[HN Gopher] Intel vs. Samsung vs. TSMC
___________________________________________________________________
Intel vs. Samsung vs. TSMC
Author : rbanffy
Score : 216 points
Date : 2024-07-20 20:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (semiengineering.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (semiengineering.com)
| kurthr wrote:
| If the development of modern chiplet/stacked die is interesting,
| semiwiki also has interesting articles from some of the vendors
| including breakdowns of design and integration costs:
|
| https://semiwiki.com/eda/synopsys/347420-the-immensity-of-so...
|
| TSMC also discussed some of the challenges for multi-die design a
| month ago:
|
| https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/tsmc/345909...
|
| My take is that the rapid rise in heterogeneous solutions and
| complexity will provide some excess semi profitability, but at
| the cost of long run performance increases for "new nodes".
| Instead of one path forward there are now many.
|
| Or the most recent:
|
| https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/347646-tsmc...
| KK7NIL wrote:
| > Instead of one path forward there are now many.
|
| This is a feature, not a bug.
|
| Leading edge nodes are becoming harder and harder to develop
| on, particularly outside of memory and logic. This is because
| of limitations in terms of Ft, max voltage, layout, poor
| scaling of analog, etc. Leading edge nodes nowadays generally
| release without a lot of key features and so can only be used
| for compute tiles, requiring other tiles for IO, analog
| circuits, etc.
|
| As the nodes mature these features will generally get added on
| (that might not even be possible in the future if the current
| trend continues), at which point you can do a SoC with all
| these things integrated on one die (which was essentially the
| only option before we had the packaging technology for
| heterogeneous chiplet systems).
|
| This is why heterogeneous chiplet designs are the future.
|
| Source: my job is helping to develop and test analog and mixed
| signal circuits on leading edge nodes at Intel.
| kurthr wrote:
| Totally agree, the complexity of 3D, heterogeneous nodes, and
| chiplet integration are necessary. Thank you for your
| efforts, and I wish you great success.
|
| It's just that for over 50 years optimizing transistor pitch
| in 2D was sufficient to drive demand and investment. The
| clear winning single path forward provided the exponential
| growth we've come to expect. I suspect the complexity and
| uncertainty of this new heterogeneity does not. Underlying
| system and process simplicity and reliability support
| overlaying complexity in software and network.
|
| I started in semi with 68020/30 to see the huge jump from 2um
| to 0.8um and stayed in on the trailing edge of analog down to
| 28nm. Maybe there is another 40 years of growth, but it feels
| like even though 3D stacking increases the power law of
| dimensionality, it may reduce iteration rate more. We've got
| 8 high HBM, but will we have 100 in even 8 years or 1000 in
| another 8 more?
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| So anyone want to hazard to guess if the node shrinks are going
| to go more than seven ignoring the half steps?
|
| If the article is correct that the major semis are going to kind
| of forge their own paths, in my opinion, that means marketing
| lots of even 1/3 or quarter steps.
| ksec wrote:
| >going to go more than seven ignoring the half steps?
|
| What do you mean by that ?
| sbstp wrote:
| Chip design & manufacturing is probably the closest thing we have
| to witchcraft as a species.
| wzp wrote:
| haha yea
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| EUV lithography might as well have been invented at Hogwarts as
| far as I'm concerned.
| nevdka wrote:
| We use invisible light to draw patterns on crystals to
| control the power of lightning. Definitely magic.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Don't forget the cavernous structures which people are
| forbidden to enter, buzzing with the activity of objects
| controlled by those enchanted crystals, like the magic
| brooms in Fantasia, performing myriad arcane rituals with
| rare and exotic materials to make more enchanted crystals.
| 6510 wrote:
| And the high priests guarding the knowledge.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Ah yes, the sandbenders. [0]
|
| 0: http://catb.org/jargon/html/S/sandbender.html
| nevdka wrote:
| They perform elaborate cleansing rituals on any item
| brought into the crystal-writing room. When they enter,
| they wear special clothing, lest the impurities of the
| outside world taint the crystals.
