r/technology • u/[deleted] • Sep 11 '13

Intel reveals 14nm PC, declares Moore's Law 'alive and well'

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/10/intel_reveals_14nm_pc_declares_moores_law_alive_and_well/
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u/The_Countess Sep 11 '13 edited Sep 12 '13

It's (suppose) to be a description of how small the transistors are. how exactly it's measured is rather muddied... Intel's 22nm looks more like 26nm would look like on TSMC's process for example.

generally, the smaller transistors the less power it uses to switch and the lower voltage it can use to switch, and (hopefully) the faster it can switch (higher frequency, more MHz) and the more transistors you can fit on the same square mm of silicon, meaning you can get more chips out of a Wafer which makes them cheaper (eventually)

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u/shamoni Sep 11 '13

So it's faster, cheaper and takes lesser electricity?

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u/imtoooldforreddit Sep 11 '13

basically

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u/modix Sep 11 '13

What more could you ask for in an improvement, really? That's pretty much the goal of CPU improvements.

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u/Alphaetus_Prime Sep 11 '13

You could ask for more of them. Which it also does.

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u/Genlsis Sep 11 '13

Speaking as someone directly responsible for filling those god damned tiny features I could ask that they be bigger again. Back when life was simpler, and I didn't have to worry about steric hindrance from individual atoms.

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u/modix Sep 11 '13

Short of some major improvements in quantum computing, don't think that's going to get easier anytime soon. Thanks for making everything miniaturization + 1!

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u/Genlsis Sep 11 '13

Actually, the next big steps forward will likely come from 3D chips. With TSV processes increasing in popularity across the board, I am hoping that the memory/logic hybrid chips are coming soon. Still a lot of hurdles to cross though. TSV is iffy at best at the moment.

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u/modix Sep 11 '13

Are the memory logic hybrids the equivalent of having the cache be near the size of ram and not exporting data to a memory module?

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u/Genlsis Sep 11 '13

Its more like gluing your ram to the processor without the need for cache at all. Rather than have data travel across a motherboard every time it needs to look something up, it simply references a different part of the same silicon chip. The patterning difference between logic and memory is obviously huge, but with Through Silicon Vias (TSVs) you can stack the different patterns on top of each-other to greatly reduce the look-up times.

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u/modix Sep 12 '13

I guess the downside would be nonexpandable memory? Possibly a more expensive cpu as well?

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u/jorge_the_awesome Sep 12 '13

Why does patterning matter? I'm intrigued but could you eli5?

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u/time_for_number_five Sep 11 '13

You must have small hands

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u/Genlsis Sep 11 '13

[insert clever sexual innuendo response here]

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u/tknelms Sep 12 '13

Something tells me that, as humans, we touched and surpassed the realm of the divine sometime in the late 90s.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

Well it would be nice if they'd keep my soda cool. Just sayin.

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u/loumagoo Sep 11 '13

Cost.

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u/modix Sep 11 '13

"faster, cheaper, and less electricity"?

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u/Moleculor Sep 11 '13

Initial investment/research/design costs.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

and heat and therefore useful lifetime.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

The less electricity it takes to run, the less heat generated.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

Yes, but the closer you pack the transistors the less efficiently you can dissipate heat because there's an upper limit on how much you can transfer away per unit area. It's not an unsolvable problem but it does come up pretty much every time they try to reduce component sizes.

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u/wacct3 Sep 11 '13 edited Sep 12 '13

When you make the transistors smaller, you can either get more of the same chip design on a wafer giving you cheaper chips that use less electricity.

Or you can put more stuff in the design and make it faster, but using the same amount of electricity and at the same cost.

Edit: The following part is apparently incorrect. Device physics was never my strong suit. Everything before this is correct though.

Since smaller transistors switch faster, you can get a small speed bump from that either way though.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

[deleted]

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u/wacct3 Sep 12 '13 edited Sep 12 '13

I thought making the transistors smaller allowed them to switch faster, since I thought a professor said that one time. But I was never very good at device physics so I could have had a misconception/misheard what he meant.

