
TSMC officially begins 5 nm production - ChuckNorris89
https://www.notebookcheck.net/TSMC-officially-begins-5-nm-production-Snapdragon-875-SoC-Snapdragon-X60-5G-modem-A14-Bionic-and-a-5-nm-AMD-high-end-GPU-incoming.477119.0.html
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ChuckNorris89
So Intel has lost the price and performance war against the latest Ryzen
architecture and has also lost the fab war against TSMC and if the rumors of
Apple moving to their own ARM based arch on TSMC node next year come true,
then I expect Intel stock to take a serious tank.

That being said, I'm not too worried about Intel, they have such a diverse
silicon portfolio(FPGAs, Optane, etc.) that I'm sure they'll be fine in the
end.

My $0.02.

~~~
rckoepke
Some people predict that feature shrinking may end around 2025 with an
inability to go below 2nm. If that's the case, Intel (and everyone else) will
get time to "catch up" to the latest technology standards around 2030. TSMC
may not be able to hold a lead forever, if there is a physics wall that stops
additional shrinking.

There will be additional efficiencies to be found, and TSMC may continue to
have an edge on a business-process level, but if shrinking stops, I'd expect
the market to become as competitive as vehicle manufacturing currently is, by
2040.

~~~
bilalhusain
Intel's roadmap (from last year) is suspected to target 1.4nm in 2029

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/15217/intels-manufacturing-
ro...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15217/intels-manufacturing-roadmap-
from-2019-to-2029)

~~~
catalogia
Given that Intel seems second only to Elon Musk in missing target dates, what
does that translate to? 2050?

~~~
pkaye
Hopefully the gravy train of technology doesn't end before I enter retirement.

------
fizixer
Moore's law is dead.

First, Intel and the semiconductor consortium started the garbage definition
of a technology node about 10 years ago, when pitch levels stopped following
Moore's law.

Now TSMC and all Intel competitors straight up started lying through their
teeth. I'm sure what TSMC is calling '5nm' is a complete joke even in face of
the horrible redefinition 10 years ago.

Don't believe me? See for yourself:

\- nVidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti was announced in 2016. base clock 1481 MHz,
11.34 TeraFLOPs FP32, on a 471 mm2 die [1].

\- Four years later, RTX 3080 Ti, base clock 1905 MHz, 21.1 TeraFLOPs FP32, on
a 700 mm2 die [2].

\- 21.1 / 11.34 = 1.86x improvement in raw TeraFLOPs.

\- 700 / 471 = 1.486x die size increase

\- 1905 / 1481 = 1.286x base clock increase

\- 1.486 * 1.286 = 1.91x

Conclusion: nVidia could use the bigger die size and the higher base clock to
deliver 1.91x the performance using the same 16nm technology node
(theoretically). But instead, using the 7nm node, they're delivering even less
of a performance bump, 1.86x, when in reality it should've been 7.64x (= 4x *
1.91x, considering two node jumps, and the die-size and base-clock bump).

[1] [https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-
gtx-1080-ti.c2...](https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-
gtx-1080-ti.c2877)

[2] [https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-
rtx-3080-ti.c3...](https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-
rtx-3080-ti.c3581)

~~~
stagger87
> Moore's law is dead.

GTX 1080 - 11b transistors (2016)

RTX 3080 - 45b transistors (2020)

From Wikipedia

"Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense
integrated circuit doubles about every two years."

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> RTX 3080 - 45b transistors (2020)

That's just... insane. That's five transistors for every person on the planet.
In 700 mm2.

~~~
iso8859-1
Why does it make sense to compare it with the world population?

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It doesn't, of course, except in the sense of "that's something that we know
is a Really Big Number".

[Edit: And a number that people have some intuition of how big it is.]

------
wolf550e
[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/5_nm_lithography_process](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/5_nm_lithography_process)

Note that the marketing name is meaningless, has nothing to do with feature
sizes. Also note that "Intel 10nm" is denser than "TSMC 7nm" and Intel's
planned "7nm" should be denser than "TSMC 5nm".

