Will 7nm And 5nm Really Happen?

http://semiengineering.com/will-7nm-and-5nm-really-happen/

by matt42 • 12 years ago

128 132 12 years ago

baldfat• 12 years ago

We are quickly coming to an end of an era where hardware can compensate for sloppy code and processes. We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers.

We might even get surprised by the code of something like Elite. An incredibly brilliant piece of software that did so much more then what was thought possible.

reitanqild• 12 years ago

I quite like that perspective. Having to accept wait and lag on i7 processors, 2digit gigs of ram as fast as never before etc * ) is really frustrating.

Luckily, in my experience at least, Microsoft is finally starting to catch up on usability and efficient use of hardware. Windows 7 didn't raise the bar for hardware specs significantly and neither did Windows 8, 8.1 etc [1]

*) not talking data science, rendering, games or user/admin misconfiguration, i.e. DNS timeouts etc.

[1] : windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/system-requirements

fredsted• 12 years ago

something like Elite

What is it? Elite is a word used many places so I couldn't google it.

dasmoth• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)

The original version did indeed to an amazing amount with a 6502 and 32kb of RAM.

apl• 12 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)

sgift• 12 years ago

An old video game, which is often praised for its clever code (and gameplay): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)

ownagefool• 12 years ago

We also had computers that'd fall over at the drop of a hat, with a crapton of low level code that'd cause all sorts of havok because not everyone who writes code is a genuis or infallible.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

We also had computers that'd fall over at the drop of a hat

Hm. That's not my experience at all, rather the opposite. Those 8 bitters were incredibly reliable.

Jtsummers• 12 years ago

We are quickly coming to an end of an era where hardware can compensate for sloppy code and processes. We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers.

I don't think we've ever had a "golden age" of software development. Sort of like going back to find examples of good art (in whatever medium) from decades ago, we end up with the impression that the scifi of Asimov's era was somehow better than what we have today. Really, the crap just disappeared. Pointing to examples of good software in the 80s, certainly impressive feats can be found, doesn't mean that they were the norm. Having worked on a lot of legacy projects, I can assure you there's plenty of crap from that era as well.

What we end up with is a false impression of our current time. We see all the crap, we're filtering it out now, and we think things must be worse now than they used to be. We just won't know until we can have a proper retrospective in 10-20 years. Once the crap's filtered out, what remains?

weland• 12 years ago

This is precisely what sprang in my mind. It's stuff like the LISP Machines and Elite that have survived the 1980s long enough for us to consider them as part of a "golden era". Those were the exception, not the norm, of the 1980s.

jerf2• 12 years ago

"We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers."

I think software is already getting there, since we've been dealing with slowing returns for a while. The previous generation of languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. traded convenience for performance and waited for hardware to catch up. It was a good trade in many cases at the time, but as we collectively learned more about the design space I think it has become clear that it is not an intrinsic trade; it is possible to get a more convenient language that we had in the 80s or 90s without trading away performance.

LuaJIT was an early example of this, but the flood gates are opening now. Go is not architected to the nth degree for speed, but it's a language that's only slightly slower than C, and in my experience, only slightly slower to develop in than Python (possible with a crossover point as the program size grows where Go is simply faster). Rust ought to be a lot easier to work with than C++ once you learn it, and I expect it to reach near-optimal speeds, possibly even beating C/C++ in practice as it will be more feasible to perform some aggressive optimizations for multithreading. And I've noticed a lot of the other little bubbling languages that may become languages of the future, like Nimrod, have the same sort of focus in them, "how can we get these convenient features without a 20-100x speed penalty"?

Then, once you have these languages, I'm noticing that in many cases while bindings exist, entire stacks are being rewritten to be simpler and faster. Go has its own webserver. Dollars-to-donuts Rust will too in another couple of years. I suspect this is actually part of the trend; rather than binding to older, huge frameworks and code written without much concern for latency issues, etc, more code is going to start being rewritten to care more about those things. Between mobile pressing us on one end and desktop speed advancement stalling out on the other, there's increasing motivation to write faster code where it matters, without necessarily having to use C or C++.

I'm not saying paradise is incoming, but I get the impression that we're seeing more care about performance manifesting in real languages and code than we used to.

mreiland7• 12 years ago

Pretty much every competitor I've ever seen for C/C++ has always made the same claim: with X optimization that C/C++ can't do, we can eventually meet or beat C/C++.

It's never actually came true in the general case. ever

vertex-four• 12 years ago

Dollars-to-donuts Rust will too in another couple of years.

