Samsung's custom CPU core arm of the company is reportedly shutting down. The research and development facility which housed around 290 employees will cease to work on future projects, according to a WARN letter filed with the Texas Workforce Commission. For the longest time, Samsung’s Exynos range of chipsets continued to attain the second position when pitted against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon family in performance benchmarks. For the foreseeable future, Samsung is expected to rely on ARM’s cores for performance-related tasks. According to the latest report, the layoffs will be effective as of December 31 and will be considered a permanent decision.

It’s possible Samsung didn’t want to cut ties with its custom CPU core department, having invested an estimated $17 billion in its Austin campus over the years. Unfortunately, considering the number of roadblocks the company had in its path, the best possible decision was to let it go.

This is interesting, and we can see both extreme costs of development for 5nm and further processes and Samsung can also want to go out of US control over chips development. So, it is possible that they already have secret development facility that is just waiting for next stage of trade wars.

Some older costs charts

Issues with modern neural networks training

It is big reason why suddenly all main firms started to make "AI accelerators", all other ways no longer work good. And complexity constantly rises.

TSMC continues to see its 7nm manufacturing processes run at full utilization, according to sources at fabless chipmakers who said new orders placed recently cannot be fulfilled at least until the middle of next year

Something is up with 7nm, as AMD and other players also can't get enough chips and are getting much less compared to that they can sell. And it is already after AMD specially delayed release and moved Threadripper even further and jacked prices.

Intel again talked about their 7nm and future 5nm.

Present fairy tale is that they will be able to make may be one product on 7nm in extremely limited batches in 2021-2022. But it is not sure.

5nm in the minds of extremely optimistic Intel management can happen in 2023-24, but may be slightly later. Or not slightly. Or never happen.

Back in time they also had nice expectations

3nm Hutzpah

Continuing with the goal to match or even beat the famous Moore's Law, TSMC is already planning for future 3 nm node manufacturing, promised to start HVM as soon as 2022 arrives, according to JK Wang, TSMC's senior vice president of fab operations. Delivering 3 nm a whole year before originally planned in 2023, TSMC is working hard, with fab construction work doing quite well, judging by all the news that the company is releasing recently.

Lately TSMC seems to be in PR mad mode. Promising things they can't keep left and right to get orders from top players.

It is nice thing to remember that Intel behaved similar just 3-4 years ago. And look that happened now - Intel is quickly talking to Samsung to survive.

Even 7nm current process has lot and lot of issues that clients just hide because of huge profits they get themselves.

Imec proposal on new transistors structure for 3nm

Samsung in their turn want them to make such:

Structure changes always also mean price hikes.

Yes, I was just about to post about sub 3nm technology that used modified existing lines, so it could be done more cheaply. I can't remember the name, but night be the one you just posted.

I remotely remember some technology smaller again.

But, what about leakage with these things? Leakage was supposed to be the ultimate restriction before size makes it unviable?.

3D vertical transistors and circuit stacking has been used for many years in the industry. The problem with 3D stacking of parallel circuites particularly, is thermal buildup. Magnetic based processing can do up to a million times less heat, so are better for stacking. You should look at doing a thread on magnetic FPGA? Magnetic Quantum Cellular Automata were an early leading research technology.

This looks like the one sorry:

http://news.mit.edu/2018/smallest-3-d-transistor-1207

It just reuses vapour deposition process. The 2.5nm finfets have 60% more performance with a higher on off contrast ratio. They talk about atomic level precision, it makes the transistors layer by layer. I wonder how it would go with new transistor structures.

The thing with low rates of 7nm and lower production is compensatable, by charging extreme extra for the small quantities to whoever wants to pay for it. So cutting edge applications, and the military might pay big dollar to suck those up. But, as a general mass product, that is difficult to justify big extreme prices for an extra 20% or so benefit. However, if you had a 1 nanometer circuit working at full speed today in even 1000 unit sucessfull production run, you could virtually auction them off to the highest bidder, 10k+ better for the military I would imagine.

