Well there's two predictions you can think about that could happen sometime in the future:
1. Nobody can put more than XXX transistors on a square millimeter (where XXX is some physical limit to chip material)
2. "Everybody" can put YYY transistors on a square millimeter (where YYY is a number sufficiently close to XXX so that the difference does not matter much)
The first means some stagnation in the chip market: not only does Moore's Law not apply anymore, but not even does a weak version of Moore's Law ("chips tend to get faster/cheaper over time") apply. But if that scenario becomes true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the democratization of the second scenario becomes true. The ability to put YYY transistors on a square millimeter could still be limited to a select few companies investing billions in the production of these chips. After all, how many fabs worldwide are currently capable of producing 45nm chips, which could be considered "commodity" [1]?
Is it really true that it becomes much cheaper to produce chips on smaller process nodes over time? Sure it becomes cheaper since less original R&D is necessary, but is it reasonable to think that producing 20nm chips ever becomes a question of investing anything less than, say, 100s of millions? Does the second scenario ever become true, at least in the forseeable future?
I don't know much about chip fabs so I wonder if someone more knowledgeable could share some insight on this.
[1]: I genuinely don't know the answer to this, but I don't suppose it's very widespread?
If 2 keeps not happenning — if producing custom ASICs remains expensive — it becomes increasingly attractive to produce cheap as-good-as-they-get FPGAs in massive quantities.
Ironically, FPGAs as endgame would be way more disruptive than an "ASICs to the people" endgame.
FPGA density, price/gate and power efficiency trail "native" hardware but constant factors of overhead but it should be possible to reduce the gap compared to now. More FPGA volume means better economies; the hardware architecture could be optimized further; most importantly IMHO the current design tools are heinously unfriendly and could benefit a lot from programmer attention (once programmers realize a more-or-finalized FPGA structure is the "new assembly" to optimize for).
I'm not sure if a constant factor of disadvantage would become very acceptable (because we'll drop the throw-faster-hardware-at-it mentality) or very unacceptable (because robots with FPGA brains always lose at high-frequency chess wrestling to robots with native brains).
Would ideally need to have some kind of open source FPGA catch on (and be manifactured with competitive performance). Companies like Xilinx and Altera are not at all keen on open sourcing their technology and tools. IMO, through their actions, they're shooting themselves in the foot, keeping FPGAs from becoming what GPGPU is right now (or something even better, in fact).
If I were to bet on which fabs were able to get to the final process node for traditional silicon transistors, my money would probably be on Intel and TSMC, since they have the most volume on advanced processes and spend the most money on new fabs and process research. And TSMC is the biggest commodity fab.
The reason it becomes cheaper is that your development costs for both the process and the design get amortized over longer and longer periods. At the same time architecture becomes the only way that some chips can be faster than others.
Though I guess I should point out that progress in chip performance isn't the same as putting more transistors on a square millimeter. One aspect of this is that more economical silicon processes such as TSMC's are better at cramming more transistors into a square millimeter than Intel's, but Intel's transistors tend to have better drive current - all at a given process node. The other aspect is that ever increasing transistor leakage means that processors might get to an era when they can't afford to keep all their transistors lit up at the same time[1].
These days, Intel is an unusual model in that they own the whole 'stack', from processor design to fabrication, packaging, etc. To replicate that costs 10s of billions of dollars.
To get your own chip produced using a 'pure-play' fab (which, these days, basically means TSMC, and to a lesser extent Samsung and GloFo), however, is much cheaper. If you want a 20nm chip, you design your chip (basically the cost is just engineering effort + CAD tools..a few million $$), send it to TSMC (getting masks made is another few million $$), and they send you back chips.
Reality is slightly more complicated, in that you're using using an integrator to manage the relationship with TSMC, the packaging company, the testing company, etc., but a startup with $10-20 million could probably scrape together a decent 20nm chip.
Once TSMC has built a new fab though, the longer it is 'relevant' the cheaper they can make the wafers, as they have more wafers to amortize the ~$10 billion or whatever it cost to build the fab over.
It's a confusing discussion (for me). It is true that "chip design" is somewhat democratized in that you don't need 100s of millions to design a chip and have it made on a competitive process. The thing I pondered was whether it will ever cost less than 100s of millions to make it yourself on a competitive process.
Although I guess the latter really isn't that relevant when it comes to the discussion of chip design.
It's kind of like fretting that it's expensive to write software if you have to invent your own language and compiler first. It would be, which is why no one does that.
1. Nobody can put more than XXX transistors on a square millimeter (where XXX is some physical limit to chip material)
2. "Everybody" can put YYY transistors on a square millimeter (where YYY is a number sufficiently close to XXX so that the difference does not matter much)
The first means some stagnation in the chip market: not only does Moore's Law not apply anymore, but not even does a weak version of Moore's Law ("chips tend to get faster/cheaper over time") apply. But if that scenario becomes true, it doesn't necessarily mean that the democratization of the second scenario becomes true. The ability to put YYY transistors on a square millimeter could still be limited to a select few companies investing billions in the production of these chips. After all, how many fabs worldwide are currently capable of producing 45nm chips, which could be considered "commodity" [1]?
Is it really true that it becomes much cheaper to produce chips on smaller process nodes over time? Sure it becomes cheaper since less original R&D is necessary, but is it reasonable to think that producing 20nm chips ever becomes a question of investing anything less than, say, 100s of millions? Does the second scenario ever become true, at least in the forseeable future?
I don't know much about chip fabs so I wonder if someone more knowledgeable could share some insight on this.
[1]: I genuinely don't know the answer to this, but I don't suppose it's very widespread?