[HN Gopher] TSMC Expected to Charge $25,000 per 2nm Wafer
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TSMC Expected to Charge $25,000 per 2nm Wafer
Author : WithinReason
Score : 84 points
Date : 2023-06-27 17:07 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomshardware.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomshardware.com)
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| Did the journalist mix up "quotes" (citation) and "quotas"
| (allowed amount)?
| drone wrote:
| No, "quotes" being prices offered to customers. In context, it
| is correct, they're saying that they're quoting higher prices
| to prospective customers.
| alberth wrote:
| As a comparison, TSMC wafers cost: Size
| Cost/Wafer % Increase ---- ----------
| --------- 10nm $5,992 7nm $9,346
| 55% 5nm $16,988 81% 3nm $20,000*
| (est.) 17% 2nm $25,000* (est.) 25%
|
| https://hardwaresfera.com/en/noticias/hardware/precio-oblea-...
|
| https://www.siliconexpert.com/blog/tsmc-3nm-wafer/
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I have read that "dark silicon" causes not all transistors to be
| usuable at the same time at this resolution.
|
| Is it possible to calculate a cost pr. usable transistor? And how
| does 2nm compare with its predecessors?
| tomcar288 wrote:
| can someone explain to me, why faster and faster chips are
| required? I look at my iphone 7+ and my wife's iphone 11 and
| her's is no more capable than mine, other than maybe wireless
| charging. our stupid new washing machine has chips in it and it
| doesn't do any better job than the last chipless model we had.
| and i'm seriously not looking forward to getting a new car with
| screens all over the place rather than knobs that actually work.
| my latest work computer a brand new mac doesn't do anything i
| need that can't be done by my 2014 macbook pro.
|
| where is all this drive to smaller and faster and faster coming
| from? and why?
| gettodachoppa wrote:
| I agree. I think phone hardware became "good enough" a few
| years back (as PCs did around 2010). The last time I upgraded
| is only because the repair guy changing my battery broke the
| cell antenna. I'm fine using a 10yo flagship phone, IF it's not
| sabotaged by the OS and app developers bloating what runs on
| said hardware.
|
| I can't think of any apps other than games and the browser that
| need anything above a 10yo phone to run perfectly.
|
| For mobile games, that's a given, but it's something that only
| kids care about.
|
| As for web browsing, it will forever be trash because HTML/JS
| is such a shit and inefficient way to access information. You
| could put a quantum computer in the phone and it still won't be
| as responsive as a native app using a fraction of the
| resources.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Faster and more energy efficient chips will continue to open up
| new consumer product categories, just as they have with the
| desktop, laptop, smartphone, smart watch, and smart home thing.
|
| Major companies seem to be betting that AR eyeglasses that look
| like normal glasses instead of ski goggles will eventually
| replace smartphones.
|
| On the data center side, the whole AI revolution has been
| largely driven by available compute.
| dageshi wrote:
| They enable applications you, nor I have considered yet but
| someone else has.
| lizknope wrote:
| There are far more chips made other than just smartphone or
| laptop chips. In the last few years my coworkers, former
| coworkers, and myself, have worked on server chips for the
| cloud, GPUs, machine learning accelerators, 400+ gigabit
| networking, 5G tower chips, and tons of other stuff. Most chips
| are not in end consumer applications but in something you may
| be using indirectly like a network switch on the Internet in a
| giant data center
| solardev wrote:
| I mostly agree about the phones, but laptops?
|
| Man, it used to be (in the Ultrabook era and before) you'd get
| a thin and light that's drastically underpowered, runs hot, has
| a terrible screen and/or keyboard, has a battery life of 3 to 5
| hours, and no GPU. Even the premium laptops like the Lenovo X1
| were a series of tradeoffs.
|
| Now for a similar price, a modern MacBook is fast, silent, can
| play casual games or do GPU accelerated editing, has industry
| leading screens, and lasts all day. And they finally have HDMI
| ports again (heh).
