Processors, Processors, Processors Everywhere

By SemiWiki

October 6, 2016

At first glance a processor conference might seem a bit arcane, however we live in an era where processors are ubiquitous. There is hardly any aspect of our lives that they do not touch in some way. Last week at the Linley Processor Conference the topics included deep learning, autonomous driving, energy, manufacturing, smart cities, commerce and more. The conference was led off by a keynote from the conference’s namesake Linley Gwennap, who touched on all the main themes for the following two days.

The keynote presented many familiar topics and ideas, along with several surprising ones. Let me summarize the most interesting points.

Linley observed that increasing wafer costs have reached the point where the price per transistor is actually going up. 20nm was the crossover point for this. As Linley puts it – “Moore’s Law is only for the rich.” The effect of this will be that cost sensitive products will stay at 28nm. Thus mainstream products will be limited in the amount of integration they contain. However, high end products will continue to move to new advanced nodes because the justification for higher prices exists.

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