In August of this year, at Hotchips 8, it was proposed that Moore's Law remains valid, but that process technology will no longer be used to describe chip performance growth. Earlier, at the SEMICON 2019 event in Taiwan, TSMC's head of R&D and Vice General Manager of Technology Research, Hansen Huang, reiterated that Moore's Law will continue to exist, but stressed that process technology reduction is not the only indicator that defines chip performance growth.
At the same time, Huang Hansen also revealed that the current carbon nanotube technology can reduce the semiconductor process technology to 1.2nm, and in the future the process technology can be reduced to 0.1nm, which is equivalent to the size of a hydrogen atom. This means that the current 7nm, 5nm, and even 3nm process technology still has room for continued application, allowing processor chips to contain more transistors and drive greater computing power with less electricity.
Huang Hansen said that Moore's Law will continue to exist, but chip performance growth indicators will no longer be defined solely by process technology, especially since process technology has gradually become a marketing tool. Simply pursuing lower process technology cannot actually reflect the true performance of the chip.
Even if process technology can continue to be lowered, allowing chips to accommodate more transistors and thereby increase computing performance, current processor products have begun to integrate more components, such as GPUs, wireless connection controllers, I/O controllers, memory controllers, or important components such as co-processors. This means that lowering process technology is not just about placing more transistors on the chip, but about integrating more application functions so that the processor can complete more computing tasks.
Therefore, Huang Hansen believes that the performance of chips can no longer be defined solely by process technology, but rather by a more comprehensive application integration effect, and processor products should be viewed with a new standard of evaluation.
Prior to this, Intel, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA had also proposedProcess technology is not absoluteAlthough the process technology itself continues to improve, the more important thing is to focus on the performance of the processor in actual applications.