And here we have Samsung with their little fantasies

? I've had an FPGA technology that looked promising for 5Ghz+ around 14 years ago, disapear into military only. This has happened a few more times to me to. I see a technology, and think thank you very much, I can use that, only to find out thar it gets taken by the military. In patenting, they have procedures where if it has certain military use, it is auto diverted to government and defence companies. Metal Storm were famous for slipping past this patent procedure, which makes me wonder how they did that, as I'm pretty sure they were doing cutting edge weapons systems before that, and one of my teachers was an ex Cornel I think used to work there previously.

Existing stabilised rugged radiation hardened, are all reasons to keep using standard tech, but a z80 doesn't have much place being the brains running an aircraft sized auto drone.

Exactly my point Vitaliy. They pickup niche things that will give them.exclusive lead. Cost effectiveness plays a major role in what processes get supported in the commercial realm, but certain players pay high amounts for performance effectiveness in unviable technology. So, if I had 1 nm technology that was ten times more costly than normal tech to make, they would line up to pay 100x the end price.

Anyway, that FPGA had three times the potential over 5Ghz, and it got signed exclusively to military. At the time I think Intel had sold 5Ghz CPU and someone had overclocked something way way past that using liquid nitrogen or something. It wasn't conventional chip technology. And on GHz claims, individual circuit elements maybe doing a lot more than the entire synchronised clocked circuit. The guy I mentioned had some part in his circuit running ar 5Ghz or something way back, but the chip ran at less than 500 MHz, or something like that. The FPGA people were looking at 5ghz FPGA running in a period of 500Mhz FPGA in that period, but that is likely to yield a complex circuit many times less in speed rather than a Pentium 4+. Still sad though.

There are lots of advanced technology out there that didn't gain a lot of traction or more funding because of cost effectiveness, or niche, like saphire chips. Litter left over from the struggle forwards. One that didn't was a form or 100QE OLED like technology, that the military funded, likely for lighting purposes to extend energy reserves. That had been used now commercially for years in consumer. A number of things get initial development and funding from US government before being set free. Of 'scams', OLED eventually turned out over decades and it is still a bit underwhelming with certain deficiencies. I suspect that in chips certain things will turn out in ways neither us or the industry expected. I mean, the way to beat silicon is to go non silicon, and they know how to do that, but people don't want to abandon their expensive equipment and momentum yet. They keep pushing silicon designs uphill instead of investing that money into the alternative. Every memory stick in your computer should also have processing functions, but it is just another option not receiving the attention it should. Present and past experience, is no absolute guide to what can absolute happen in a progressive dynamic situation. The right funding emphasis, and something better pops out. Above I mention an accurate atomic level way of making a 2.5nm circuit using existing lines. Being able to precisely make something is key. So, is such techniques going to lead to sub nanometer circuites one day. Sure it might even be horribly expensive to do that, but if it is the most viable game in town to do that it can thrive. But the question is, can that be applied to make optical components to, with precisions atomic it would be, interesting times ahead of they figure that part out. This becomes meta material optics engineering at that scale. Very exciting potential.

Optical tales, I'm telling optical fact, kept from the commercial market. In my own design proposals, I can see high deficiencies in using optical for conventional design too. So, I put that aside, but there are ways and means to get desirable results in areas. People able to make startrek like free floating holograms might have technology to solve some of the issues and do a good job at it. I've got certain proposals for things which to solve certain issues, but it is a complex mess to miniaturize them down to chip level, but a solution just occured to me. Anyway, just a larger scale optical processor has advantages due to the speed of light and lack of leakage, if you can figure out how to do it properly. But, you don't need a conventional processor to do the animations they were doing.

Again Intel 10nm Issues

It looks like Intel is not just delaying a single server project, their entire roadmap has just slid significantly.

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/12/12/intel-significantly-delays-its-entire-server-roadmap/