That's just beyond me to even comprehend. Not the increase in function, but the lithography. Creating a conductive line, so tiny, is just a Wow moment. The operating voltages and switching to feed them, it's just exciting to know that's being done. And I wouldn't know anything about that without your updates. I know how much time it takes to type stuff. Thanks again.
And keeping it Readers Digest level is cool.

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 10/07/17 at 13:59:51:


7nm is neat, but 5nm is neater, as is 3nm.    watch out when you look at this one, realize that this is a REALLY BIG mainframe chipset from IBM being run off at 5nm -- not any little bitty phone SoC.  But Intel is still stuck at 14nm in this turf area, so you get the importance that the IBM/Global/Samsung consortium folks are making it work right now at 5nm on much more hairy complex hard to do stuff (stuff that brings a much better price tag too).

What you see here is Intel losing market share in yet another one of their key mainframe turf areas ....
Intel is still stuck at 14nm in this particular turf area

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/6/5/15740500/ibm-5nm-gaafet-tran...




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Now cast your eyes on the picture below, because this is current 5nm memory that is in production right now .....

The 5nm chip uses a "gate-all-around" transistor (GAAFET), with the gate material wrapped around a trio of horizontal silicon "nanosheets," as compared to the vertical fin design (FinFET) that's used in current state-of-the-art chips. IBM claims that FinFET could possibly scale down to 5nm, but there's a performance ceiling on that design due to the limits of current flow through the minuscule fins at that scale. In a way, the gate-all-around architecture is more simple than FinFET, and can probably be scaled as far down as 3nm, according to Ars Technica.

Simpler equals quicker and cheaper to make.     Memory is being made as we speak with this 5nm lithography process and they are putting in lots of new 5nm memory production lines as fast as they are made available.   Lots & lots of conjoined fast low power draw memory is a key element for everybody right now ......




See how clean and neat the lines are at 5nm -- this EUV laser stuff is quite an improvement, really.

Each one of the 3 stacked pellets is a transistor with the gate material being all around it and the FinFET being for conducting current flow and heat away from the stack of 3 transistors.  

When they get better at it, the stack count goes up for even more cost savings and smaller overall chip sizes.

https://liliputing.com/2017/10/sifive-unveils-first-linux-ready-risc-v-processor
.html



Chips made by Intel and AMD currently dominate the PC space, while most smartphones and tablets tend to feature processors based on ARM designs. There are few other options, but one of the most intriguing are chips based on the RISC-V architecture.

Since 2010, the RISC-V project has been developing an open instruction set architecture as an open source, royalty-free alternative to x86 and ARM designs, among others.

Now a company called SiFive has introduced the first RISC-V processor capable of supporting full-fledged operating systems including Linux, Unix, and FreeBSD.

Why is this worth noting?    I count 3 "real right now" current kickstarter programs trying to build a FOSS Linux based phone.   One of them just passed it's 1.5 million dollar funding goal.

When you FOSS design a 1.5 ghz quad core FOSS Linux telephone/tablet/laptop chipset, and get it tuned right and then let people just order runs off of it from TSMC (or order the chip quantities they need from LENARO who could act as a stocking point) then suddenly all these little cute items become possible off of kickstarters programs.

Next, once you adopt all the tricks of AI/DynamIQ (done fully FOSS style of course) and the full use of AI booster blocks, then you can get considerable processing power out of a freebie 4 core RISC-V design.    It is the 25-50x AI booster block portion that makes all the big horsepower anyway, not the slightly puny main processor portion.

You may well see this stuff again later, and it may be worthy of some additional consideration at that point.

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 10/10/17 at 09:43:34:


That was a cross section view with the conductors sticking "up" towards the camera and "down" on the far side of the image.   What you saw as the beads was the cross section slice of the diode portion itself which is in line with the connecting wires (which was the rest of the 3 stacked beads extending out in space).

I'll spot you some better explanation when it becomes available -- right now 3 high (stacked) gate all around is completely state of the art and very proprietary and nobody is explaining it to anybody for much right now.




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What does this mean in reference to solid state drive sizes getting smaller and smaller?

Well, first shot out of the gun is a 128 gigabyte solid state drive ..... with most of the item being the USB connector itself.

    Cost is another amazing benefit --- $30 for a 128 gig drive.   I suspect the chip itself ball grid soldered directly to a motherboard would be a good bit cheaper to do as part of a finished phone or tablet or a laptop.    Cheapest yet would be DESIGNED INTO THE layered SOC itself, and run off as part of the actual SOC chipset (Apple currently does it this way).

Oh Justin, just park this YouTube up in your browser bar and watch it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwVdVY3XY9M




Coming in only Six Days, the world will shift techtonically another 100 yards off that-a-way .....

Rumor has it that the Huawei Mate 10 is also a phone PC, so it may be a pretty strong fast AI powered phone PC when it ships  --- we shall see.

Kickstarter is working on 3 new laptop docks that are actually laptop shells as we speak, as folks find the laptop experience format very handy and portable compared to a DeX style dock for a desktop experience.    And the laptop shell shown costs less than a DeX docking station from Samsung .....      

Intel and Microsoft recognize that they totally missed the first part of the AI wave and are too far behind now to ever catch up in a meaningful AI fashion.    They both acknowledge that AI tech will supplant traditional PC stuff inside the next calendar year and a half.   Both are struggling to position themselves in the new AI reality .....

