[timboslice]

This is where 450mm wafers and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in. EUV relieves the need for double patterning and the tremendous additional costs that entails (and was used to manufacture this 7nm chip).

The CEO of Applied Materials, Gary Dickerson, has stated that the 450mm wafer timeline “has definitely been pushed out from a timing standpoint.” That’s incredibly important, because the economics of 450mm wafers were tied directly to the economics of another struggling technology — EUV. EUV is the follow-up to 193nm lithography that’s used for etching wafers, but it’s a technology that’s spent over a decade mired in technological problems and major ramp-up concerns.

Toasting to the death of Moore's Law: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBrEx-FINEI

[TheOtherHobbes]

And for comparison, scale fans, let's remember that we're talking about making 7nm features on wafers that are nearly a foot and a half wide, using near-as-dammit x-ray wavelengths.

A few teething problems would be expected.

7nm has been struggling for a while, 5nm is likely to be late, and I don't think anyone really knows what happens after that.

Longer term, industrial manufacture is probably going to have to move to something exotic like nano-assembly of individual atoms, with some extra finagling to work around tunnelling effects. (Easier said than done...)

[api]

... and why would we invest the money to do that when there is not enough (software-driven) demand for that performance.

The average person uses PCs and mobile devices to browse the web, write documents, order an Uber, and maybe play games. Nothing much is being done on the software front that challenges current systems. Maybe if VR took off or we got home applications for AI like domestic robotics that would change. I could see a domestic robot capable of folding clothes, cleaning up, etc. needing a low power chip that can do what a dual-12-core Xeon can do on smart phone power and thermal profiles. <5nm might be needed to accomplish that.

I'm not sure server and high-end compute demand is sufficient to pay for the R&D that would be required to far beyond 7nm.

But the good news is that we haven't even scratched the surface of what current systems could theoretically accomplish. Look into the demo scene and prepare to be blown away by what 8-bit CPUs in the 1980s could accomplish with non-crap code running on them. Maybe we need a software Moore's Law to take over for the hardware one -- right now software has more of an erooM's Law.

One thing is clear: if you do software, ball's in your court either way. Either you need to invent killer apps to keep demand high for high performance computers -- things that really need that much power -- or you need to take over for the hardware people and start finding new efficiencies.

Ball's really been in software's court for a while anyway with multi-core... linear performance max'd out (for consumer chips) a while ago.

[minthd]

I agree that most of the demand requires software innovation , but there are other good sources of demand, for example:

1. AI - variety of applications, both for consumer and business markets.

2. Telepresence. If we can get the real feeling of "being there" to telepresence, at a price point that's attractive for the consumer.

3. Simulation. Currently it's a complex process ,mostly done by experts. If it can be a tool for regular engineers , and maybe further down the road - for combining that with some sort of genetic-algorithms , maybe there's potential for a huge demand increase.

[ant6n]

GPUs are basically as big as possible, and still can't really render at 4K. Now if I want to have a ray-traced Game Engine, fuggetaboutit.

[ars]

> and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in

I wonder if they could use electrons instead of light to etch the surface.

[tedsanders]

Electron-beam lithography is a technique that works, but because it's very slow, it's also very expensive. There are efforts to parallelize e-beam writing, but they face hard challenges. For example, if you want to pattern faster, you just need to shoot more electrons. But if you shoot too many electrons, they repel each other and the pattern blurs. It's a difficult problem to overcome, but people are working on it.