Why, and how, we’ll all be making our own computer chips in the future…

If you read the tech news, it can’t have slipped your attention that significant changes are a foot in the computer chip industry. New chief at Intel; Apple making their own chips for laptops and phones; big mergers — ARM, Nvidia, Xilinx, Qualcomm; the inexorable rise of RISC-V…

This is a multi-part blog about what’s going on and where these changes will take us.

Underlying all this change are two things — the economics of chip manufacturing and the rapidly reducing benefits of shrinking transistors.

As you may remember, back in the 90’s and 2000’s, every couple of years computers would get twice as fast — an exponential curve transforming the world as we knew it. This was called Moore’s law and this was the key driver in the tech revolution. Then, at some point in the 2010’s, this stopped happening…

Why was that?

The original Moore’s law stated that roughly every two years, the number of transistors on a chip would double. This is still pretty much happening, but unfortunately this no longer means that chips are still getting twice as fast. Some facts of physics came together (with scary sounding names like Dennard Scaling and Dark Silicon) which really essentially boil down to this fact: when transistors get really small you cant use them too much otherwise they burn out.

This means that as we cram more transistors on a chip, we just can’t use all of them at once. So what was once an exponential growth of capability has now switched back into old fashioned linear growth.

Now that wouldn’t be industry-transforming in and of itself without one other fact — the cost of cramming more transistors on a chip is still growing exponentially.

This is making the business of making chips one of the realm of nations and national collaborations rather than of business.

Next up — what this means for the industry..