|
| In my 30 years of laptop usage (almost entirely Windows and
| Linux), the Apple Silicon Macs are far and away the best
| laptops to have ever been made. Nothing else even coming close.
| Things that feel slow on my 2019 i9, and cause the fan to run
| full blast, are multiple times faster and cause no noise at all
| on the M1. And this thing is more powerful than the top of the
| line Alienware gaming laptops from a few years ago, the things
| that weight like 18 lbs and another 5 for the charger. The
| efficiency makes a huge difference in my daily quality of life.
|
| Maybe that doesn't matter to you, but it makes my work so much
| nicer. Of course, if you don't value the same things... good
| for you! I'm jealous, and wish I weren't such a gadget head.
| tester756 wrote:
| Whole world moves as fast as semiconductor do.
|
| Some things werent possible with computational power of the e.g
| year 2000 and now are.
| david2ndaccount wrote:
| Javascript.
| photonerd wrote:
| > I look at my iphone 7+ and my wife's iphone 11 and her's is
| no more capable than mine
|
| I mean... it _is_ more capable, by a lot, and so are the
| current 14s.
|
| The question is... do you use it? You may not. That's fine. But
| some people do.
|
| Not least the hardware can do more with _less power_. That's
| pretty incredible. Plus faster graphics, memory, and cpu all
| improve overall responsiveness. That's without going into the
| camera, neural engine, on chip image processing, etc.
|
| These all improve with each generation. There is absolutely a
| difference, especially between a gap of 4 versions like you
| have.
|
| But it's ok that _you_ don't need it. Many other of us
| certainly do appreciate the improvements though!
| csmpltn wrote:
| > can someone explain to me, why faster and faster chips are
| required?
|
| We keep piling up abstraction layers that effectively cancel
| out any processing speed improvements, so the only way to get
| better performance (user perceived) now is to push for better
| hardware (which is increasingly prohibitively expensive to do
| at this point).
|
| That's what you get when the only way people build software
| these days is in a browser, with JavaScript/Python/WASM and
| 3-layers deep Docker containers. With layers of sandboxes in-
| between, and countless libraries and API abstraction layers for
| every single little thing.
|
| Look at how bloated apps like Teams/Zoom/Slack are - sending a
| fucking plaintext buffer between two computers without using
| at-least 1GB of RAM on each client machine is somehow an
| unsolved problem in 2023.
| olliej wrote:
| There are all sorts of things that a new phone can do that one
| from a few years ago, even if you don't personally use it.
| Similarly even if you don't play games, plenty of other people
| do.
|
| It's also incorrect to only consider phones, as TSMC
| manufactures many (most?) of the non-x86 laptop/desktop CPUs,
| where performance is much more overtly desired.
|
| The final point is that this isn't just a matter of smaller
| equals faster, but also smaller equals less power - which I
| assume does matter to phone users.
| grumple wrote:
| Obvious applications: anything machine learning related (self
| driving cars, etc); Photo and video processing on your devices;
| Graphics processing; Simulation of a million different things,
| computation for a million different projects.
|
| Your question could be posed to anything. Why does someone want
| a smaller battery? Perhaps they want their electric car to
| weigh 500 pounds less so it gets more range. Why didn't we stop
| when computers were the size of buildings?
| danieldk wrote:
| People do play games on phones and for 3D games an iPhone 7 vs
| iPhone 11 makes a huge difference. And then we don't even take
| into account the silicon that they use to post-process photos.
| Photos on later iPhones are significantly better. Partly due to
| better sensors, partly due to better lens systems, partly due
| to huge processing improvements.
|
| Or to make another comparison. An 2016 MacBook Air was pretty
| mediocre-performance-wise and would require loud fans to spin
| up for a minimal amount of work. The 2020 MacBook Air M1 was
| about as fast in compiling Rust projects as a Ryzen 3700X (with
| 65W TDP), while being completely passively cooled and therefore
| quiet.
|
| Also, incremental improvements are how we get from a big
| 4.77MHz XT to a supercomputer in your backpack. It's a bit akin
| to saying: I have a 4.77MHz XT and my wife an 8MHz AT and I
| don't really see the difference when running WordStar. The AT
| is an improvement over the XT, perhaps not noticeable for for
| some applications, but year-over-year improvements are needed
| to make big leaps over longer time periods.
| Panoramix wrote:
| We don't really need most of this stuff anyway. I survived just
| fine back in the day without mobile phones.
|
| As to the drivers.. performance, efficiency, consumer
| expectations, smaller devices such as wearable and IoT, and a
| competitive market where if you deliver on these you get a ton
| of consumers.
| shmerl wrote:
| So how will this affect prices of CPUs and GPUs?
