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TSMC Shows Colossal Interposer, Says Moore's Law Still Alive
In the company's first blog post, TSMC has stated that Moore's Law is still alive and well, despite the zeitgeist of recent times being the reverse. The company also showed a colossal 2500mm2 interposer that includes eight HBM memory chips and two big processors.
Godfrey Cheng, TSMC's new head of global marketing, wrote the blog post. He notes that Moore's Law is not about performance, but about transistor density. While performance traditionally improved by increasing the clock speed and architecture, today it is more often improved by increasing parallelization, and hence requires increases in chip size. This enhances the importance of transistor density because chip cost is directly proportional to its area.
[...] "one possible future of great density improvements is to allow the stacking of multiple layers of transistors in something we call Monolithic 3D Integrated Circuits. You could add a CPU on top of a GPU on top of an AI Edge engine with layers of memory in between. Moore's Law is not dead, there are many different paths to continue to increase density."
[...] [System-technology co-optimization (STCO)] is done through advanced packaging, for which TSMC supports silicon-based interposers and fan-out-based chiplet integration. It also has techniques to stack chips on wafers, or stack wafers on top of other wafers. As one such example, TSMC showed a nearly-2500mm2 silicon interposer – the world's largest – on top of which two 600mm2 processors are placed and eight 75mm2 HBM memory chips, which makes for 1800mm2 of compute and memory silicon on top of the interposer-based package, well over two times the conventional reticle size limit.
Related: Dual-Wafer Packaging (Wafer-on-Wafer) Could Double CPU/GPU Performance
Another Step Toward the End of Moore's Law
Intel's Jim Keller Promises That "Moore's Law" is Not Dead, Outlines 50x Improvement Plan
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @01:50PM (6 children)
I'm glad someone besides me is working on this chip shrink stuff.
I got an electrical engineering degree, but chip technology just seemed like the most incremental, tedious sort of drone job you could have.
So I did software instead, which is not real engineering.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @02:41PM (5 children)
And here we have in 3 sentences the reason why all our software sucks: Because people go into it trying to avoid working hard and engineering properly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @03:08PM (3 children)
And for every real engineer trying to shrink dies and solve hard problems, there are 10 knock-offs reimagining the platform in a virtual environment that runs even slower than you thought possible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @03:22PM (2 children)
I have a 32c/64t 2990wx w 128 gb ram and am not kidding when I say I have come across websites that can grind it to a halt. What these people can achieve when it comes to inefficiency is just amazing.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 16 2019, @04:15PM (1 child)
Are you going to upgrade to 64c/128t Threadripper 3, 256 GB RAM? That might allow acceptable browsing speeds.
But rly though, the RasPi 4's wimpy ARM quad-core can load websites just fine. uBlock/uMatrix is there to help.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @04:40PM
I think they get race conditions but don't know where so just keep adding sleep calls everywhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2019, @03:26PM
I don't think you got the subtle humor at the end.
Software was "not real engineering" before I went into it.
Also, how do you think I am able to recognize that unless I have a sense of proper engineering to start with? (I graduated BSEE.)
Most programmers never got an engineering degree. Did you?
Not trying to pull rank, just wondering why you are.