I believe the project to follow is "Teepee", which is being developed by the person who wrote the quick-and-dirty "rust-http".

stcredzero5• 12 years ago

LuaJIT was an early example of this, but the flood gates are opening now.

Smalltalk was an early example, but the community made the wrong mindshare choices and it never lost the "slow" reputation. Java still experiences some of the same dynamic.

nnethercote• 12 years ago

Be careful using LuaJIT as a representative example for anything. Not every language implementation can be written by a human super-optimizer like Mike Pall!

But yeah, people have a better idea now of what features need to be built into a language to get good performance, and Rust shows off many of them.

Finally, nostalgia for the old days often includes a failure to remember the many limitations of software back then.

mreiland7• 12 years ago

We've been hearing that statement for atleast the last 15 years. Is it anymore true now than it was then?

The only thing that's caused people to start worrying about efficiency has been social: mobility and environmental concerns.

In no way has technological issues stopped us from increasing our performance throughput.

nadam• 12 years ago

The fastest modern 3D engines (Frostbite, CryEngine) are as brilliantly efficient as those programs from the early days. The difference is that today's highly efficient systems are much more complex, so besides brilliant ideas, more and longer hard work and studying is needed to create something that really impresses people.

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

People have been talking about the impending end of Moore's law for a long time. Now, we have run into a wall with clock speeds which has already slowed things down, and led to a lot of back filling (e.g. The huge push in improving the speed of VMs and interpreted languages is essentially a tradeoff of memory for performance, which follows from memory continuing to get cheaper while performance stagnates (kind of).

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure those days are gone forever. Even if there's a slowdown of CPU power, there's still quite a lot left over for the sloppy coders of the world. Especially when we consider a lot of software isn't CPU bound, but storage bound, and even the most commodity SSD blows away the spinning disk. Oh, we're also all 64-bit now and computers shipping today come with 8gb of RAM.

We recently played the constraint game with the mobile/tablet space. It was fun while it lasted, but now with quad-cores and 1 to 2gb of RAM standard, its over as well. Tablets have become the new laptops. Phones have become the new tablets. Its boring.

I think the days you pine for are forever gone, at least in the general computing space. I find that once something new comes around, its naturally constricted and if it allows people some level of freedom and creativity, then the weirdo early adopters will rush in, and in that group there will always be a handful of super-stars. This minority makes the big crazy strides or the crazy efficient game and then go into more respectable work.

We also saw this with the early web, which was so much more innovative and experimental than the "social marketing" mode we've all agreed works best. That matured quickly as well. Look how the web browser is pretty much a platform, if not a quasi-OS, in itself. We keep reinventing the big bloaty OS and big bloaty applications for reasons that make sense; because people want big bloaty toys and the bells and whistles they offer.

So where's the next new constrained system young hackers are going to blow ours minds with? Maybe 3D printing. Maybe drones. Maybe VR. Maybe automated and electric cars. But even those have a certain level of maturity already. We might not know until it actually happens. Who saw TBL and the www coming? I suspect very few.

I personally hope to wake up one day to a new Jobs/Woz combo offering me something straight out of sci-fi, like a home robot with useful arms and enough AI to make use of it or a lucid dreaming machine that actually works or a nootropic that makes us all near geniuses. Come on guys, stop writing bejeweled clones and financial apps and blow our minds again. I suspect I still have a few mind blowing events left in my lifetime (almost 40 now).

DigitalJack• 12 years ago

Perhaps we'll end up with programming competitions that have restrictions on equipment like some forms of auto racing. Perhaps a common VM would be used for those competitions (maybe this already goes on?)

It could rate limit the CPU/peripheral access, limit memory, etc...

chrismcb• 12 years ago

The word you are looking for is "clever" and we all know that clever isn't always better. Yeah, stuffing everything you needed into <64K was difficult (and fun) But that code isn't "world class" and I wouldn't want to use that code in today's zero day security environment.

Yes people need to write cleaner, less sloppy code. But we also don't need to go back to the days of self modifying code either.

InclinedPlane• 12 years ago

If only. But no.

What happens when FAB technology stagnates, everything locks in place and micro-processor advancement halts? Nope, it takes years for the state of the art FAB technology to trickle down everywhere. All the while getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. That state of the art smartphone in your pocket, it uses processors fabbed using 28nm technology. Even switching to 14nm technology would quadruple the transistor count and allow a corresponding increase in performance. Also, as FAB costs come down it would be more and more cost effective to increase chip sizes up to the maximum feasible die size, further increasing performance. Meanwhile, as former state of the art processor manufacturing becomes cheaper and cheaper it becomes more and more ubiquitous. So now not only your CPU but also your flash storage is made using 14nm technology, and maybe they decide to cram a shit-ton of micro-controlling processing power in there (they already do) and a bunch of static ram for caching or whatever, and performance keeps improving. Meanwhile, the processors and controllers in the radio system, on the cell towers, in the switches and routers, and in desktop and server devices keep getting faster and cheaper too. So now you have a butt-load of resources "in the cloud" or "the fog" or whatever idiom you want to ascribe to the phenomenon, all available for making sloppy code run faster and better.

