TBH that sounds metal A F !

Vertical stacking and the ability to wick away heat are where it's at now!

And maybe quantum will start a new scale curve?

An AI crash will absolutely happen, just like the Internet crash happened in 2001!

Right now, the game is to position yourself as the Google or Amazon of AI, not the Excite or Pets.com

It's a weird thing because Microsoft made a really nice mobile GUI, and then rolled it into a desktop OS where it made no sense and everyone hated it. As a result, everyone also hated Windows Phone because they thought the UI would be as bad on the phone.

It's a weird product where everyone I know who actually used it loved it, but everyone else hated it.

@graydon @david_chisnall @linuxgnome @ChrisMayLA6

@mdm @graydon @david_chisnall @linuxgnome @ChrisMayLA6

But in the end, forecasting is hard, especially when it is about the future . A tech bubble burst has been predicted several times already. The monopoly position of those companies does give them remarkable resilience...

Early tests show AI making some very dangerous decisions

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/artificial-intelligence-under-nuclear-pressure-first-large-scale-kings-study-reveals-how-ai-models-reason-and-escalate-under-crisis

Well, kind of. Moore's law is about the size of IC you can build assuming a fixed investment (the latter isn't explicitly stated in the law, but it is an underlying assumption in the paper. Increases in yield contribute as well, as do more mature processes coming down in price over time. So do things like 3D stacking and chiplets (chiplets, in particular, let you build smaller chips and get the yield benefits, but assemble them into more complex complete chips).

Moore's second law is a bit more relevant because it discusses the doubling of fab costs for each new process node. That's predicated on making enough money from the previous generation to justify the investment. That's why we've seen so much consolidation: you need enormous economies of scale to be able to afford the R&D costs. Once you hit 'good enough' performance for 90% of use cases, funding the R&D for the next process out of the 10% that needs the higher performance is hard, if not impossible. Once you reach 99%, it's definitely impossible.

Somewhere, I have a copy of the issue of BYTE where the cover story is the new 1nm process (note: nm, not µm). It confidently predicts the end of Moore's Law within a little over a decade.

We hit the end of Dennard Scaling around 2007 and that was a far bigger shock than slowing of Moore's Law. Prior to that, shrinking a die had given you a commensurate decrease in leakage current. Your clock frequency is determined by the signal propagation delay (one clock cycle at the maximum frequency supported by the part is the time taken for a signal to propagate along the critical path). As you make transistors smaller, the amount of stuff you can do in one cycle is much more because you can fit more logic in.

This is how we're able to run our first test chip at 512 MHz on a 22nm process, even though it's a microcontroller with a three-stage pipeline, whereas Intel needed five stages (and a lot of engineering work) to break 100 MHz with the 800nm process.

But back prior to around 2007, that increase in clock speeds came for free with respect to power. With newer processes, the leakage current is higher and that means that you need to increase the voltage more to increase the clock speed. And that is what gives us power problems.

There are a few interesting experimental processes that look like they might get back to much lower leakage, which would allow chips of similar sizes to todays to run at hundreds of GHz in the same power budget, if they work. We've had some initial discussions with some folks who built a small fab around one of these. That has no impact on Moore's First Law as it's actually written, but it would have a big impact on the common informal understanding of Moore's Law.

Time to bring back the tax then

Nice analogy

Ahhh.... but you're expecting our political class to think beyond the next electoral cycle there, aren't you, and we know they find that almost impossible (for a range of internal & external reasons)

"you can't build circuits smaller than atomic orbitals"

Well, not with that attitude /s

I think the final post may be right - one last throw of the dice in a bid to avoid a 'correction' in their share price (see the warning today from the BoE about UK share prices, which is just as applicable to US ones, in my view)

Oracle invoked the same argument.

Extraordinary times whatever the interpretation.

One possibility is that they don't think its a risky move. How can they be so sure? Only if they know they have a stranglehold on users and can push "AI" in all eventualities.

Another possibility is that they are actually "bust", not literally - as in bankrupt - but in terms of defending their astronomical valuations: the risky bets aim to avoid a massive correction.

Time will tell I suppose...

The bubble bursting will simply be their final breath being released into the sky. Blessedly.

The logical end-point after the node size bottoms out is going to be for the inherent deflation to become evident—fabs get amortized over time, so the product stops being premium and becomes a cash cow, and prices have to drop.

Nvidia can't survive that. Intel can't survive that. They need something like the AI hyperscalers to keep demand high, but the demand is artificial, and actual consumer demand is soft if not soggy.

Crash is inevitable.

On the one hand, that's a big change, percentage-wise.

On the other hand, only TSMC is doing this because the entire world economy can afford at most one fab.

On the third hand, it's not clear there's any actual advantage to making the change. There's almost certainly better things to do with that money. But line must more tinyness! is built into the whole process.

@david_chisnall @linuxgnome @ChrisMayLA6