Can graphics keep evolving? How? For how long?

[haxxiy]

Pemalite said:

"Electronic circuits" still have significant room to exponentially grow and become more complex... And thus will enable new rendering paradigms.
TSMC 3nm is not really using 3nm sized transistors, it's an advertising term to make themselves look cool and isn't representational of any geometric feature sized of the chips themselves.
In-fact the transistors are actually much much much much larger, so we are a long way from reaching peak-silicon when Quantum Tunneling becomes a physical limitation.

Everyone and their mother in the industry knows there are at best a handful of full nodes left and then they are moving on to vertical circuit stacking. This isn't exactly a secret or an opinion:

Regardless of TSMC's shenanigans, ITRS's nomenclature has never referred to the physical size of transistors. Historically it was half of the gate pitch which was a close approximation for the smallest feature size of a MOSFET.

That hasn't been the case for a long time, however, as logic scales better than the rest of the circuit:

TSMC's 3 nm transistors have logic gates of ~ 15 nm and within them transistors with silicon fins as small as 7 nm wide, which is pretty close to electron mobility collapse from quantum tunneling.

Even using theoretical 2D materials and 1 nm transistors as wide as a single molecule isn't going to make matters much better (just ~ 5 times denser than TSMC's N5).

Everyone is trying to find smarter solutions for computing problems or trying to find quantum algorithms that actually work (hint: they won't since it's very very very likely that P =/= NP) because they know brute forcing with MOSFETs isn't going to cut the mustard for much longer.

Last edited by haxxiy - on 04 August 2024