Moore's law will outlive most fab companies

The continued race to the bottom, or in this case to the smallest possible die size, is going to weed out all but just a few foundry players in the next few years. Gartner projects that by the time semiconductor process technology reaches 8 nanometers, there will only be four to eight left.

[Nihilism]

Sad but true. The bigger companies always get bigger, and the smaller ones get swallowed up. This far along in the cpu/gpu game as well i can see intel climbing to the top as far as complete solutions go, with larabee, and who knows what nvidia/ati will do one they get to 1nm size, surely die shrinks are the cheating way of making a better card than the competition, beat them to the punch, and i definately don't see any new players coming along, i'd love to see some of larger computer hardware manufacturors branch out though, gigabyte for example making their own graphics cards separate from the ati/nvidia lines. Surely they have enough experience to do so.

/wall of text

EDIT: there is a serious drought of tech news on n4g, but the trouble is, there isn't much worth submitting, we need gt300 to hurry the F up so the article wars can begin....then cue ati die shrink, then cue ati dual pcb....then cue nvidia die shrink, then OMFGWTFBBQ i9 might be out, then nvidia dual pcb, good tech coming up soon people's, keep your eyes peeled and your wallets open

[dragonelite]

Dont think n4g is really a good place to have a discussion about tech have you seen what the fanboys are sprouting out of there ass.

I myself sometimes go along in those fan boys war but the IQ in those discussions is rather low if i want to get technical i go to Beyond3D at least most of these guys have knowledge about how stuff works.

[Pandamobile]

Nanotube just sounds awesome :P

[MetalFreakMike]

I usally keep up with new tech but it costs too much. Upgrading every six months to a year just is not worth it sometimes. I have a Phenom II 955 3.2 Ghz Black Edition Quad-core processor, with DDR3 4 GB ram and a GTX 260 core 216 896 mb video card. This build is going to last me atleast a year and a half before I want to upgrade again because I can not afford to be shelling out money on computer parts and games for my ps3 and 360 at the same time.

[INehalemEXI]

I only upgrade or rebuild the rig when a great game requires it and so far I am still good.

[Nihilism]

I have a similar rig

[email protected]
4 gig ddr2
gtx 280

the fact is that i7 etc doesn't give you abny extra performance in gaming, my next upgrade will be a new gpu, and i will wait for the die shrink of the next high end single pcb nvidia card, after that F it , i'm gonna wait 5 more years

[z1ck]

have a q9450 2.66 ( not overclocked because of weak cooler )
4 gb ddr2
hd4870

maybe i will buy a 5870 but the processor and ram are fine since my maximum resolution is 1280 1024 and games like farcry 2 only use 600 to 800 mb ram and im still waiting for a game that use all my 4 cores and when they use i buy a 40 dollars cooler to overclock

btw nice rig MetalFreakMike

[AuToFiRE]

my computer is old, i overclocked my AMD 4200+ X2 to 5.4ghz witha locked processor (i used the northbridge for those who think its impossible) to truly increase speed and performance of any computer, you get a faster hard drive, the hard drive in todays computers are the bottleneck, some day moores law will break, and someday people will realize faster hard drives will always equate to a faster computer

[zagibu]

@ AuToFiRe: The harddrive rarely matters in games. In most games, shorter level load times is all you get from a faster hard drive.

[AuToFiRE]

hard drive speed is an extremely critical piece, you can have the fastest processor in the world, but it only works at the speed of your slowest device whihc is the hard drive, which pumps out a mere 384 megs/s on a SATAII configuration, which means anything coming out of that hard drive will only be processed at that speed. Yes, you have RAM but RAM doesnt have everything in it. with a faster hard drive combined with the RAM you can have gigs more data on screen than you can have in your RAM, leaving the RAM free for higher texture sprites, more variations of foliage, etc. thats why we have RAM in the first place, because the hard drives are too slow.

[zagibu]

You obviously have no idea how games and computers work. Sadly, this doesn't hinder you from posting complete bullshit.

If you don't believe me, you can do the test. Buy a slow laptop-harddrive, install Windows and Crysis and check your FPS. Then buy an ultra-fast WD Raptor or even a solid state disk and put it in the same system. Install Windows and Crysis and check your FPS. They will be exactly the same. Why? Because Crysis, like many other games, only accesses the hard drive during level load.

[acere]

scary

[Shadowstar]

Hm. I tend to think of Moore's Law as the more encompassing one that, according to Wikipedia, is really Kurtzweil et al's misappropriation. Funny, that.

[bjornbear]

this jsut means by the time "fab companies" can afford new tech, there'll be newer tech...thats always the case anyway =P