| wmertens wrote:
| And the scribes designing the incantations using magical
| tools, ever more complex, eagerly working towards
| stronger and faster magic crystals
| timschmidt wrote:
| Those magical tools being self-referential incantations
| written in the weird and decidedly non-human language of
| the crystals themselves, containing deep magic [0]
| derived from the secrets of life itself [1] exploited to
| solve problems of intractable complexity in creating the
| next set of incantations.
|
| Disturbingly, using the magical tool twice on the same
| incantation never produces exactly the same result.
|
| 0: https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/deep-magic.html
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
| gumby wrote:
| Those EUV lasers are themselves insanely crazy, and unlike
| the semiconductors they are part of producing, the EUV gear
| has lots of expensive short-lived consumables -- like
| mirrors!
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Yeah Zeiss makes a lot more than eyeglass lenses!
| LVB wrote:
| Yep. One thought experiment I like is how well I'd be able to
| carry forward human technological progress to some primitive
| group, given any descriptions or samples of said tech that I'd
| want.
|
| Microprocessors are always the choke point, where I'd be hard
| pressed to reproduce one, and they form the basis for so much
| else.
| ars wrote:
| Microprocessors with tiny features are a chokepoint, but I
| suspect you could make a primitive one if you really worked
| at it, i.e. go back to 1960's technology, such as the AL1 or
| 4004.
|
| Even going to 1925 and teaching how to make a MOSFET would
| help.
| fragmede wrote:
| nandgame and nand2tetris are important works of teaching
| for this reason. On the off chance I get thrown back in
| time to the exact right time for it to be useful, I'll be
| prepared!
| Tade0 wrote:
| Or disregard silicon entirely and use vacuum tubes combined
| with relays.
|
| Not particularly _micro_ , but a processor nonetheless.
| 6510 wrote:
| Batteries from wooden crates with newspapers, metal rods
| and is enough to do telegraph. That it is slightly harder
| ensures serious use.
|
| If the drinking water is far away at the top of a
| mountain it isn't so convenient to throw your garbage in
| it, take a dump in it or float the dead in it.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I saw someone build a 4004 on a piece of plywood about ten
| years ago.
| raverbashing wrote:
| BJTs are possibly easier. And can get you there
|
| (a TTL 4004 would be an energy drain and would be hot, but
| it would work). I think CRAY used ECL
| lordnacho wrote:
| Microprocessors are still relatively recent.
|
| What about a bunch of other things like smelting iron or
| teaching everyone to read? They don't seem like choke points
| because we are long past them.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Smelting some iron is not that hard. You just burn special
| mud using coal and collect iron drops in the ashes
| afterwards.
|
| Producing cheap iron is hard.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The job is not done if you produce unaffordable iron.
| Producing lots of cheap iron is the job for Industrial
| Revolution
| baq wrote:
| Coal is a recent "invention". The Brits were pretty damn
| lucky they found lots of it under the last tree they
| chopped down. It was all wood before that.
| lazide wrote:
| The bootstrapping required to produce an iron tool from
| scratch (really, a small village with a surplus of food
| sufficient for one full time adult male + accessible ores)
| is doable in less than a lifetime with some recorded
| knowledge on how to do it. Even if they're literally at the
| mud hut stage.
|
| Producing even the simplest IC? Definitely not. And that is
| ignoring the need for electricity and everything else
| required to actually use it.
| 6510 wrote:
| If given the choice I would chose not to have them.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I know what you mean, but it's probably quite the opposite.
| It's engineering and science at its best, not invoking some
| esoteric spirits.
|
| It might _look_ like witchcraft though to the uninitiated.
| claritise wrote:
| We are practically machine elves.. we enchant, transmute and
| bind mystical inscriptions onto crystals that are charged
| through an invisible and intangible energy to perform actions
| we could never do with our biological bodies. All of this is
| produced succinctly through an empirically pragmatic yet
| slightly esoteric process of a form of gnostic meditation we
| call the scientific method...
