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Posted on 02/22/2015 4:47:42 PM PST by ckilmer
Eventually, the conventional ways of manufacturing microprocessors, graphics chips, and other silicon components will run out of steam. According to Intel researchers speaking at the ISSCC conference this week, however, we still have headroom for a few more years.
Intel plans to present several papers this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco, one of the key academic conferences for papers on chip design. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr will also appear on a panel Monday night to discuss the challenges of moving from today's 14nm chips to the 10nm manufacturing node and beyond.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
And this is only silicon. :’)
It’s all so crazy. Who woulda thought 10 years ago this was possible.
Science scares me. I am a simple caveman.
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Hey its going to get worse. Someday all deserts of texas will be turned green. Mexico too. Only just not as fast.
When that happens you’ll know the world is coming to an end according to God’s timing.
Intel among others started including some kind of exotic metal “bead” running diagonal in one of the layers, to bleed off excess electronics. I don’t know how any of this stuff works, I’m still working on how Fred Flintstone can get that car to roll at full speed by just moving his feet a few times.
It hasn’t ended ... yet :-). Processor prices have declined and the new ones are a lot more powerful than their predecessors.
However :-) ...
Most new processors are parallel processors. Software rarely exploits these new architectures. It’s great if you’re programming them yourself and make use of them! There are a few applications that make use of them as well (video editing/transcoding, some games, graphics intense applications).
The catch is that programming highly parallel systems is tricky for those not accustomed to developing such applications. Debugging is a total pain if the code is written terribly. As such, most companies like to avoid requiring multiple cores at all costs :-).
Overall, all a processor core means to a typical user is that one can run another application in parallel with no appreciable performance loss. Usually 4 cores is enough for a vast majority of users out there (actually, 2 is probably enough!) Chances are they won’t care if they have a six, eight, or 12+ core system. There would be no appreciable difference in their experience given the applications they use.
Overall, the transistor counts are still going up and the cost is still coming down, but there’s certainly a limit in the not too distant future.
I think, in the very near future, bandwidth will be free. In exchange for free bandwidth, cellphones will always be connected and, during when they are not used, they will all be interconnected and forming a massive supercomputer.
As 2 Kool explained, I'm not sure there's anything significant about 7 nm (or 5 atoms), and I'm not sure that's what Intel is saying either.
Ten or twenty years ago, there were plenty of people who thought they'd never be able to get useful circuit functionality at feature sizes below twenty atoms, which they are already well below.
Also keep in mind that there's a whole manufacturing dimension to this. To get to the current features size of 19 nm (or is it 14 nm now?) takes an incredible amount of technology.
For example, back in the 1990s, they were able to use deep blue lasers for light sources to transfer the chip-scale artwork to the various layers of photoresist on the big (300 mm) wafers they used to make microprocessor and memory chips.
To get below 22 nm, they have to use EUV (extreme UV) light sources that are remarkable. In them, they use very high-power lasers to ionize tiny specks (or droplets) of metallic tin (Sn). When I say "ionize," I mean highly ionize. They blow the entire outer electron shell off the tin atoms; the resultant plasma emits photons of such a high energy that they are close to being X-rays. This process is in some ways identical to what they planned to do with laser fusion, except this is practical, the tin droplets are ionized at the rate of tens or hundreds per second (I'm not sure of the details).
Just the light sources for these fab machines cost as much as the entire fab machine (they used to be called a "wafer stepper" or a "mask aligner," I don't know if those terms are still used) of twenty years ago.
To get to 7 nm, they'll have to actually go to literal X-Ray sources. This means (if I remember correctly) that the whole process has to be done under high-vacuum conditions. Also keep in mind that they don't get to lay down the tiny lines and features just once. They have to do it over and over again, five, six, even seven times, to make working chips. Each overlay has to be done to a tiny fraction of the feature line width. Thus, to achieve 7 nm feature sizes, they have to be sure they can reach an overlay accuracy of - again, I don't know the details - but I would think no more than 2 or 3 nanometers.
That means they have to be able to control the "wafer stage" of these machines (which are big, the size of a small car) to an accuracy on the order of the size of one atom, over and over, at production speeds, turning out tens of thousands of chips per hour. That's because these machines will be enormously expensive, and must be kept in production 24-7-365 to pay off the money Intel will borrow to build, install, and operate them.
Roswell stuff no doubt :)
I think, in the very near future, bandwidth will be free. In exchange for free bandwidth, cellphones will always be connected and, during when they are not used, they will all be interconnected and forming a massive supercomputer.
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Yeah this is the internet of things. Your microwave and fridge will have different IP addresses. Households appliances will talk to each other. Lord knows why. But that’s the plan. Well there is one thing I like. That is the more efficient use of heating and cooling and lighting so stuff turns off when you’re not around automatically.
Or it all turns off when you’ve been deemed unessential and they need more soylent.
Faster switches.
Or it all turns off when you’ve been deemed unessential and they need more soylent.
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Agree — unless your electricity/power comes from your own property.
That means they have to be able to control the “wafer stage” of these machines (which are big, the size of a small car) to an accuracy on the order of the size of one atom, over and over, at production speeds, turning out tens of thousands of chips per hour. That’s because these machines will be enormously expensive, and must be kept in production 24-7-365 to pay off the money Intel will borrow to build, install, and operate them.
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Sort of like the massive deep sea drilling rigs in the gulf of Mexico.
Yes, although the people who finance and operate those are looking at far higher risks on a day-to-day level than Intel is.
Intel doesn't have to worry about hurricanes wiping out their billion-dollar investments. They also don't have to worry about underwater leaks or blowouts causing the government to come down on them and take half their annual profits to serve as a political slush fund.
They don't have to worry about how many Russian submarines have their platforms in their crosshairs 24 hours a day.
They don't have to worry about the price of their product suddenly crashing because OPEC is trying to put frackers out of business.
The risks the oil guys have to deal with are off the charts.
The limit is determined by the diffusion limit which is set by the wavelength of light shining through the masks. Extreme ultraviolet has a shorter wavelength than deep ultraviolet (from lasers) currently in use, so it can make smaller features. There are huge challenges moving to EUV Light. There’s a pretty technical explanation at http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography.
EUVL is a significant departure from the deep ultraviolet lithography used today. All matter absorbs EUV radiation...the optics (mirrors and lenses) alone absorb 96% of the available EUV light, so the EUV source will need to be sufficiently bright. Research is focused on plasmas generated by laser or discharge pulses. The mirror responsible for collecting the light is directly exposed to the plasma and is therefore vulnerable to damage from the high-energy plasma ions and other debris.
This is tougher than rocket science!
Multi core / multithreaded makes a HUGE difference at the server farm delivering your video.
I worked for Intel for 25 years in design.
They are three years ahead of anyone right now but EUV is the gating item right now.
There won’t be any big breakthrough in the next 5 years without EUV
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