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Comment by lpsz | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of being off-topic, an honest stupid EE question:

What physical innovations actually drive the processor releases, or even flash storage sizes? I understand that each generation shrinks the transistors. But what tangible things were invented in 2015 to make the transistors smaller? Is it that in order to make them smaller, Intel has to run some kind of circuit optimization calculations that weren't possible the year before? Or are there advances in manufacturing (e.g. physical inventions of new molding processes, new chemical processes, something else?) Or is it simply market forces driving the prices and the specs?

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For the most part, manufacturing advances drive microarchitecture advances. Smaller feature sizes mean more transistors can be stuffed in the same area. Those transistors can be used to make larger reorder buffers, more registers, more caches, better branch predictors, and more functional units. If you want to know about specific architectural changes in x86 over the years, I strongly recommend Cliff Click's talk: A Crash Course in Modern Hardware.[1]

A lot of the specifics of semiconductor manufacturing are closely-guarded secrets, but Todd Fernandez gave a glimpse in an informal talk titled Inseparable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips.[2]

1. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/click-crash-course-modern... (starts about 4 minutes in)

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4

Check of the VLSI Circuits conference proceedings: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome.jsp?punumber=1000798

Here are the papers Intel presented at the 2014 conference: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/mostRecentIssue.jsp?filter%3D...

Intel has (or at least tries to have) a 2 year cycle: in year one, you get a new chip design. In year two, you get the same chip design shrunk down to the latest process size. This gives the design team 2 years to figure out improvements and keeps the process engineers from killing themselves.

When technology doesn't keep up with marketing plans, or when it becomes too expensive to build the next process improvement, you get a stutter, and AMD gets a chance to catch up.

I don't think AMD is really dumb enough to actually want to catch up on the desktop. It seems like they are doing a certain amount of marketing lip service to desktop hardware, but their really interesting products are APUs/GPUs for ML and HPC, and their real ambitions are there and for parts of the server market that Intel isn't pursuing as aggressively.

Last I heard Zen is supposed to release as a server part in 2016, which I take to mean that it would be a miracle if I could buy a mainstream desktop part in two years (http://www.fudzilla.com/news/graphics/37713-amd-has-finfet-t...).

Anyway, for anyone who doesn't already own a fab and have the market cap of BP, trying to compete with Intel on desktop parts is like starting a cattle ranch in your back yard to try to undercut Cargill Meat Solutions at selling leather to buggy whip manufacturers.

Disclaimer: because my university is nearby ASML, I get bombarded by their information... also I'm not an EE student

The actual progress of technology is in lithography. The lithography machines are produced by ASML and used by almost all major chip producers[1]. Currently ASML is building their new line of machines, namely with extreme ultraviolet lithography instead of what the line of current machines use.

What I do not know, if the machines are currently used for Intels 14nm or that the old machines are still used (or maybe both). What I do know, is that ASML and Intel are having problems with getting to 10nm. That is because they have to improve the current machines, you observe this from the delay in the Tick-Tock from Intel.

Which brings us to the Tick-Tock of Intel, this is the improvement of the chip structure itself. They do this because they have to wait for the smaller transistors.

At last, what I heard is that the ASML machine is getting more and more complicated. Especially because they are having troubles with the laws of nature.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873238093045784288...

Intel isn't implementing EUV for 10nm. They plan to use it for 7nm, though. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9447/intel-10nm-and-kaby-lake

To add to this: it's not just developing new lithography processes such as EUL. A large part of the recent improvements are due to optimization of existing litography processes by improving sensor accuracy, minimizing the error, and improving the throughput speed among others.

Advances in manufacturing. Each shrink will involve a large number of patented improvements to the etch process, layer alignment, chemistry (e.g. "high k metal gate"), sputtering, reduced-kerf diamond wire saws for the wafers themselves, and so on. You could probably find everything in Intel's patents.

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