alt Hacker NewsMostly high end lithography.
They can copy it. And no, the software moat is not there if someone choose the blatant copy route. They just can't build it in the scale they want yet.
> what if they just use 12nm and create GPUs with much bigger size but comparable performance
Physics do not work this way :/
well, physics does work that way, depending on what you mean by performance. (in the sense that power is normally part of performance when we're talking about chips).
you could certainly use a larger process and clone chips at an area and power penalty. but area is the main factor in yield, and talking about power is really talking about "what's the highest clockrate can you can still cool".
so: a clone would work in physics, but it would be slow and hot and expensive (low yield). I think issues like propagation delay would be second- or third-order (the whole point of GPUs is to be latency-tolerant, after all).