It's fun to dig up old predictions of where we'd be today. Here's an article from 2002: <a href="https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1176510" rel="nofollow">https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1176510</a><p>>Moore's Law scales to at least 9nm: technologist<p>>It'll be at least a human generation before Moore's Law begins to run out of gas at around the 9nm and even then it may thrive, TSMC's chief technologist said Tuesday (March 12). Calvin Chenming Hu told an audience at the annual Semico Summit conference here that the 9nm node "can be ready more or less on time, in 2028 according to long-term forecasts or 2024 according to the 2002 (industry roadmap)."<p>Intel is off by 4-5 years according to their initial estimates (in 2011) of hitting 10nm, but they are 5-10 years ahead of where TSMC thought we would be 15+ years ago. TSMC was manufacturing at 10nm last year, incidentally (Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835).
There are even rumors that Intel delayed the much more important Xeons to 2020, which could give AMD a 1 year head start with Zen2 on 7nm in the server space (comparable to Intels 10 nm).<p>Copy paste from my posting yesterday:<p>EDIT: it seems the twitter post got deleted.<p>EDIT2: anandtech still has the pictures: <a href="https://www.anandtech.com/show/13119/intels-xeon-scalable-roadmap-leaks-cooper-lakesp-ice-lakesp-due-in-2020" rel="nofollow">https://www.anandtech.com/show/13119/intels-xeon-scalable-ro...</a><p>> <i>If the rumor [0] that Intel's first 10nm server chip will only release mid 2020 is true, then AMD's shares will probably skyrocket again if they truly can release their Zen 2 server CPU mid 2019 (on 7nm which is comparable to Intel's 10nm).</i><p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/david_schor/status/1022142835989118977" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/david_schor/status/1022142835989118977</a>
It used to be that Intel was undisputed king of the silicon race. It's kind of shocking that they've fallen so far behind.<p>TSMC is already doing 7nm mass production right now:<p><a href="https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20180622PD204.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20180622PD204.html</a><p>(arguably, what they call "7nm" isn't quite that, but still...)
Well they have a lot of things to care of before to release the next CPU<p><a href="https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/support/articles/000025619/software.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/support/articles/0000...</a><p>In particular security issues related to the IME:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine</a>
Note this article is guessing and it's very likely they are guesssing wrong.<p><a href="https://seekingalpha.com/article/4190920-intel-intc-q2-2018-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single" rel="nofollow">https://seekingalpha.com/article/4190920-intel-intc-q2-2018-...</a> what was actually said is this:<p>> we continue to make progress on 10-nanometer. Yields are improving consistent with the timeline we shared in April, and we expect systems on shelves for the 2019 holiday season.<p>This article guesses this to mean Cannon Lake.<p>In reality, it almost surely means Ice Lake.
The secret behind 10nm technology:<p><a href="https://www.asml.com/press/press-releases/earnings-growth-continues-driven-by-strong-sales-across-full-product-portfolio-continued-euv-progress-enables-asml-roadmap-acceleration/en/s5869?rid=57342" rel="nofollow">https://www.asml.com/press/press-releases/earnings-growth-co...</a><p>“Outlook
For the third-quarter of 2018, ASML expects net sales between EUR 2.7 billion and EUR 2.8 billion, a gross margin between 47 percent and 48 percent. R&D costs of about EUR 395 million, SG&A costs of about EUR 120 million. Our target effective annualized tax rate is around 14 percent.”
From the original article:<p>>In the second-quarter results, Intel said that its 10-nanometer yields are "on track" with systems on the market in the second half of 2019. Krzanich's previous perspective wasn't specific on whether they would arrive in the first half of next year or in the second half. On the conference call with analysts on Thursday, Swan was more specific and said products would be on shelves in time for the holiday season.<p>>Murthy Renduchintala, group president of the technology, systems architecture and client group, said on the call that the products that will become available in 2019 are client computing products, whereas products for data center use will come "shortly after." The stock fell further after those comments but later rebounded as executives talked about ongoing research and development for next-generation 7-nanometer technology.
I wonder how cloud computing providers feel about this. On the one hand, competition between Intel and AMD for the cloud probably means cheaper chips for them. On the other hand, they were probably looking forward to the power savings from Intel's 10nm chips.
Cry me a river. I'm still waiting for the day when our productivity scales with computing power (or node size). [1]<p>Until then, the drive toward smaller/faster/whatever-other-superlatives CPU's is just people running on a hamster wheel.<p>[1] <a href="https://foundersfund.com/the-future/#/artificial-intelligence-software" rel="nofollow">https://foundersfund.com/the-future/#/artificial-intelligenc...</a>
Could someone ELI5 why smaller/denser feature size and layouts is the way we achieve higher and higher speeds? Is it mainly about efficiency and heat?