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Has the number of chips produced from a single wafer (assuming
| same wafer size) changed from what they call 5nm to 2nm? I know
| that's hard to quantify, you basically have to start a new
| architecture from scratch when a new node comes out.
|
| I'm curious if the price increase isn't as bad as it seems
| because of that, but IANAE.
|
| In any case, I suppose this was expected. TSMC is on the bleeding
| edge of technology, and the techniques and equipment that make
| all of this possible is absurdly astounding. It's a miracle of
| modern cooperation and science that any of it works at all.
|
| Prices will go down as the process matures, and we all see
| progress march forward. Win-win to me.
| WithinReason wrote:
| If you scroll down to the table you can see the trend. New
| process node price increases far outpace price drops for mature
| nodes. Price per transistor has been stagnating since 2012 but
| it's only becoming significant now.
| paulmd wrote:
| The worst part is that MCM doesn't even solve this problem,
| actually in some ways it makes it worse. MCM solves _yield_
| not _wafer cost_ - people conflate the two into a single _die
| cost_ number but they 're actually two distinct things
| really.
|
| Take RDNA3 as an example. Even if you get 100% yields, you
| need a significant amount of additional area in the product.
| N31 is over 500mm2 of area even if it's yielded as a 308mm2
| chiplet and six 38mm2 chiplets. Even if all of those yield at
| 100% you can't make it not be 500mm2 of area, and you have to
| pay for that.
|
| And because MCM imposes some performance overheads that have
| to be compensated for, and because of the innate nature of
| the additional PHYs taking up area, the actual total area is
| larger than a monolithic chip. This is an offsetting factor
| in the comparison to monolithic, yes monolithic yields lower
| but it also needs less actual silicon too, and that pushes
| yields back up a touch and pushes wafer cost down a touch.
|
| Comparisons between products are always inexact, and NVIDIA
| is on a slightly different node (a customized version of
| N4/N5P called 4N) but it's the same general family (AMD is on
| N5P) and 7900XTX is using 531mm2 total to compete with the
| 4080 which uses only 378mm2 - so we are talking about
| potentially a 40% area overhead for MCM, which is significant
| in terms of increased wafer cost even if the yields are
| higher.
|
| Even if you assume RDNA3 missed expectations and "should"
| have performed somewhat better... we are still probably
| talking about a >20% area advantage for monolithic products.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin.
| ..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces.
| ..
|
| (and, note that rumors have swirled recently that N4 and N5P
| are actually the same thing, they have the same density and
| library. Reportedly, both TSMC and Samsung faked their N4 and
| 4LPX libraries for marketing reasons and pushed the "true"
| node off, in the same way that TSMC kinda pushed off the real
| N3 into N3E (e for enhanced) and called the shitty version
| N3B (b for bad) instead... so N4 vs N5P for the basis of the
| 4N custom nodelet may not actually be a meaningful
| distinction after all, lol. And RDNA3 and Ada may actually be
| on the same parent node as a result.)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/145e9ft/tsmc_n4_i.
| .. (actual tweet seems to be removed?)
|
| Anyway, it is the same thing in CPUs too - yes, the CCD/IO
| die approach is great, but, it also does use a lot more
| silicon than a monolithic chip would for an equivalent
| design. Epyc has 8 or 16 chiplets of N5P and another giant
| chiplet of N6 for the IO die. That's a lot of total area, and
| wafer costs continue to increase.