Ah, but wait, there's more. This is all the boring stuff, but there's crazy stuff out there too. Memristors are almost certainly the future of computing in more ways than one, and so far it looks like they'll be as feasible to manufacture and as practical as we've theorized. With durable storage that has access times faster than modern ram the performance bottlenecks of the past (which have rarely been in CPU and have more often been in I/O or RAM) will fall by the wayside. Pocket sized computers will have terabytes of non-volatile super RAM. You can write 3D renderers in javascript and they'll run at 4k resolution / 60 fps with detail beyond what state of the art GPUs are capable of pushing today.

So no, the hardware train isn't coming to a stop, in many ways it hasn't even started yet.

That doesn't mean that caring about quality and writing highly efficient code isn't worthwhile, but it does mean that there probably won't be a big mean performance bottleneck forcing everyone to get their shit together in the near future.

rphlx2• 12 years ago

With 16nm parts in production now, I suspect conventional NAND flash has less an 8X density increase, and less than 10 years left, before we need some totally new tech to keep the party going. AFAICT memristors will not be anywhere near ready for high-volume production by then, at least not in a way that's better than NAND.

With the USD supply expanding 8-10%/yr, within a decade, we may actually see flash storage costs increase over time.

Filligree• 12 years ago

Nothing in there about how they'll do 1.5nm. That's understandable; it's a hard problem, and I imagine any solutions they've come up with will remain trade secrets for some time.

I've heard stories, though. Scanning-tunneling microscopes on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Massively parallel arrays of atomically precise probes, used to build CPUs atom by atom. Things you wouldn't believe.

I'm sure it's coming one day, but once you've gotten that far, how far away are you from outright nanofactories? Which are science fiction, and therefore can't happen.

vorbote• 12 years ago

Love the reference, but I'm sure all young phillistines that hang out in HN have missed it completely. :-( You have my upvote.

Time to die.

yzzxy2• 12 years ago

This is hardly an obscure reference... I think you underestimate the pop culture literacy of young programmers.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

Brilliant.

trsohmers2• 12 years ago

But do androids dream of electric sheep?

jmpe• 12 years ago

How i learned to stop worrying and love the miniaturization:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

Seriously, watch it. Memristor-tech relies on this kind of miniaturization and can provide a speed boost in several areas in current architectures.

Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics.

kken2• 12 years ago

HP and the Memristor is a good PR story. Unfortunately there is not too much beef behind it.

The Memristor is actually the same as an RRAM element (Resistive Random Access Memory). Companies other than HP have started working on it long before and are significantly ahead. For example Micron recently presented a multi-gigabit prototype chip. But there is still a lot to be done. HP lacks the funds, manpower and manufacturing muscle to really get anywhere in this area.

mikeyouse• 12 years ago

HP lacks the funds, manpower and manufacturing muscle to really get anywhere in this area.

They might lack the political will, but HP has ~$15B cash on its balance sheet, 350k employees, and tens of billions in fixed assets.

kken2• 12 years ago

Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics.

Such as? Getting new materials into manufacturing is only the last step. Before that there has to be a significant benefit of doing it. And yes, that is usually benchmarked against risks and capex.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

They respond allergically to everything that looks a little exotic because the costs of failure are colossal, and I would bet money that conservatism has allowed the industry to dodge more than a few bullets you haven't heard about. High-k just happens to be one of the things that worked out in the end.

AshleysBrain• 12 years ago

I find it just amazing that modern chips already have parts that are just thirty or so atoms across [1], and that there are plans to go even smaller. I guess you can't go much smaller than 1.5nm because that's, like, three atoms, right?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_nanometer

tfgg2• 12 years ago

1.5nm is more like 10 atoms across, given that, for example, a C-C bond is 0.154 nm. Not that that helps tremendously :)

Denvercoder9• 12 years ago

I don't think we can actually make chips out of carbon...

josaka2• 12 years ago

Unit cell of Silicon is about 5 angstroms (0.5 nm), so we'd be at about 7 atoms wide for a diamond cubic structure (I think).

claudius• 12 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon has 0.5nm for the lattice spacing, distance between Si atoms ranges somewhere between 0.3nm and 0.5nm, I guess. Even if you go to graphene instead of Si wafers, I don’t think you’ll get more than three atoms within 1.5nm, as graphene is not a cubical lattice.

