Jim Keller is legend in microarchitecture design, not in process technology. All his arguments seem to be just extrapolating from the past.

Process engineers&material scientists seem more cautious. I'm sure shrinking goes but gains are smaller from each generation.

TSMC 3nm Process is something like 250 MTr/mm² and single digit performance increase and 15-30% power efficiency increase compared to older prosess.

It does, though, reduce heat, right? Which ultimately is more cores per socket. Which hits the thing that actually matters...price/performance.

Yes. But that's a huge decline compared to even recent past.

Performance increases from generation to generation used to be much faster. TSMC's N16 to N7 was still doubling or almost doubling performance and price/performance over the long term. N5 to N3 is just barely single digits.

Every fab generation is more expensive than in the past. Soon every GIGAFAB costs $30 billion while technology risk increaseses.

That’s true, but because Moore’s Law has slowed, you’ll be able to amortize that $30 billion over a longer time.

> because Moore’s Law has slowed

Not sure that is really true based on the data. Remember, Moore's law says the number of transistors in an IC doubles every two years, which doesnt necessarily mean a doubling of performance. For a while in the 90's, performance was also doubling every two years, but that was largely due to frequency scaling.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Moore%27...

To be precise, Moore’s Law says the number of transistors per unit cost doubles (every two years). https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/...

A lot of the new processes have not had the same cost reductions. Also, some increase in transistor count is due to physically larger chips. Also, you have “Epyc Rome” on that graph, which actually isn’t a single chip but uses chiplets.

Yeah and after you have a working $30B fab, how many people are going to follow you to build one?

The first one built will get cheaper to run every year - it will pay for itself by the time a second company even tries to compete. The first person to the "final" node will have a natural, insurmountable monopoly.

You could extract rent basically forever after that point.

I don't think we'll see a final node in our lifetimes. Improvements are slowing down and will become a trickle, but that doesn't mean research stops entirely.

Consider other mature technology, like the internal combustion engine. ICEs have been improved continuously, though the changes have become marginal as the technology matured. However, if research and improvements on ICEs ends entirely it's not because the technology has been fully explored but because they're obsoleted by electric cars.

I thought the drivers of cost are lots of design work, patents, trade secrets etc. involved with each process. If there’s a “final” node, those costs should decrease over time and eventually become more of a commodity.

That's only true if the supply satisfies demand.

The video that was posted goes into that (30min mark) and seems to reflect what you are saying.

he might know some about the material science behind things but yeah, that said I'd like to hear about actual semi/physics researchers on the matter

If we ever figure out a way to make caron nanotube transistors in volume, expect another 50 years of Moore's law.

Since the "nm" numbers are just marketing anyway, I think they don't mean much in regards to how small we can go. We can go small until the actual smallest feature size hits physical limitations, which is so decoupled from the nm number that we can't possibly tell how close "7nm" is (well, I mean, we can, there's a cool youtube video showing the transistors and measuring feature size with a scanning electron microscope, but I mean we can't tell just from the naming/marketing).

Check out the lex fridman Jim Keller podcast on YouTube