The Semiconductor Golden Era
In the wake of the Spectre and Meltdown, it seems odd to write a post making the point I hope to make today. However as hard as it may be to believe, we truly are entering the golden era of the semiconductor industry.
I recall many personal conversations with Broadcom co-found Henry Samueli, where he would re-enforce his noted statement that there would be no more silicon/ semiconductor startups. His conviction was because of how capital intensive it is to be a semiconductor company. In reality, we are seeing a semiconductor industry renaissance which is driven by a continuing increase of semiconductor performance in categories like cloud, automotive, AI, machine learning, etc.
This renaissance is partly driven by a number of new semiconductor/silicon startups coming from many parts of the world, not just the US, but also the combination of ARM making their IP more diverse and more turnkey. There are also more foundries looking for new business to fill their factories and offering a range of competitive offerings for upstarts. As interesting as watching a number of semiconductor startups bloom, what is most interesting to me in this golden era is the approach each company is taking to unique designs of their architectures.
In the past, there was a great deal of similarity in semiconductor architectures. This was during the speed race. Every company making processors was in a race to make the fastest. During that race, the focus was on the transistor design and the aggressive pursuit of Moore’s Law. But as I mentioned, the designs of the architectures themselves were quite similar. Interestingly, this is part of the pathway that led us to Spectre and Meltdown. The commonality in all CPU designs which led to Spectre and Meltdown was Speculative Emulation. Which in its own right is a very clever approach to speed up a processor, and an equally clever hack to exploit. But this simple borrowing of an architecture design to focus more on performance may very well be on its way out.
While the first big semiconductor era focused on speed, this next era will focus on efficiency. Nearly everyone designing CPU/GPU/memory/ASICs/Co-processors/ISPs, and most other types of silicon is now focusing on efficiency over performance. This is where, I believe, we will see some fascinating and creative engineering in the area of architectural design. Specifically, where we used to see many similarities in the architectural designs of Intel, AMD, Samsung, Qualcomm, Apple, etc., we will now start to see more originality from all the big names making semiconductors.
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