ufmace3• 12 years ago

That what I always wonder. There's gotta be a limit in there somewhere... right? Maybe? But they just keep finding new ways to make 'em even smaller yet. How far will we go, and what will our devices and industry look like by the time we can't go any further?

josu2• 12 years ago

I don't think that there is a way to go smaller than an atom. Most likely, there will be a sifht in technique. My guess is quantum computing, but who knows.

tedsanders4• 12 years ago

It's quite possible we're at the cusp of the plateau already. For many years planes kept getting faster and faster, until one day they didn't. It may be the same with processors. For years they'll keep getting smaller and smaller, until one day they don't. In fact, this already happened with clock speed 10 years ago. The top Pentium 4s, while certainly worse than the Haswell i7s of today, have about the same clock speed (3.8 GHz or so).

Tloewald2• 12 years ago

Tl;dr. Yes.

rwmj4• 12 years ago

Question, probably going to come across as dumb, but I'll ask it anyway ...

Is there a market for "huge" feature chips (eg. 100nm+)? Would it be worth making these older processes very cheap and widely available and growing the market that way?

(You can still build an early Athlon at 130 nm or a 486 at 800 nm).

goteborg• 12 years ago

The cost of making chips at 100nm+, 90nm, 45nm, etc, is almost indifferent. It actually gets cheaper with smaller sizes because you can fit more chips in the same number of waffles.

The problem described by the article is that 10nm is already so small that we are hitting the barrier of what's physically possible.

rwmj4• 12 years ago

What (I think) I mean by the question is this:

Why can't I have a $1M machine sitting in the corner of my lab which turns out 800nm chips on demand? Can the technology which in 1990 was incredibly demanding now be turned into a product, thus vastly opening up the chip market, albeit for "obsolete" varieties of circuits.

flyinglizard• 12 years ago

Yes, you can fit more chips on lower nm, but you spend lots of money on tooling and suffer from lower yields compared to high nm processes. The cost of developing and tooling a modern, competitive ASIC, if you need a relatively modern process, can be tens of millions of dollars (not counting the IP development itself, just bringing to production).

retroencabulato2• 12 years ago

No way is 28nm cheaper than 32nm per chip. Even though the die size shrinks, the process is much more expensive.

Also, s/waffles/wafers/

cowardlydragon2• 12 years ago

previous tech/node fabs often build things like the motherboard chipsets, and other things. 100nm node machinery probably isn't used since there is probably enough production capacity from more recent nodes that there isn't any point (as has been pointed out, silicon wafers aren't really much cheaper for the older nodes, so you might as well stamp more processors out with newer tech)

driverdan• 12 years ago

Beyond what the others have said, one of the reasons you wouldn't want to use older chip tech is power efficiency. In many cases newer chips are so much more power efficient that the power savings alone more than make up for the difference in cost over its lifetime.

gabriel34• 12 years ago

No such thing as a dumb question. (My answer could be dumb, though)

I guess you would be limited by a couple of things:

You don't have scale. To produce cheap you need scale. Go ARM for cheap processors and emulate whatever circuitry you want. It will probably be cheaper for most applications.

Power consumption would be prohibitive.

Huge upfront costs for a market that is quickly fading away.

retroencabulato2• 12 years ago

Sure, and you can find low volume prices here: http://cmp.imag.fr/products/ic/?p=prices

gwern• 12 years ago

There are markets, yes, but they may not be very large ones or ones you'd think of. For example, the NSA has (as of a few years ago, anyway) a chip fab of its own using very large nm features. Why? To manufacture chips for legacy systems.

sitkack3• 12 years ago

Yes, but for things like CMOS imagers and MEMs, not for regular semiconductors.

izzydata• 12 years ago

If you doubled the number of transistors in the same space then wouldn't that nearly double(quadruple) the heat output? How would someone even keep these things at a reasonable temperature at 7nm?

coryfklein• 12 years ago

No, because the heat generated by the transistors is a function of their size.

didroe2• 12 years ago

My limited understanding is that heat is related to the square of the voltage. And that by reducing the size of a transistor, you can lower the voltage. I don't think you can lower the voltage by quite as much as the reduction in size, so there must be a point when you can't just pack more in. Though gate design or choice of materials can reduce the voltage needed as well. They can also make the chip smarter about switching off parts that aren't needed at a given point in time to keep overall heat down.

ufmace3• 12 years ago

Here's an article that disproves Betteridge's law of headlines

phkahler• 12 years ago

It sounds like 7nm and 5nm are entirely feasible, but nobody is prepared to spend $10Billion on the fab until they're sure they've got (close to) the best solution.

