| fatslob-:O said: Yes, production of 20nm wafers are going by but it WON'T reduce costs compared to 28nm cause of the fact that multipatterning is required and that drives up the costs of wafers exponentially due to the fact that extra masks are required for the exposure step in lithography. |
This figure is a few years old, but it might still be accurate to some point. And it quite nicely shows that Nvidia basically expects the same thing as you. But they also still expect the lowering of production costs per transistor by around 10% per year. And smaller nodes also allow higher clock frequencies, which would further increase their computational power per dollar. I won't expect big jumps but cost savings of around 20% per year still seem likely.
My proposed console on page 3 of this thread was based on the assumption of a reduction of manufacturing costs for the chip components by this 20% per year and the availability of the 16nm node in the middle of 2017, reducing the requirements for cooling of the system.