| vladms wrote:
| What is mystical to follow a procedure? And even breaking a
| big nut with a stone is an "action that we could never do
| with our biological bodies".
|
| Currently it is more esoteric on how a baby (human but not
| only) is formed than how we build a microprocessor. So if
| anything I would say we are statistical acrobats, existing
| despite the numerous approximations in biology. Compared to
| us humans, microprocessors are predictable and boring.
| lazide wrote:
| The tech stack is possible because each individual part
| is (relatively) predictable and boring (when used within
| parameters).
| apantel wrote:
| > What is mystical to follow a procedure?
|
| This is how science destroys wonder instead of inspiring
| it.
|
| What is mystical is the fact that you exist in the first
| place, plus everything else. It's all far out and
| enchanting.
| claritise wrote:
| The mysticism is an emergent property of sufficiently
| complex and "obfuscated" procedures... No intelligent
| entity can lay claim to an omnipotent and perfected
| understanding of all known procedures... The fragments
| between silos of rational derivations of existing
| predicated truths we have discovered about the natural
| order of the universe is where it feels more like an
| enchantment than a discovery.
|
| I strongly disagree around how forming a baby is amore
| esoteric.. cell mitosis is a pretty well understood
| science at this point and eventually we will reach a hard
| limit of covering all the surface area of that domain of
| knowledge. However technological discoveries unfold more
| like a fractal.. it isn't really a bounded domain as far
| as we know.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| _Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
| magic._ - Arthur C. Clarke
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The corollary is that any technology that is distinguishable
| from magic is insufficiently advanced.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Funnily, I'm not sure living in a world of magic is a goal
| to be pursued. We should strive to make tech foundations
| understandable or stop using it.
| ben_w wrote:
| How much are you willing to simplify?
|
| Because if you need to explain GPS at the level of the
| impact of general relativity, my understanding is that
| _by itself_ is already a topic normally introduced in the
| final year of a physics degree.
|
| If you're OK with simplifying to "time passes at a
| different rate for the satellites, here's the equation, I
| will not explain why it works just roll with it", why
| insist on ceasing to use it if the foundation isn't
| understandable?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Trying to explains generative AI to a lay person already
| feels like a wizard trying to explain a magic spell.
|
| _"There's a lot more going on than just saying a
| sentence and then things happen!"_
| 6510 wrote:
| You can do GPS by triangulation using existing radio
| towers with known location. It is very simple.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Any human technology that the general population can't
| understand is an egregious failure in education that will be
| indistinguishable from large-scale cognitive impairment. --
| h-d'a
| ben_w wrote:
| There has _never_ been a time when most technology in use
| was understood by the general population.
|
| "The Last Man Who Knew Everything"[0] was 1773-1829 and the
| trend towards compulsory education was only beginning, 2
| countries at the start of his life and 7 at the end[1].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Man_Who_Knew_Eve
| rythi...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > There has never been a time when most technology in use
| was understood by the general population.
|
| There is nothing surprising in that, we know where we
| have _been_ historically.
|
| When people don't understand vaccination, or electricity,
| or the shape of the Earth, the more interesting question
| is where we are going.
| bitwize wrote:
| It's like I keep saying: We etch runes into stones, and make
| the stones come alive and do our bidding by channelling
| lightning through the runes. And you say computers _aren 't_
| magic?!
| jimnotgym wrote:
| In that the knowledge is locked up in secret societies?
| Xen9 wrote:
| From Monster Manual by Gary Gygaxale and David Angstromson (TSR
| Inc., 1978), p. 61, in the section on etches:
|
| "An etch exists because of its own desires and the use of
| powerful and arcane magic. The etch passes from a state of
| humanity to a non-human, non-living, and non-conductive
| existence through force of light. It retains this status by
| certain conjurations, enchantments, and a reticlefactory. An
| etch is most often encountered within its hidden chambers, this
| lair typically being in some dry, deserted area or vast
| underground lab, and in any case both solidly constructed of
| stone and very sterile.
