Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, morphine
just brew it! wrote:Oh, I think we'll find something viable to replace silicon eventually. It'll take a while though.
Igor_Kavinski wrote:All the big players have something cooked up and ready to launch in their biggest top secret underground lab. Just waiting till it's Time's Up for silicon.
just brew it! wrote:Igor_Kavinski wrote:All the big players have something cooked up and ready to launch in their biggest top secret underground lab. Just waiting till it's Time's Up for silicon.
I'm sure they're working on stuff... but "ready to launch"? No frikkin' way. It'll take billions of dollars in investment to build a new fab and several years in transition to ramp from laboratory proof-of-concept to volume production. If a replacement for silicon was "ready to launch" we'd know about it, since it's kind of hard to hide a commercial-scale fab based on revolutioonary new tech, not to mention the entire supply chain that would need to be created to supply the equipment and raw materials (whatever they are).
K-L-Waster wrote:just brew it! wrote:Igor_Kavinski wrote:All the big players have something cooked up and ready to launch in their biggest top secret underground lab. Just waiting till it's Time's Up for silicon.
I'm sure they're working on stuff... but "ready to launch"? No frikkin' way. It'll take billions of dollars in investment to build a new fab and several years in transition to ramp from laboratory proof-of-concept to volume production. If a replacement for silicon was "ready to launch" we'd know about it, since it's kind of hard to hide a commercial-scale fab based on revolutioonary new tech, not to mention the entire supply chain that would need to be created to supply the equipment and raw materials (whatever they are).
What, you don't think some mad genius has a carbon-nanotube chip fab in his garage?
K-L-Waster wrote:just brew it! wrote:Igor_Kavinski wrote:All the big players have something cooked up and ready to launch in their biggest top secret underground lab. Just waiting till it's Time's Up for silicon.
I'm sure they're working on stuff... but "ready to launch"? No frikkin' way. It'll take billions of dollars in investment to build a new fab and several years in transition to ramp from laboratory proof-of-concept to volume production. If a replacement for silicon was "ready to launch" we'd know about it, since it's kind of hard to hide a commercial-scale fab based on revolutioonary new tech, not to mention the entire supply chain that would need to be created to supply the equipment and raw materials (whatever they are).
What, you don't think some mad genius has a carbon-nanotube chip fab in his garage?
Blahpony wrote:K-L-Waster wrote:just brew it! wrote:I'm sure they're working on stuff... but "ready to launch"? No frikkin' way. It'll take billions of dollars in investment to build a new fab and several years in transition to ramp from laboratory proof-of-concept to volume production. If a replacement for silicon was "ready to launch" we'd know about it, since it's kind of hard to hide a commercial-scale fab based on revolutioonary new tech, not to mention the entire supply chain that would need to be created to supply the equipment and raw materials (whatever they are).
What, you don't think some mad genius has a carbon-nanotube chip fab in his garage?
And disguising all his work as refurbing old video arcade games?
just brew it! wrote:K-L-Waster wrote:just brew it! wrote:I'm sure they're working on stuff... but "ready to launch"? No frikkin' way. It'll take billions of dollars in investment to build a new fab and several years in transition to ramp from laboratory proof-of-concept to volume production. If a replacement for silicon was "ready to launch" we'd know about it, since it's kind of hard to hide a commercial-scale fab based on revolutioonary new tech, not to mention the entire supply chain that would need to be created to supply the equipment and raw materials (whatever they are).
What, you don't think some mad genius has a carbon-nanotube chip fab in his garage?
He very well might. But even if it exists, it ain't gonna scale to the point where it can produce commercial volumes of reasonably priced chips any time soon.
just brew it! wrote:The move to MCMs also couldn't have come at a better time, to deal with the inevitable yield issues that come with transitions to smaller process sizes and the slowdown of Moore's law.
Igor_Kavinski wrote:Do you think the smaller process sizes will force the engineers to space the chiplets further apart from each other so they don't melt each other from their heat? That's going to end up increasing latency. Do you think they might shift to multiple sockets to solve this issue?
Captain Ned wrote:I'm with JBI. Cooling integrated at the chip design level is where we're headed.
just brew it! wrote:In retrospect, AMD's decision to ditch their own fabs was a very good move. Let TSMC/Samsung/etc. figure out the process issues, and have your own people focus on CPU architecture.