Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Beijing time September 28 news, as the golden law of the semiconductor industry, Moore's law has been guiding chip development. However, as the upgrading rate of chip technology slows, this law is being questioned.

▲ Moore's Law has been questioned

Moore's Law, proposed by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in the 1960s, is mainly about the number of transistors on a chip. Moore says the number of transistors on the chip doubles every other year, increasing processing power. To increase the number of transistors on a chip, transistors must be made smaller, which requires improved manufacturing technology.

Now, Intel and Nvidia, the two most important American semiconductor companies, disagree over the speed of chip development and whether Moore's law still applies.

▲ Kissinger thinks Moore's Law still holds.

Intel CEO Pat Kissinger (Pat Gelsinger) said at a company press conference on Tuesday that Moore's law "still holds". But Huang Renxun (Jensen Huang), co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, said last week that Moore's Law was dead. Nvidia's market capitalization is more than three times that of Intel.

"the progress in brute force plus transistors and Moore's Law has basically come to an end." Huang Renxun told investors when he launched the new product last week.

The disagreement over Intel's abacus highlights the strategic differences between Intel and other US semiconductor companies. Intel has promised to continue to produce some of its own chips, while companies such as Nvidia rely mainly on third-party contract factories outside the US to make chips.

Intel has been a leader in semiconductor manufacturing technology for many years, producing the world's densest transistor chips. But in recent years, Intel has been overtaken by TSMC and Samsung, which can now produce processors containing 5-nanometer transistors, while Intel is still stuck in 10-nanometer and 7-nanometer technology.

After Kissinger took office, one of Intel's core corporate goals was to return to "performance leadership", which meant that Intel's chips needed to be as fast and efficient as those made by third-party contract manufacturers. Intel hopes to increase the production capacity of five "nodes", or five transistor sizes, within four years to catch up. In general, it usually takes two years to introduce a new node that contains a smaller transistor.

▲ Huang Renxun thinks Moore's Law is dead.

As a result, Intel needs Moore's Law to survive because the company is still actively trying to stuff more transistors into a single chip. However, the size of the transistor has its limitations, and when the transistor is small to a certain extent, it will encounter physical problems. At a press conference on Tuesday, Kissinger called the moment "reckoning day."

Mr Kissinger said Intel was working to advance manufacturing processes, such as new lithography and RibbonFET architecture, which would allow the company to continue stuffing more transistors on each chip, even if they became small enough to be measured in angstroms.

"We want to start with about 100 billion transistors in a single package today, and by the end of the decade, we want to add a trillion transistors to a single package," Kissinger said. "We are moving forward as planned."

Nvidia abandons Moore's Law, by contrast, Nvidia's latest processors are made by TSMC, which currently has the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology and is the world's largest chipmaker. Nvidia designs chips, but doesn't worry too much about manufacturing.

Nvidia's solution to the engineering challenge of making smaller transistors is not Moore's law, but what Huang Renxun calls "accelerated computing". In his vision, intensive applications such as artificial intelligence could run on specific processors that best handle these tasks, which is the graphics processor developed by Nvidia. In other words, there is less demand for Intel expertise.

▲ Nvidia shares perform much better than Intel

"looking to the future, the opportunity to continue to use Moore's law performance-to-price curve is over," Huang said. "so, if you want to do large-scale computing in a cost-effective way, after 15 to nearly 20 years of pursuit of accelerated computing, I think it can be summarized that accelerated computing is the real way forward, which will almost become the conventional wisdom."

Intel released new chips and software on Tuesday in an attempt to recover from years of declining performance and profits. Intel's share price has fallen 28% over the past five years, while Nvidia's share price has risen more than 180% (even after falling 58% in 2022).

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