------
x87678r
I've been looking at Huawei gear, Samsung memory as well and its getting a bit
scary about how far USA is behind Asian countries in high tech. Meanwhile all
undergrads understand FANG companies pay best, it seems crazy.

~~~
adventured
> its getting a bit scary about how far USA is behind Asian countries in high
> tech

Yeah right.

Cambodia, North Korea, Myanmar, Mongolia, Bangladesh, the Philippines,
Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India, Laos, Thailand, Nepal, Russia, Afghanistan,
Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan

Which of those are leading the world in "high tech"?

China's only consequential tech company is Huawei. South Korea has Samsung, SK
and LG. Taiwan has TSMC, Pegatron, Quanta. Japan has Sony, Nintendo, Canon,
Hitachi, Panasonic and one or two others that are relevant.

It's amazing how far ahead the US remains after so many decades.

Apple, Intel, AMD, Cisco, nVidia, Qualcomm, Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft,
Micron, Texas Instruments, Lam Research, Applied Materials, Western Digital,
Seagate, Broadcom, NetApp, Adobe, Facebook, Salesforce, VMWare, Dell EMC, HP,
Intuit, Marvell, Oracle, Analog Devices, Microchip Technology, Citrix, Xilinx,
Maxim Integrated, KLA Corp, Tesla, Illumina, Agilent, Intuitive Surgical

That's a partial list of large US tech companies. Asia has nothing like it,
and that's before getting into the vast number of US software & cloud services
companies (Workday, ServiceNow, Splunk, Twilio, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palo Alto
Networks, Akamai, etc.), of which Asia has no comparable list.

Besides that, Asia isn't a country, it's silly to pretend they're somehow one
unit. They're all competitors. It's equivalent to pretending Europe or Latin
America operate as combinations.

Show me the Asia equivalent of AWS (Alibaba's 1/5th size clone?). The world
lags embarrassingly, the US has a ten year lead in cloud services.

Tencent is a gaming & entertainment company. Baidu is a languishing search
company that never got outside of China. Alibaba is an advertising platform
that does nothing special. ByteDance is mostly social media, there's nothing
special about that either (see: FB, Twitter, Snap, Pinterest, etc).

China is the only individual country that comes close to competing with the US
in tech and they're still well behind in most tech segments and surpass the US
in none other than digital payments.

~~~
csharptwdec19
> Japan has Sony, Nintendo, Canon, Hitachi, Panasonic and one or two others
> that are relevant.

Add Nikon to the list, especially in the context of chip fabbing (They and
Canon are one of the few companies that make fab equipment not necessarily of
the same caliber as ASML, but similar vein.).

~~~
selectodude
Canon makes every production OLED printer in the world.

------
lowmemcpu
What changed to enable this?

I was told a decade ago by my professor that chip makers were facing an issue
with electrons jumping across these tiny circuits, and couldn't go much
smaller. I'm continuously surprised.

~~~
marcosdumay
Excess electrons and holes in silicon spread through spaces on the order of
10nm. Any smaller features will get mixed up.

But that's not really what is happening here. The first thing is that those
are feature size, not the size of the dopant region. They are like the size of
the pixels on a screen, where the transistors get drawn. The second thing is
that this limit is for silicon crystals, and top of line chips are now built
in 3D with mixed materials, so you can have an entire crystal that is smaller
(at least in one dimension) than that limit.

------
wetpaws
Gentle reminder that 5nm is a meaningless marketing number that does not
represent neither the transistor size no element density, and it does not
correlate in any way with all other Xnm production of other companies.

------
Lind5
Several foundries are ramping up their new 5nm processes in the market, but
now customers must decide whether to design their next chips around the
current transistor type or move to a different one at 3nm and beyond
[https://semiengineering.com/5-3nm-wars-
begin/](https://semiengineering.com/5-3nm-wars-begin/)

------
SomeoneFromCA
Single-thread performance it tied to clock frequency, which cannot go above
5Ghz, so the only thing we'll see is more cores. It is actually blessing in
disguise, this is exactly why ancient Core Duos, made in 2007 are still
perfectly usable for office applications and even lightweight development.

~~~
mywittyname
Where do you get this idea? Single-threaded performance has improved
substantially in the past several generations of Intel processors. Single-
threaded performance and clock speeds have not been correlated outside of same
generation for a while now - like over a decade.

[https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html)

There's are 2.8GHz processors at the top of that benchmark with a 3100 score
and one near the bottom with a 539 score, as well as everywhere in between.

~~~
szatkus
Probably he based his opinion on speed of progress. In 2006 you could buy Core
2 Duo at 3.0GHz. Modern processor at 4.5GHz would be maybe just 3 times faster
in normal, every day, single thread use which seems like a lot, but isn't too
much if you think that CPUs 14 years before Core 2 Duo were clocked at 33MHz
and IPC slightly below 1.

My dad uses a computer with C2Q CPU and it's still fast enough for everyday
use.

Edit: to be clear, he's still wrong, we had quite untrivial IPC increase
during all these years. I just wanted to point out that he's comment probably
was based on empirical data.

~~~
WizardAustralis
One of my desktops is a C2Q and I swear I could get another decade out of it
yet.

------
blackrock
What ever happened to clock speed? Nobody ever talks about that anymore.

~~~
imtringued
Increasing clock speed will require a different technology than silicon. It's
not impossible to think that graphene or carbon nano tubes could allow higher
clock speeds.

------
ceo_tim_crook
Intel on suicide watch

