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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Moore's Law broke a while ago. Note the past tense.

nVidia couldn't get their economics at 28nm. RAM cells are now more expensive in 20nm than 28nm. There are lots of other examples.

Remember: the strong form of Moore's law was that transistors get cheaper ever 12-18 months. The original formulation of Moore's law was always about economics, not technology.

The problem is: nobody knows what to do.

You now need clever circuit design and humans who can squeeze another 15-20% out of existing technologies. Unfortunately, all the humans who knew how to do custom VLSI design are dead, retired, or doing something else since custom VLSI was fool's errand for so long (see DEC, IBM, Silicon Graphics, etc.).

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> You now need clever circuit design and humans who can squeeze another 15-20% out of existing technologies. Unfortunately, all the humans who knew how to do custom VLSI design are dead, retired, or doing something else since custom VLSI was fool's errand for so long (see DEC, IBM, Silicon Graphics, etc.).

Broadwell is a custom-designed part, and it's scaled extremely well from 22nm to 14nm. There have been yield issues going to 14nm, but the biggest hurdles have been solved, with a lot of help from the design team. I guess Intel must have hired all the people you think are dead or retired.

It really helps to specify what you mean by custom. There is hand-built vs. tool-built, there is full-custom vs. semi-custom, etc...

I for one doubt Broadwell is hand-built, hand-routed, full-custom. Which is what your parent was probably talking about, as they mention DEC.

Unfortunately, all the humans who knew how to do custom VLSI design are dead, retired, or doing something else

Well, sort of. The ol' DEC guys are still out there, many at semiconductor companies.

Anyway, design is not the biggest lever right now, and it stabilizes last. When architecture & process slow down, design will probably see increased focus as you finally have more time for squeezing out 20% extra speed- and without everything being tossed the next go-round.

I'm not sure you can extrapolate that from one company's use of one foundry's process nodes. Intel at least seems to be doing well with their 22 nm process node.

Yep, they seem to be doing well, but they are almost an entire doubling time later if you compare the two previous doublings with to Moore's law.

This might in part be explained by their moving to nonplanar FinFET transistors. And in practice their geometry doesn't quite match the idealized drawings: http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1261761

Who knows. How can anybody tell if 28nm if more cost effective than 28 nm when it isn't sold in the market as a fab ?

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