this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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The real thing that matters is if they reach "good enough". 7nm/5nm/3nm is a useful technical milestone, and a measure of the quality of their tooling, but at the end of the day, the question is if they can make parts that fulfills a real product need without foreign dependencies.
Size is not everything-- don't forget when Intel stumbled on 10nm repeatedly, yet they were still printing money with 14nm+++++ because the process was "good enough" to deliver a chip people wanted.
I also have to wonder if the music is going to slow down for some of the IC industry soon. Yeah, we can feed every transistor that can be fabbed into AI/ML, but flagship smartphones are getting both expensive and ridiculous. Are enough people buying a $1500 phone, whose main feature is that it folds into an origami crane, that it can drive new process nodes? Or will a mature 7nm design provide enough performance and battery life for 90% of customers? What's the current killer app for more than a $200 phone? Maybe the camera, but image sensors have completely different manufacturing constraints.