The Semicon West 2019 conference held under the auspices of Applied Materials has already borne fruit in the form of interesting statements from AMD CEO Lisa Su. Although AMD itself has not produced processors on its own for a long time, this year it outperformed its main competitor in terms of the degree of progressiveness of the technologies used. Although GlobalFoundries left AMD alone with TSMC in the race for 7nm technological standards, it is customary to attribute success in mastering this stage of the lithographic process to AMD. In the end, the company continues to design its processors on its own, and TSMC simply offered to adapt these designs to its production capabilities.
As can be seen from the fragmentary photographs published in industry blogger David Schor, at Semicon West, Lisa Su touched on the current issues facing the semiconductor industry. In AMD's understanding, the so-called "Moore's Law" is too early to write off as erroneous theories, since it is the progress in the lithographic field that has allowed the company to double the speed of processors over the past two and a half years compared to the products of the last decade.
In any case, the process technology in this situation accounted for at least 40% of the contribution to the increase in performance, as AMD notes on the slide. If you add another 20% to this, provided by optimizations at the silicon level, you get all 60%. Changes at the microarchitecture level accounted for 17% of the gains, power management accounted for 15%, and compilers accounted for another 8%. Like it or not, without progress in the field of lithography, AMD would not have been able to achieve such success.
AMD management also notes another trend: the “thinner” the technical process, the more expensive large crystals will be in production. For example, a conditional crystal with a core area of 250 mm2 in the transition from 45-nm to 5-nm process technology will be five times more expensive at the level of the unit area cost. Thus, in order to maintain a cost-effective cost, processor dies must become smaller. AMD implements this thesis by switching to the use of so-called "chiplets" - small crystals combined on a single substrate.
The third slide, caught in the blogger's camera lens, tells about the distribution of electricity consumers in modern processors with a high degree of integration. Only a third of energy costs are due to computational work. The rest is taken over by cache memory, I / O logic, various interfaces. Since 2006, the TDP level of server CPUs and GPUs has increased by 7% annually, according to AMD. The efficiency of energy consumption is not as high as we would like.
Source: 3dnews.ru