Nothing "Traditional PC" shall survive the 30x-50x AI wave that is coming.

The passe' Wintel duo are now pouring all their development money now into Quantum Computing and are buying failed quantum computing start ups right and left in an attempt to get on board to that next Quantum wave from the very beginning.    Intel for example just showed the world a non-working 17 Qbit Quantum Computing chip put together by a new company they just bought.    (buying them for their patents, actually)

By dropping all development efforts in the traditional PC space, Intel and to a lesser degree MS are simply abandoning the traditional PC space as completely out of their control.

And all of the AI replacement tech they see coming all belongs to the DynamIQ standard and to the various FOSS consortiums involving Google, LENARO, IBM, Samsung, Huawei, TSMC and AMD/Global.


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PREDICTION TIME:
Microsoft completely drops their Qualcomm 835 based laptop ideas before any laptops are actually built, mainly because the AI based replacement chipsets as shown by Huawei next week are SO VERY MUCH BETTER.   Qualcomm is all cash strapped itself now, and isn't a suitable supporting partner for the always cash strapped MS any more anyway.

MS does try try try again with the up and coming AI Qualcomm SOC version which is coming out fresh next year, but by then MS will have been so fumbly slow to get the AI driven Win 10 ARM OS and AI driven Win 10 ARM Office software ready that MS eventually misses out on their come back chance yet again because they simply can't keep up with the speed that the phone zone change waves come up and go by a sluggish player like MS.

QUALCOMM     Finance sources are telling their followers NOT TO BUY QUALCOMM on this current market dip --- it isn't coming back up all the way this time.    It may never come back all the way since all the big 3 phone makers and Apple are building their own basebands and radios now.    Intel now sells a suitable radio and baseband if you don't want to build your own.   Ditto for Samsung and Huawei and Mediatek, they've all got one for sale now too.

Qualcomm's NXP merger plans are busy falling through now, and existing court judgements against Qualcomm are big enough now and numerous enough now to put them under water for well over a year if the big NXP merger payments do go through .....  

The ongoing wave of lawsuit judgements for Qualcomm's past over-charges are large and they are MANY ....  Qualcomm is unable to pay them all right now.

In China and South Korea, Qualcomm is firmly enjoined to only charge royalties based on the actual cost of their chipsets, not the whole cost of the entire phone as they used to do.   This royalty basis is rolling out across the rest of the world as we speak.  

Qualcomm isn't going to control anything with an iron fist any more.


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Friday, Oct 13   Qualcomm just got hit with a new $775 Million Dollars in additional criminal [u]PENALTIES[/u] in South Korea for their original licensing scam's coercive illegalities.
(you can't put a corporation in jail, so instead you fine the heck out of them, big enough $$$ to make it hurt, bad)

Saturday,  Oct 14    Microsoft announces an AI relationship with AMAZON HOME, with the two partnering technically on AI home devices to compete against Google's AI lead in the American domicile market.

Microsoft is struggling to find some real relevance in the AI wave -- AMAZON may have indeed picked themselves up a Jr. partner with many many needs,  a lot more needs than AMAZON has real uses for Microsoft right now as MS really brings very little real stuff to lay down on the table right now.

I bet MS is promising to write the MS OFFICE world over to run on AMAZON's hardware base, ignoring all their past deals with Qualcomm (since Qualcomm can't hold up their end any more).

AMAZON and Microsoft hope to build some relevance together, as they both need it, badly.    AMAZON has a large installed base of ARM based tablets. lots of smart speakers and lots of video movies and content to run on them.   AMAZON sells most of the PC type stuff that gets sold, so it could be a good move for MS going out into the future .....

If MS was planning on switching over to ARM this would make some sense as a first move, first go get you a ready customer base that is still growing instead of shrinking.

Bet Jeff Bezos winds up "owning" MS by the time it is over, though.....

https://www.google.com/search?q=amazon+and+microsoft+partnership&oq=amazon+an...

Yes, it is a search page, so poke around and read until you get the flavor of it ..... this is potentially a major fusion of two larger players.

Google and their OK GOOGLE AI are putting significant pressure on Amazon and their Alexa speaker based stuff -- so Amazon is willing to jump into bed with someone to get a better AI and Microsoft says they have one named Cortana and MS is willing to snuggle the two half naked girls up together inside the same devices.

Sad part is that OK GOOGLE's AI already beats them each separately, and Google may well still beat them once they are fused together.   AMAZON isn't an "in the device" AI house at all (Alexa sends all request up web to server farms, does search / display / etc there and then sends the answers back down to the device) and MS is relatively weak on the pure in device AI as well.

My Google phone now keeps the map/tourist data in the device and does all calculations internal to the phone itself when I save the map ranges for what I am needing inside the phone's memory.   I don't even have to have cell tower service up in the mountains to get what I need any more.   And that includes on the fly verbal requests for gas stations, food, tourist site location info, etc.

But I think it will be more of a contest with the 3 girls mud wrassling each other at the same time, I think.    All the players will be forced to get a lot better much much quicker, and that is a good thing for us Savage riders.

Right now when I am wearing mic equipped earbuds under my helmet (w/face shield down) I can just ask the cell phone sitting out the handle bars for whatever I need and it will do it / go get it / display it and give me the turn by turn navigation on how to get there.    Hands off, no having to do anything but ask out loud.   The full face helmet cuts out enough of the trash engine noise & the wind noise to allow it to work properly.



What will it be like in two years, I wonder ......