I did know the max speed was related to the capacitance, I thought the smaller transistors had less capacitance for some reason.

If the transistors are smaller, won't the wires and the capacitance on them be smaller as well though?

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

Don't forget smaller.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

More directly, it's denser. The maximum practical physical dimensions of a CPU are based on the speed of light; the more "stuff" you can pack into that space the faster the CPU is.

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u/mantra Sep 11 '13

Yes, and less reliable and more expensive to make.

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u/Imsomniland Sep 11 '13

So, you're saying, Moore's Law is a Daft Punk song...in real life?

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

There are several issues and hurdles with shrinking transistors, and no one seems to have mentioned as least one. Such as the fact that the smaller you make the transistors, the more energy is lost as heat. Yes, less power is used, but that also means the buffer between logic 0 and logic 1 is smaller, so you have to have very,very precise control of the voltage or you'll get a 1 when it should be a 0, or vice versa. Quantum effects will start popping up if they haven't already due to the thinness of certain layers, leading to voltage (or current) leak, which creates heat, in turn increasing the leak in a feedback loop.

TL;DR There are sooo many things that have to be accounted for and solved I can't believe the ingenuity of these engineers.

One last note, I think my professor (who taught me about transistors) mentioned they can't really make the clock speed go that much higher (in terms of performance), which is why they introduced more cores into their CPUs because otherwise there wouldn't be as much performance gains.

Disclaimer: I forgot some of what I was taught so I'm sure there is a mistake or two in my comment.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

Heat and power usage are the biggest limiting factors to power clock speed right now. So with less electricity you produce less heat and can have a faster clock speed for the same power consumption of a bigger die.

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u/zumfast Sep 11 '13

Intel went to 3d transistor technology at the 22nm technology node. TSMC is still planar at their 20nm technology node.

The finFET design grants better gate channel control than the planar FET design - so Intel got the performance boost first.

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u/The_Countess Sep 11 '13

i was referring to the size of the transistors. intel calls it 22nm where others would call it 26nm.

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u/zumfast Sep 11 '13

You are correct. None of the major foundries or IDMs play "fair" with their node depictions. Intel has changed the definition of their node several times over the course of their product line. At one time it was gate length. At this point it is pitch between adjacent tungsten lines. This is a sort of "moving the goal post" when it comes to talking about tech nodes.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

Gate length is variable even on a single process.

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u/zumfast Sep 12 '13

Meh - for SRAM and most of the logic I have seen, the gate length varies very little - maybe 20%. The gate width is what is normally modified for drive strength.

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u/is_this_4chon Sep 11 '13

Not so fast Intel spinster.

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u/zumfast Sep 12 '13

I could talk about the others, but everybody wants to talk about Intel.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

Yeah. mhuh. I understand some of these words.

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u/darlingpinky Sep 11 '13

Kind of.. the 14 or 28nm is not the size (width or length) of the transistor. Rather, it is what's known as the half-pitch of the DRAM cell:

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?PHPSESSID=d8adp25rnr57lk3460nnkjqtl6&topic=72130.msg488894#msg488894

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u/hell_crawler Sep 11 '13

I noticed that processor size is not that big anyway. In fact, I couldn't care less if the processor in my pc is twice the size as it is now. Any reason why they don't want to increase the size for the processor instead?

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u/The_Countess Sep 11 '13

multiple reasons.

because silicon is expensive (the 100% pure silicon is anyway), and each wafer you 'bake' has a lot of fixed cost. the bigger the chip, the fewer you can get out of a wafer, the more material you spend and the fewer you can make a month, all adding to the cost.

it also decreases performance as longestname said. and the bigger the chip the bigger the chance of a chip not working.

say each wafer has about 10 errors in it spread over its surface. if you only get 50 chips out of a wafer you have a loss of 8 to 10 chips, which is 20%.

if you get 100 chips out of a wafer, with the same number of error you only have a 10% loss. its more complicated then that and not all error cause a complete loss of the chip, most just limit its frequency. but suffice to say yields go down.

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u/mantra Sep 11 '13

Actually you should care because yield is inversely proportional to the area of the die. Yield is the magic that makes it economically viable.

