TSMC published a blog post last Wednesday that is called, “Moore’s Law is not Dead”. First, they reiterate that Moore’s Law is about density, not performance. It used to be that a denser semiconductor manufacturing would reduce cost, increase performance, and reduce power consumption. Performance has plateaued for a while, but density is still progressing.

The article goes on to talk about “system level density”.

While this has the marketing spin feel, it is backed with an experimental, almost 2500mm2 surface area interposer that can mount two 600mm2 dies and eight 75mm2 HBM memory packages. The article goes on to note that a common bottleneck in computing is keeping the logic fed with data. This is mostly true for parallel processors, such as GPUs, but TSMC also mentions dedicated AI processors. With the RAM and the processors all on the same interposer, bandwidth goes up and latency goes down much easier than separate components on a large circuit board.

Of course, some day we’ll transition to a new compute medium. We don’t need to push electrical waves down a semiconductor at radio frequencies. We will figure out a new paradigm, whether that’s quantum, light down an optical integrated circuit, or something else entirely. It will be interesting to see whether that transition is pioneered by the existing players.