|
| The other place it bites is in GPU dies too. PHYs don't
| shrink, and there are de-facto "minimums" of 4 PHYs per GPU
| (of any performance) imposed by actual raw bandwidth
| requirements and the need for 8GB of VRAM (current max is
| 2GB/16gbit per module unless you go clamshell, which drives
| up cost a ton). Every time you shrink, the wafer cost of that
| fixed, non-shrinkable PHY area goes up by 25% or 50%, even if
| you yield that area at 100%, and the performance does not
| increase accordingly. This is what's been eating up the gains
| in the low-end dGPU market, and this is the reason AMD chose
| not to shrink RX 7600 / Navi33 to N5P with the rest of the
| lineup and left it on N6 instead.
|
| Thermals are the elephant in the room with stacking and wafer
| costs are the elephant in the room with MCM and PHYs. Yes,
| yields are better, but it doesn't mean the wafers are free
| either.
| chasil wrote:
| According to the graph on the linked page below, the cost per
| transistor hit a minimum at 28nm (which was the last of the
| planar designs), and has risen slightly with FinFET (which is
| not as reliable as planar).
|
| "The chart below is from Marvell's 2020 investor day. The bar
| for 28nm was approximately 2011-2012."
|
| Cost is per 100 million gates. 90nm - $4.01
| 65nm - $2.82 45/50nm - $1.94 28nm - $1.30
| 20nm - $1.42 16/14nm - $1.43 10nm - $1.45
| 7nm - $1.52
|
| https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/the-rising-tide-of-sem...
| verall wrote:
| You can fit more chip in the same space with a die shrink. It's
| not as much more as it used to be, but it is more. N2 is still
| pretty new so I'm not privy to details about how much.
| wmf wrote:
| _Has the number of chips produced from a single wafer (assuming
| same wafer size) changed from what they call 5nm to 2nm?_
|
| Most companies target the same die size across generations. For
| example, AMD CCDs have been close to 80 mm2 for three
| generations and Apple keeps the A-class die size around 100
| mm2.
| ortusdux wrote:
| The average 300mm wafer weights ~125g. That's $200/gram, 3x the
| price of gold!
| prewett wrote:
| If you etch/engrave the gold with impressive designs, itss
| price will go up, too. A raw wafer, which is more comparable to
| the price of gold bullion, isn't going to be the price of gold.
| mdasen wrote:
| I think this is a bit where Intel has an opportunity to catch up
| a bit. 3nm is costing 40% more than 5nm and we'll see how long it
| will take AMD to move to 3nm. It took AMD 2 years to move to 5nm
| after Apple started shipping 5nm phones.
|
| Intel is set to launch Meteor Lake on Intel 4 later this year or
| early 2024. That will put AMD and Intel on a similar process-
| level footing. If Intel can get Intel 20A out the door around the
| same time TSMC gets 2nm out the door, we might see Intel overtake
| AMD on process. Intel's latest roadmap has 20A in the "2023-2024"
| time frame which seems a tad unlikely at this point and 18A for
| "2024+". It's possible that Intel will get ahead of TSMC on
| process if they actually hit their roadmap given that TSMC is
| looking at 2025 for 2nm. In that case, AMD might be facing a
| tough battle.
|
| If Intel can control its costs better than TSMC's charges, that
| will make a big difference. If TSMC's charges for 2nm are going
| to be 75% more than 5nm, that's going to eat into margins for
| someone like AMD.
|
| However, while Intel does seem to be making some good moves
| today, it's probably too soon to completely buy into their
| roadmap. Yes, they're refocusing their culture in a positive
| direction. It's still reasonable to have some doubt on Intel's
| roadmap.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Why assume that Intel's cost at this resolution is anything
| less than TSMC's? It likely will be much more expensive for
| Intel as they lack the experience and are producing in a
| country with higher basic costs than Taiwan.
| akmittal wrote:
| Intel has already lost Apple. ARM has not been very successful
| on Windows yet, but Nuvia hased processors are supposed to be
| launched end of this year. If Nuvia chip is anything close to
| M1 also then both Intel and AMD are going to have tough time.
