer agree on what exactly they're measuring about transistors. And there's also a long road between this research announcement and actual commercial manufacturing. IBM believes this new process won't cost any more than chips with today's transistor designs, but its approach requires an expensive shift that chipmakers have put off for years: the use of extreme ultraviolet light to etch chip features onto silicon wafers.

8 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. Moore's law by Whatanut · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'll just leave this here.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    --

    yvan eht nioj
    1. Re:Moore's law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Since Whatanut doesn't spell it out. Moore's law is an observation that number of transisters in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. This is a tech site, we should get it right - shame on msmash. Really, why go to the trouble to name Moore's first name and the year, and get what he actually said wrong.

      OK. Enough discussion on the inaccuracy. What do yall think of their 5nm claim?

    2. Re:Moore's law by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 2

      , I know. Moore's Law (observation, actually) is that transistor count (approximately) doubles every 2 years, not "power" (current times voltage?), or "processing power" (Whetstones perhaps?), and certainly not "speed" (GHz times bus width?). This process seems to obey the transistor count rule, but with heat already being the problem it is, it's hard to say what quadrupling the density actually buys you.

    3. Re:Moore's law by Khyber · · Score: 2

      "What do yall think of their 5nm claim?"

      They just about hit the limits of atomic transistors, if this is true and the feature size they refer to is not the trace but the transistor itself.

      From that, I expect to see at least an IPC improvement of 2 or 3 per thread given the shitty bloated coding everyone does now days, which should put us back on par with how things worked when we were on server-class P3 dies and didn't need these extra bullshit instructions.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    4. Re:Moore's law by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 2

      You can also add new things to the chip. There are plenty of things that used to be off of the main chip and on the motherboard 20 or 30 years ago. But as space became available on the chip they were moved on. This prevented the use of the bus on the motherboard and greatly sped up things. You can also add more registers, memory, and processing units (arithmetic for example).

      Everything is electrons moving around. If you can move everything closer you shorten the trip an electron has to take. Imagine if all of the city blocks where reduced by 10% with one corner anchored but you still walked the same pace. You would get where you were going faster with the same amount of energy.

    5. Re:Moore's law by CanadianMacFan · · Score: 2

      But it's easier to build a faster processor than it is to retrain all of the shitty programmers writing bloated code.

  2. Switch to picometers by SPopulisQR · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We need to switch from nanometers to picometers. 5 nm is 5000 picometers. The diameter of silicon atom is 210 picometers, thus 5nm will be equal to approx 24 silicon atom diameters, which will provide a valuable perspective. I do understand that measuring lakes in olympic swiming pools will be used to compare measuring transistors with the silicon atom radius, however in this situation there is a limit on how small transistors can exist in practice.

  3. EUV by edxwelch · · Score: 5, Informative

    "but its approach requires an expensive shift that chipmakers have put off for years: the use of extreme ultraviolet light"

    Actually, EUV has been planned for 5nm all along (even for 7nm). It make the process cheaper, not more expensive (by reducing the number of masks)