Apple Chip Supplier Preparing to Begin Production of 2nm Chips as Early as 2025

How small can they get before random errors from cosmic radiation become a major problem? Also interesting that 2nm only give 15% more performance compared to 3nm. With 2nm you should ne able to more than double the number of transistors that can be addressed in one cycle, which are limited by the speed of light.

At this point ‘3nm’, ‘2nm’ etc are basically arbitrary labels to describe progress in transistor manufacturing processes. They have little to do with actual feature size on the microchips, which can vary widely in a single microchip.

Also, process sizes are not comparable between different CPU manufacturers because they also serve as marketing tags for that particular manufacturer’s processes.

Don’t base expectations or calculations on the ‘Xnm’ label.

The partnership between Apple and TSMC is responsible for some of the most important innovations in semiconductor technology. It's the perfect match between TSMC's chip semi ingenuity and execution and Apple's processor design prowess and very deep pockets to finance each major process generation. The entire industry is benefiting from the fruits of this partnership.

That is if Taiwan isn’t part of China in the next year.

How small can they get before random errors from cosmic radiation become a major problem? Also interesting that 2nm only give 15% more performance compared to 3nm. With 2nm you should ne able to more than double the number of transistors that can be addressed in one cycle, which are limited by the speed of light.

That way of thinking, i.e. (3*3)/(2*2) approximately equalling 2, does not mean you get double the transistor density - that has not been the case for ages now. These days, somewhere in the process they will have managed to reduce one or two dimensions from 3nm to 2nm but the vast majority of other dimensions (and there are hundreds of them) are a lot bigger and many don't even change at all going from node to node. Sure, things are getting better, but nothing like what you're implying. That being said, it is amazing to behold the progress. My first job in IC design (shortly after the dinosaurs perished) was with a 10µm bipolar process!

That is if Taiwan isn’t part of China in the next year.

Thats why big names think ahead
"The U.S. plant is TSMC's most advanced chip facility outside its home market. The project was announced in May 2020, and construction started last June (2021)"

That's spot on.

Considering this apple's architecture is actually a pretty impressive feat, because it goes toe to toe with much more power hungry desktop chips on a sequential single thread basis. Sure, Apple has to do all sorts of tricks inside the CPU, including limited parallelism (out of order execution), but at least it works in practical scenarios, and not just benchmarks.

People kept dumping on intel for not going beyond 4 cores on the desktop. Fact is: doing normal computing things you will be hard pressed to saturate even two of those. And - I feel I have to say this at this point - that has nothing to do with us programmers being lazy. You can't just "make" a problem of sequential nature adhere to rules of parallelism. That's like saying time travel is perfectly possible - you just have to break causality.

So if we look at actual general purpose, single thread CPU performance .... Moore's Law, or what people believe it to be, has been dead for quite a while. Probably since the Pentium 4 era - which, interestingly, is right around the time Apple jumped on the intel bandwagon because PPC wasn't going anywhere either.

For me, the Apple Silicon advantage has very little to do with peak performance, and everything to do with how efficient and smooth everything is running. This is precisely what makes Apple Apple. They didn’t just rely on chips getting faster to make better computers. They innovated on everything around the core. Which, precisely because Moore’s Law is dead, is where the real differentiation is now, if you look at the experience of using a computer, rather than performance numbers.