| BearOso wrote:
| Intel has already lost its role as _chip provider_ with
| Apple. As a fab, if it outperforms TSMC as the parent
| suggests, it could provide manufacturing for Apple 's
| designs.
|
| Of course, we'll have to see if Intel keeps up after finally
| clearing its 10nm hurdle.
|
| The M series isn't as great as it seemed. It had an initial
| advantage of a smaller node, and benefits from everything
| being on-die. It's huge, so it relies more on the chip tech
| getting smaller than traditional CPU solutions.
| dragonelite wrote:
| But how can they even find the people that are willing to
| work cheap and long enough to compete against TSMC in
| Taiwan? TSMC is having a lot of issues to scale up their
| Arizona operation.
| soligern wrote:
| You pay the right salaries and the people will come.
| Granted you're not going to get cheap labor working
| borderline slavery hours like you can in Taiwan but maybe
| large scale automation has a role to play.
| stefan_ wrote:
| You are talking about the most automated industry in the
| world with productivity through the roof. Don't believe
| everything they tell you.
| f6v wrote:
| > If Nuvia chip is anything close to M1 also then both Intel
| and AMD are going to have tough time.
|
| Who's going to write a "Rosetta for Windows" that works
| seamlessly though?
| notreallyauser wrote:
| Microsoft would need to do their part in the OS, but Apple
| reportedly didn't do all of Rosetta in house. (IBM now owns
| the start-up reported to have done the core.)
| GeekyBear wrote:
| > Apple reportedly didn't do all of Rosetta in house
|
| You're talking about the 2011 version of Rosetta that
| allowed Intel Macs to run PPC software.
|
| >QuickTransit was a cross-platform virtualization program
| developed by Transitive Corporation. It allowed software
| compiled for one specific processor and operating system
| combination to be executed on a different processor
| and/or operating system architecture without source code
| or binary changes.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTransit
| rektide wrote:
| Number of cores sold is I think quickly tipping towards the
| data center. The data center doesn't need x86
| compatibility.
|
| The other bulk of thr market is mobile, which is almost
| entirely arm already.
| kritr wrote:
| Isn't that already available on Windows?
| f6v wrote:
| From reading the reviews my impression was that it was
| too slow.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Who's going to write a "Rosetta for Windows" that works
| seamlessly though?_
|
| Microsoft? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| They haven't shown any signs of doing a competent job on
| the $1,800 ARM Surface Pro 9.
|
| > My frustration with this computer wasn't a workload
| thing. It didn't start out fast and gradually slow down
| as I opened more things and started more processes. It
| was peppered with glitches and freezes from start to
| finish.
|
| I'd have only Slack open, and switching between channels
| would still take almost three seconds (yes, I timed it on
| my phone). Spotify, also with nothing in the background,
| would take 11 seconds to open, then be frozen for another
| four seconds before I could finally press play. When I
| typed in Chrome, I often saw significant lag, which led
| to all kinds of typos (because my words weren't coming
| out until well after I'd written them). I'd try to watch
| YouTube videos, and the video would freeze while the
| audio continued. I'd use the Surface Pen to annotate a
| PDF, and my strokes would either be frustratingly late or
| not show up at all. I'd try to open Lightroom, and it
| would freeze multiple times and then crash.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/23421326/microsoft-surface-
| pro-9-ar...
| f6v wrote:
| ARM SP felt sluggish even without running x86 software
| when I held it in the store.
| tester756 wrote:
| You think Apple wouldn't even partially go back?
| solardev wrote:
| Why would they? Right now they have the best laptop and
| tablet chip, bar none, and total vertical integration.
| They've invested heavily in M1 and M2 and M3 is due out
| next year. What would an Intel chip offer, except
| uncertainty?
|
| On the compatibility side, Boot Camp is less useful when
| Windows on Arm does its own x86 emulation and works well
| enough in Parallels. On the graphics side they wrote their
| own DirectX 12 wrapper. If they can port some AI libs over,
| running them on 64 GB of shared CPU/GPU memory would be
| pretty amazing.