Also, I feel like the whole industry is getting a bit lazy. The big foundries are all around 28nm and getting 100 percent utilization of their capacity. So long as their customers competitors have no better foundry to go to, there is little incentive to press forward. There is the possibility to fall behind, but waiting just means increasing certainty in the path forward. Meanwhile Intel...

ebiester• 12 years ago

Or, alternatively, the simple solutions have all been squeezed out and these are genuinely hard problems.

discodave• 12 years ago

That will change if/when intel gives up sticking to x86 only. Then anybody who has space and power constraints (hint: mobile) will be playing fabs off against each other.

zw123456• 12 years ago

The drive to smaller gate structures is because a MOSFET transistor gate is essentially a capacitor, and as such, it takes time to charge and discharge the capacitance of the gate. So to further increase the performance, one must reduce the capacitance of the gate. The gate is basically and RC circuit. The easiest way to reduce the capacitance is to reduce the physical size of the gate. The size of the gate is directly proportional to the capacitance. Once you get down to a few atoms wide, which they are approaching now, then quantum effects kick in and it starts getting impractical to go further. The alternatives for the next generation have to do with attacking the R part of the equation which is what they mean when they talk about electron mobility. Other approaches that are unrelated to the traditional MOSFET are being researched, but there is such a huge amount of IP based on MOSFET any move away from that will incur huge cost in porting over. (think of it as the hardware version of switching to a new programming language). I am not sure what the next gen answer will be as it seemed the author did not either (which tells me he knows what he is talking about).

rdrdss23• 12 years ago

I've heard that the whole quantum tunneling stuff is in practical terms bullshit. While it's a real effect (and physicists looove to talk about it), it's virtually irrelevant b/c the overwhelming issues is parasitic capacitances. When you have a 3Ghz clocks, everything acts like a capacitor and you have current leaking all over the place (the smaller the circuit the closer all the elements are).

So transistors in modern processors don't end up switching consistently. There is all sorts of error correction to compensate for that, but it only goes so far.

yvdriess• 12 years ago

On the other hand, I heard just this week at imec that currently 30% of the leakage is due to quantum tunneling. Nothing to sneeze at.

sigterm• 12 years ago

The gate leakage current was a serious concern until the High-K gate dielectric was found. It increased the gate dielectric thickness so tunneling current is reduced significantly (exponentially). Nowadays the main problems are subthreshold leakage and dynamic power. Here's a good article about it:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-highk-sol...

p1esk• 12 years ago

Wow, you are so wrong, and yet no one has corrected you!

We want to increase gate capacitance, not decrease it. The higher the capacitance, the faster you can invert the channel, and therefore turn the transistor on.

Think of a transistor as a water tap (valve based). Gate capacitance is the sensitivity of the valve to the handle. In this analogy, higher capacitance is equivalent to less effort to turn the handle (to move the valve out of the way and let the water flow).

That's the reason we want to increase the area of the gate (the idea behind FinFET, and all-around gate), and increase its dielectric constant (the idea behind high-k materials).

You're also confused about RC model - perhaps you heard it in the context of a logic gate (as in NAND), and you try to apply it when talking about a transistor gate (as in FinFET). Nope.

tedsanders4• 12 years ago

This question faces a tremendous amount of uncertainty. So much rides on whether the power/$ of EUV sources can be significantly boosted. No one knows when (or even whether) this will happen.

It's not even known whether we will reach 10nm any time soon, as the article asserts we will.

The industry's history has inculcated a huge amount of technological optimism, but someday that optimism will be misplaced. There is a fairly high chance that day is today.

joosters• 12 years ago

A fairly high chance? Care to quantify that? Is it 50%? 10%? 1%?

tedsanders4• 12 years ago

Sure, I'd be happy try to quantify my views. What question would you like a quantifiable answer to?

jostmey2• 12 years ago

Let's keep the size of the transistor in perspective. The human synapse is on the order of 20 to 40nm in diameter. I have to wonder if we will be able to do that much better than what Nature has already come up with.

w-ll• 12 years ago

Nature really has produced some amazing things, but they are generally not optimal, just good enough.

jostmey2• 12 years ago

True. And Natural Selection never discovered how to extract energy by breaking apart the atom---that took an act of intelligence. Still, I suspect there may exist limits to how small a fundamental computational unit can be:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021126203508.ht...

agumonkey• 12 years ago

I cant wait for haswell-like processors to be so small they can be powered by kinetic side-effects (walking, etc).

Will 7nm And 5nm Really Happen?

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