|
| Through the power which changes this creature from human to
| etch, the armor class becomes the equivalent of +1 plate armor
| and +1 shield {armor class 0). Similarly, cast dice are
| 8-sided, and the etch can be affecied only by magical attack
| forms or by monsters with magical properties or 6 or more hit
| dice.
|
| Etches were formerly ultra powerful magic-users of magie-
| user/clerics of not less than 18th level of magic-use. Their
| touch is so cold as to cause 1-10 points of damage and paralyze
| opponents who fail to make their saving throw. The mere sight
| of an etch will cause any creature below 5 nm {or 5 hit dice)
| to flee in fear of overexposure. All etches are able to use
| magic appropriately at the level they had attained prior to
| becoming non-human.
|
| An etch can only be permanently destroyed when their
| reticlefactory is destroyed. Unless the etch's reticlefactory
| is located and destroyed, the dice will be cast, and the etch
| will re-adhere in 1d10 days after their apparent defect.
|
| The fallowing spells or attack farms have no effect an etches:
| charm, sleep, enfeeblement, annealing, insanity or death
| spells/symbols.
|
| Description: An etch appears very much as does a wight or
| mummy, being of skeletal form, eyesockets mere black holes with
| radiating points of amplificated light, and garments most often
| rotting (but most rich)."
| lazide wrote:
| Angstromson? Talk about nominative determinism!
| jack_pp wrote:
| I'd say the applications are witchcraft as well, as in you can
| get food from tapping a screen on your phone, instead of mana
| you use money.
|
| Or now with latest LLM and voice recognition you can just utter
| the words to summon food.
| m463 wrote:
| I've always thought of chips and the unrelated peter principle
| ("people rise to the level of their own incompetence").
|
| Except with chips it is shrink instead of rise. Like if a chip
| works well and is reliable, time to shrink it (or run it
| faster, or run it hotter, etc) :)
| localfirst wrote:
| Imagine if TSMC is out of the picture. Samsung would have de
| facto monopoly over semiconductor chips.
| Guthur wrote:
| How so?, is there not a glot of trailing edge semi
| manufacturers?
|
| We get dazzled by leading edge semi conductors by that's only
| part of the picture.
| localfirst wrote:
| Well trump doesnt seem keen on protecting taiwan
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Would love to hear more about that. Do you have an article?
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > Imagine if TSMC is out of the picture
|
| Wouldn't Intel actually become competitive? Of course without
| TSMC they wouldn't have had any incentives to open up their
| fabs...
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Intel is currently limping along on government handouts,
| hoping people don't notice their latest generations burn out
| if you leave them turned on. Taking their primary competition
| away would push up profit margins and push down the need to
| fix the engineering. If they aren't dead already, TSMC
| disappearing would do it.
|
| I wonder how global foundaries is doing these days.
| dannyw wrote:
| A specific fab had a process issue, that appears to have
| been rectified in April 2024. Intel 4 is not affected.
| Other fabs making Intel 7 Ultra is not affected. The issue
| only noticeably shows up in the highest-end processors, and
| dropping max clock multiplier by ~3% seems to fix things.
|
| It's not a good thing, but it's not doomsday. The earliest
| Ryzens 1000s had issues with making incorrect calculations
| in certain circumstances, and look where they are now. More
| recently, just a year ago, certain Ryzen mobos literally
| fried their chips to ~1000 degrees (literally 1000
| celsius).
|
| Yes, there are reports of ~50% failure rates, etc... but if
| you get a shipment of a contaminated batch, it's probably
| gonna fail, and a single source shouldn't be used to
| generalise.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| How well established is that? I'm a few weeks out of
| date, last time I looked Intel hadn't really said
| anything either way
| mbajkowski wrote:
| The following in the article is pretty spot on "Numerous
| industry sources say TSMC's real strength is the ability to
| deliver process development kits for just about any process
| or package." There are countless flows and tools that need to
| get enabled, tested, etc. on the way to make a chip. TSMC has
| established a fairly good reputations delivering the required
| collateral. Just having a great process without proper PDKs
| will not get you anywhere fast
| gradschoolfail wrote:
| The TSMC description language mentioned is an "open" standard.
