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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

I had a question. I apologize if this a bit naive. The first slide shows the N3 releases go though 2025 and then we see the arrival of N2. How significant are these numbers in regards to end of Moore's law? Will we saw N1 in the next 10 years or is that getting to a process that requires something radically new like carbon nanotubes etc?

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I'll also mention that we should have reasonable node progress through 2030 at least. There's plenty of room at the bottom with just EUV multi-patterning and a few other very practical improvements. Beyond that I'm less hopeful but I wouldn't bet against it.

I think this is not the correct way of thinking of Moore's law. Like mentioned elsewhere, Moore's law is not so much a law as a self-fulfilling prediction. Semiconductor companies follow Moore's law (or recently an approximation) to stay competitive because their competitors do it and hence Moore's law continues. The cost of not marching along to Moore's law can mean you will get left in the dust (see Intel).

I think a better question to ask is whether the underlying economic factors behind continuous process tech improvements are healthy. Is there enough value-add to the final user by continuous process tech improvements? Are the costs for that improved process tech scaling with the value-add? And is the competitive landscape healthy? While that holds true, companies will keep looking for process tech improvements to give them a competitive edge.

In the 80-90s this was very much true but in recent decades it was to a lesser extent hence why we see consolidation/reduction in the number of foundries, foundry services to amortize the cost of older node-tech, and R&D going to companies/partnerships that can capture the most end user value-add (Apple/TSMC).

Looking forward I think the economics are very healthy with a design-house/foundry service model that we have right now so I would guess that Moore's law (or some approximation) will continue for the next decade. There are a lot of process tech innovation that can lead to better performance that are not necessarily scaling related. In fact, scaling transistors stopped being very useful a while back afaik due to the breakdown of Dennard's scaling.

>"I think a better question to ask is whether the underlying economic factors behind continuous process tech improvements are healthy. Is there enough value-add to the final user by continuous process tech improvements?"

I agree with this and I suppose I just sort of reached for Moore's Law out of habit and maybe a bit of laziness. Thanks for articulating the question more appropriately.

>"Looking forward I think the economics are very healthy with a design-house/foundry service model that we have right now so I would guess that Moore's law (or some approximation) will continue for the next decade."

This was what I was looking for. Cheers.

Completely insignificant. They're just names. Intel is going "Intel 4" -> "Intel 3" -> "Intel 20A". Everyone will call them 4nm, 3nm, 20Å (Angstrom) despite them explicitly not being that, but it's a hard industry habit to break.

Idk if Moore’s law is still in effect as stated

It isn’t actually a law, it is more of an observation / prediction

But people have been inventing new technologies to be able to still improve chips (for instance, finfets and now GAA)

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