Daniel Bizo (dbizo@idc.com) on 3/14/11 wrote:
>
>A conclusion not articulated by the article itself is that the IDM model becomes
>even more desirable for those who can economically afford and sustain it. Chip
>desingers which can keep financing cutting edge process R&D and manufacturing will
>increasingly levarage the integrated model unless they badly screw up on the architectural side.

Well, the other side of that is the question about what
happens when shrinking ends. Oh, I'm sure that process
tweaking will go on for a long time (new materials, new
tricks like straining, etc etc), but the advantages will
likely not be as stunning.

So what happens to your IDM advantage when you hit 10nm
(or whatever the practical limit ends up being) and your
process improvements end up being a much more incremental
than the huge 70% scaling we see now?

So it can certainly go either way. What happens if the
process becomes more of a "commodity"? Sure, it's going to
be an extremely expensive commodity, but it's going
to change things when people realize that you can't shrink
features every eighteen months.

Yes, yes, we're some time off. And clearly subtle process
tweaks will be important, and there will be differences
between processes - some players will be better than others.
But right now I think Intel has a big advantage from being
a year or two ahead of people in shrinks.

So what happens if that kind of timing advantage isn't
about "70% more dense, 30% lower power, 30% faster" any
more (or whatever: pick your tradeoffs from shrinking), but
ends up being much smaller? Being a few years more advanced
isn't nearly as big advantage if that means "5% lower
leakage" or something like that.

Hmm?

Linus