|
| https://3dblox.org/
|
| https://resources.sw.siemens.com/en-US/video-simplified-phys...
| nabla9 wrote:
| Packaging has become so advanced that they now need similar
| accuracy and clean rooms as the chipmaking itself. When they add
| microfluidics it becomes even more difficult.
| robertwt7 wrote:
| I didn't understand how crucial chip manufacturing is until
| reading the book "Chip War".. What an amazing book. This is
| probably one of the greatest, if not the greatest invention in
| the human history.
| 3abiton wrote:
| We have some sand to thank. Jokes aside, it is still mind
| boggling how most of the manufacturing is still dominated by
| very few companies, it's the perfect setup for WWIII
| mrtksn wrote:
| When I was a kid I was into electronics and remember being very
| annoyed when I found out about this chip stuff. I was happily
| building analog circuits using the basic building blocks like
| transistors, capacitors and resistors and it gave me the
| satisfaction of having great control over everything and being
| able to "see in 3D" when I look at my circuit as I had full
| mental model over what's happening.
|
| Chips are really great of course but at the same time its
| completely magic in a bad way. It haven't clicked for me how it
| all works until I watched videos of people building CPU analogs
| in Minecraft or something. Just don't like the feeling of not
| having an idea of how this thing works just by looking at it.
| tuyiown wrote:
| > Just don't like the feeling of not having an idea of how
| this thing works just by looking at it.
|
| I find it pretty funny that, since we're no equipped to sens
| electrical flows just by looking at it, it's more the visual
| / sensorial support for you mental model that helps you. E.g.
| you don't really have more information by seeing the circuit
| physically than looking at plans, it just that your brain
| finds it easier.
|
| But it's also pretty clear that having physical objects in
| the loop actually changes the brain thought process, so it's
| not just an affair of having the information at hand, how
| it's presented to our senses must imply changes.
| mrtksn wrote:
| That's right, the analog circuit has clear topology which I
| can easily imagine what's going on just by looking at it
| and sometimes by manipulating it.
|
| It's simply more enjoyable to look at, like looking at
| mechanical watches or industrial machinery. Chips are kind
| of dull. Not to take anything away from their enormous
| utility and impact of course.
| bgnn wrote:
| Well, this us true for only the simple analog circuits. A
| modern analog front-end of a 5G modem or so is absolutely
| impossible to understand visually. Even the sub-blocks
| like the phase-locked-loop (PLL) or the analog-to-digital
| converter (ADC) are often vay too complex to grasp alone.
| But with a good hierarchy of the schematic one can divide
| each of these into sub-blocks and understand each of the
| sub-blocks. The whole is still too complex to understand
| fully, even for its designer. This causes a lot of simpe
| mistakes to happen like forgetting to connrct two nodes
| and not realizing till the silicon failing after the
| production...
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yes, but there is a certain magic feeling of power in
| knowing that you _could_ , with a steady hand and a
| soldering iron with thin enough tip, meaningfully alter
| or repurpose the analog parts of the circuit.
|
| It's like the difference between a game whose logic is
| 90% Lua or Python scripts, included plaintext in the game
| directory, vs. one that's 100% compiled C++. One is
| susceptible to modding by a 12 year old kid armed with a
| notepad, or a 22 year old kid trying to make a flashy
| visualization of finite state machines to get a good
| grade on CS labs for little work[0]. The other is...
| still mutable, if you get into reverse engineering, and
| probably pay for (or pirate) SoftICE[1]. More
| importantly, one lets you learn how to make similar
| things, through looking and experimenting; the other
| doesn't[2].
|
| --
|
| [0] - Well, that involved Processing to show an animated
| diagram of a simple FSM, and Colobot with a flying Moon
| robot programmed with that FSM for the flashy vis, plus
| some half-assed IPC using text files...
|
| [1] - Ghirda wasn't a thing back then.