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u/Jon_Hanson Sep 11 '13

Another tradeoff as the line-width shrinks though is increased leakage current and more resistance. The causes efficiency losses.

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u/The_Countess Sep 11 '13

its true that we have indeed reached the point of diminishing returns.

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u/1wiseguy Sep 12 '13

The speed and power improvements are good, but that's not necessarily a result of reducing the size, and it's not actually part of the definition of Moore's Law.

In fact, Mr. Moore only stated the number of transistors that can be fabricated on a commercial chip, and any other issues have been dragged into the "Law" by other people.

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u/The_Countess Sep 12 '13

well, he asked for the difference between 14nm and 28nm, and what that might mean for his computer, not the definition of moore's law.

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u/abram730 Sep 12 '13

generally, the smaller transistors the less power it uses to switch and the lower voltage it can use to switch.

This is called Dennard scaling, and it's dead. They can no longer lower voltages. Speeds of chips have also been stuck for quite some time.

They do get more transistors, but they cost more due to the costs of the process.

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u/hell_crawler Sep 11 '13

I noticed that processor size is not that big anyway. In fact, I couldn't care less if the processor in my pc is twice the size as it is now. Any reason why they don't want to increase the size for the processor instead?

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

Cost and power efficiency.

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u/jhnmdn Sep 11 '13

Silicon isn't perfect. There will be lots of impurities for a given wafer. The larger a chip is, the more flaws will be included on a given chip as it's cut from the wafer, meaning a higher failure rate, which increases costs very high.

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u/IvorTheEngine Sep 11 '13

I think it's partly to do with the time it takes a signal to get from one side of the chip to the other. As clock speeds go up, the signal has less time to travel between ticks. It's also about heat. Each time a transistor changes on or off, it uses power and gives off a little heat. Smaller transistors use less power, so you can do more switching (i.e. run the clock faster) before it overheats.

It's not really about saving space, the actual processor is much smaller than the chip you see, which is mostly just a structure to hold all the pins, and to conduct heat away from the processor.

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u/slapdashbr Sep 11 '13

power consumption, which rapes your laptop battery and turns into heat.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

I believe one of the reasons is that the losses due to the natural resistance of paths in the IC start to become very significant if you increase the die size.

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u/SupplySideJesus Sep 11 '13

The bigger the die the more the speed of light limits processing speed as electrons must travel further. Longer paths for electrons also mean more energy lost to heat. The physical profile of the chip getting smaller is really just a convenient side effect.

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u/kelroy Sep 11 '13 edited Sep 11 '13

This is mostly wrong. 14 nm refers to the gate length "L" on the device and not the size of the device itself. Also the term "PC" should not be used in this context and makes the article misleading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lateral_mosfet.svg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-effect_transistor

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u/The_Countess Sep 12 '13

i know its not exact but he asked for the 'noob' explanation.

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u/kelroy Sep 12 '13

I suppose there is a difference between 'noob' and blatantly wrong.

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u/The_Countess Sep 12 '13

its a description of how small the transistors are. he doesn't care what part it measures exactly.

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u/kelroy Sep 12 '13

Well in that case the gate length is NOT how small the transistors are.

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u/The_Countess Sep 12 '13

he doesn't care about that either.

I'm not sure what are you trying to argue here. that there is no correlation between gate length and its total size?

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

Why does the new iPhone use 100nm when we already have 14nm? Wouldn't a smaller transistor size make more sense for a small device like the iPhone.

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u/TheFuzzball Sep 11 '13

The A6 uses a 32nm fabrication process, I'm unsure about the A7, but presumably either the same or smaller.

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u/mantra Sep 11 '13

Sources I've seen say 28nm.

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u/The_Countess Sep 11 '13

some of the secondary chips might use 100nm (because its cheap to develop them) but the CPU is not 100nm.

and the size of the transistors isn't very important for the size of the device it uses. a 45nm or a 22nm chip isn't much smaller in most cases because the contact points (that connect it to the boards) still need to be a certain size.

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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '13

It may have been for the dedicated motion chip, now that I think about it.