Misunderstanding Electronics Research

As a guy who works on the Foundry floor for vendor that wasn't mentioned here...Intel and AMD (GF), et al, are consistently pushing our equipment beyond the density/die size it was designed for. Every few years, Intel releases a new chipset that has a smaller die size. Last I looked, we're pushing <14nm. And this is on equipment that was designed by vendors to run at 32+ nm.

Also, despite these advances in production die size, Moore's Law is, in fact, starting to lose pace. It's important to recognize that Moore's Law specifically refers to density on the chip. And that has decidedly slowed from the speed at which such advances used to be made.

Part of this is, in fact, technology driven. There's only so much improvement existing equipment can make. However, the real holdup is that replacing an entire Fab of equipment is too expensive to justify as increasing the density is not the only way to increase the performance of a chip. Die size and density are sufficiently able to allow a chipset to be designed with markedly higher performance without substantially increasing density. This is similar to why we don't see the speed wars that Intel and AMD engaged in in the early - mid 2000's. Because it's not just clock speed. And it's entirely possible to increase the overall package size of the chip to increase number of transistors without negatively affecting overall processor size the way it used to be.

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