|
| [2] - See also "Show source" in browsers - used to be a
| great on-ramp to webdev and programming, back when JS was
| just a toy language.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's different in that analog circuits aren't just a
| physical representation of a wiring diagram - they are
| something I know I could manipulate if needed. Cut out a
| part there and replace it with a substitute, splice some
| wires in and add more parts to add extra functionality,
| etc. Digital electronics? The chips are magic black boxes.
| And when they communicate using digital protocols, like
| SPI, I2C, UART, etc., then the physical properties of
| connections between the chips become irrelevant too - the
| connection is either present or missing, you can't
| manipulate the behavior by messing with the wire from
| outside. No soldering in a cap to change delays, or a 555
| to add timed behavior. Almost all of the circuit is
| therefore hidden in magic black boxes, and whatever remains
| either works or it doesn't.
|
| Now sure, I know now I can do digital electronics with the
| right tools. But the tools I _can_ use, that most hobbyists
| and professionals can access, allow only limited control.
| You can 't just fab yourself an alternate chip to do
| something, you have to buy the very specific one that
| happens to do what you want, or a more general one that can
| be reprogrammed. And you rarely can reprogram existing
| chips on a board you modify, because the vendors don't
| _want_ to see the magic.
|
| Yes, I too, as a kid, was pissed off about digital
| electronics, and regularly remarked to a friend that soon
| we'll have light switches and fridges implemented using
| microcontrollers. If I only knew how true that prediction
| would turn out...
|
| Now the irony is, at that same time I was making those
| complains, I was also studying X86 assembly and C++, trying
| to learn how to make video games. Turns out, the common
| thread that connects programming computers and analog
| electronics is _accessibility_. I could do both for almost
| free, while gradually learning through experimentation. I
| couldn 't do that with digital electronics - the cost and
| educational barrier was just too great.
| textlapse wrote:
| Just the sheer number of companies and the complexity of the
| supply chain to produce a square inch of product most of which
| is tamed sand... is mind boggling.
|
| I don't think there is quite another product made by humankind
| that matches the sheer number of humans/sqinch - even including
| rockets, space ships, and some hospital clean room equipment.
|
| Truly a golden era to be alive as a civilization to appreciate
| the height of human potential.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Almost every current era is golden if you lived in that era,
| unless you look back. Tech is always improving every year, if
| it isn't tech, is laws and social structures.
| Certhas wrote:
| This is not true. The idea of constant progress is a
| relatively recent cultural invention.
|
| Prior to the great acceleration changes were slow enough
| that the world seemed static over a lifetime. If it wasn't,
| the changes were almost as likely to be negative as
| positive.
|
| It's also entirely possible that we are in a transitional
| period. That in hindsight the great acceleration will be
| the first half of a sigmoid function.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Acceleration
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Makes me think of something my high school physics
| teacher tried to drill into us: if you zoom in on an
| exponent enough, it looks like a straight line.
|
| Maybe we're transitioning between stages of a sigmoid. Or
| maybe we're still on an exponential trajectory, but on a
| timescale of one lifespan, the change still looks linear
| (if very fast).
| lazide wrote:
| Bahaha -
|
| plagues (black death, plague of justinian, many more)?
|
| conquered by mongols?
|
| targeted by crusades over centuries?
|
| Do you think the Natives in North America, South America,
| or Australia saw it as golden?
| hedora wrote:
| I'd guess a kernel of corn has a similar humans per square
| inch ratio. It took about 10,000 years to bio-engineer the
| stuff at your grocery store.
| textlapse wrote:
| That's true. In terms of humans per sqinch per unit time
| though....?
| rustcleaner wrote:
| This comment just makes me want to hoard all the chips and
| the plans and the...
|
| ... oh god what if we collapse again like Atlantis?!!
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Can a sufficiently determined person start a new fab in the
| west?
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| At what feature size?
| http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/
| bgnn wrote:
| if they invest in educationg tens of thousands of engineers,
| yes, maybe in 20 years.
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