|
| Maybe in 10 years, if Intel generationally leapfrogs them
| again like with the PowerPC era. But short of that, what
| would they have to gain?
| tester756 wrote:
| I meant building their ARM M3, M4, and so on CPUs
| solardev wrote:
| Like using Intel as a fab?
| tester756 wrote:
| Yes, aren't they going into that business lately?
| solardev wrote:
| Yes, I think so. Sorry I misunderstood you.
| Tade0 wrote:
| > It took AMD 2 years to move to 5nm after Apple started
| shipping 5nm phones.
|
| They didn't have much choice. Apple booked most of the
| production capacity for those two years:
|
| https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-secures-80-percent-of-TS...
| caeril wrote:
| > AMD might be facing a tough battle
|
| The Ryzen 7940HS, which is a pretty good value, is on TSMC 4nm,
| rumored to already cost close to $20k/wafer.
|
| Even if they _double_ the transistor count, a single SKU should
| theoretically be _cheaper_ to produce, since you 're reducing
| the footprint by 4. Of course, this is assuming yields don't
| fall too badly on 2nm (which they probably will, 2nm feels like
| alien technology at this point).
| kayson wrote:
| I'm always a little skeptical of seeking alpha article by <name>
| covering a report by company owned/run by <name>. There's no
| information whatsoever about how these estimates were generated.
| I'm sure you could back them out with decent accuracy from
| earnings statements, but the industry is notoriously secretive. I
| don't think there's any way he can even fathom a guess at what
| the price will be for N2.
|
| It's also worth mentioning that none of the big players will be
| paying sticker price. They negotiate contracts that pay per KGD
| (known good die) since the process yields are abysmal for the
| first year or two.
| wmf wrote:
| There are plenty of reputable one-man analyst shops. Presumably
| they have inside information gathered by "informally" talking
| to many people in the industry.
| tedunangst wrote:
| So 2x price for 4x transistors compared to N5? Or not quite?
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Transistor density scaling decoupled from "node size" (however
| you want to describe it) years (decade??) ago. Also, scaling
| also really depends on what you're building (logic vs cache for
| example). That being said, looking at like a 10-30% increase in
| density per node step will probably get you a rough estimate -
| though you'll certainly need to dig into whatever specific
| claims each foundry advertises for each new node.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'd like to see the table they list there adjusted on a
| $/transistor rate. 7nm is ~1/3 the cost of 2nm, but if you can
| fit 3x as many transistors on 2nm then it could be a wash...
| lizknope wrote:
| I haven't heard what the mask costs are for 2nm or 3nm. For TSMC
| 5nm the masks are about $30 million. If you have a bug and can
| fix it with a metal only change then it is about $20 million. I
| can assure you thought that they will be more expensive for 3 and
| 2nm.
| TOMDM wrote:
| I don't fully understand how the masks work, but can smaller
| players pool together for a mask if they're willing to share a
| die?
| lizknope wrote:
| Yes, it's called a shuttle run but it is normally only done
| for an initial test chip or a prototype.
|
| This says that the 5nm reticle size is 26mm x 33mm
|
| https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/3377/tsmc-
| announces-2x-reticl...
|
| If you are making a huge chip that is close to the max
| reticle size then you can't share it with anyone.
|
| When I have done shuttle runs they split the reticle into
| 4x4mm sections and each cost about $100,000 in 28nm. I think
| the full 28nm mask set was a few million dollars back in 2012
| when it was current technology. You could get another size in
| multiples of 4 like 4x8mm or 8x8mm where you paid another
| $100K for each 4x4 section.
|
| But you can't use these shuttle masks when you are going to
| full production where you make millions of chips because you
| would be making chips from other company's next to yours and
| that company may have had bugs in that mask or only want
| 100,000 chips while you want a million.
|
| The masks are a one time cost (assuming you don't have any
| bugs which is rare) but that is a huge portion of the NRE
| (Non Recurring Engineering cost or one time cost)
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(page generated 2023-06-27 23:02 UTC)