AMD illustrates how much more a 5nm and 7nm chip costs to make

During its SemiCon West presentation, AMD showed the progress of Moore's Law is decreasing and it also showed a slide that illustrates how the cost of smaller process nodes keeps increasing. The chart below reveals the normalized cost per yielded mm² for a 250mm² chip die.

Over the past decade, costs have shot up and especially the last chip generation is a lot more expensive to make than the previous. Beyond the 14nm/16nm node, there's a steep acceleration in the cost per yielded mm². AMD says this makes increasing die size economically problematic.



The solution is seen in microarchitectural advances, chiplets and die stacking, and heterogenous platforms.