Slashdot Mirror
Intel Claims Smallest, Fastest Transistor
The Angry Clam writes: "Supposedly, Intel has really micronized transistors." Seems that "Intel engineers
have designed and manufactured a handful of transistors that
are only 20 nanometers, or 0.02 microns, in size." There's some of the usual discussion of how long Moore's Law can hold, but also a bit of discussion about what will replace silicon dioxide in a few years. Reader omnirealm points to a similar story at the New York Times as well.
Here's some pure bogusness, but what do you think:
I wrote a C++ program which initializes a double to 1.1; then adds 1.1 to it 4 billion times (ULONG_MAX).
On my PIII 500 mhz laptop (circa 1998-99) sometime, this program runs in 30 seconds.
On my new P4 1.7 ghz, it runs in 12 seconds.
I didn't check, but I think Plank time is about 10-47 seconds. Assuming the time it takes to execute one of these 4 billion steps, and if it continues to cut in half every three years, we'll hit planck time in about 100 years.
In other words, there is a fundamental limit on how quickly we can know one single fact (planck time), and our children will hit that by the end of their lifetimes.
What then?
[Saint Stephen]
True, the bus does become an issue here. However, since cache fills tend to be large (32-64 bytes) it should be possible to have extremely wide busses (like the dual 256bit busses on Alpha workstations) to compensate for a lower clock speed. Also, 20GHz busses won't come around until processors reach 100GHz or so (which is still a bit away) since 1/5 the processor speed speeds to be a fairly regular bus speed. Of course, as many tricks as you put in there, the inherent problem remains, just gets postponed somewhat.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
From Yahoo Dailynews: An investor could check his stock portfolio in the morning and find that the computer has analyzed the portfolio, market trends, economic data and such to present a number of options.
:-D
``You log on in the morning and (the computer) gives you two or three options: 'Have you thought about doing one of these things? I've done the calculations for you,''' Marcyk said.
If the computer is so smart, why not just tell it to initiate whatever stock transactions it thinks is best? Come to think of it, if computers are that smart, you'll be out of a job and you won't have any money to invest in stocks unless you inherited an estate or had some money stashed away from the time when you were working.
When that happens, we'll need a new law to replace Moore's law: the number of unemployed people will double every seven days. Andy Grove will be heard saying "Where is the limit? Show me the limit, goddamnit!" while an angry and hungry mob tries to force its way into the lobby of Intel's headquarters, brandishing pitchforks and God knows what else.
We're talking about 0.02 microns here. Most people can't make out any detail smaller than a centimeter. 0.02 microns would be 500,000 times smaller than what can be seen with the unaided eye!
I really don't understand your reasoning. Are you saying that we are motivated to improve our technology all the time? What does this have to do with Moore's Law and specific predictions about how fast our technology improves?
If anything, I think that Moore's Law might be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We just don't have that great a motivation to improve processor technology these days. We have processor technology that is beyond the dreams of engineers 30 years ago. For the most part, we have reached a point where most of the needs of applications of massively powerful computing are currently realized in today's machines.
Sure, faster is better, but does faster translate to big development dollars to outdo Moore's Law when researchers and developers are constantly trying to develop software and systems to keep up with the huge gains that were seeing with Moore's Law? In this scenario, Moore's Law is how fast machines improve because Moore said as much and that's what drives the designers to improve, keeping up with and staying ahead of Moore's Law. The designers don't want to be in the group that finally failed to live up to the expectations of the industry, but there's also no particular motivation to get ahead of Moore's Law's predictions either.
Take the above with a grain of salt. It's just conjecture, of course.
It seems clear to me that Moore's Law does hold no matter what - in a way. When the size continues to decrease exponentially... smaller and smaller, to the point where we can't even see what we're making by the naked eye, it's not that further improvement becomes impossible, but simply that the process changes, or the technology.
:-)
Example: a floppy disk's size can be pushed to the limit, and finally we have 1.4MB floppies.. but sooner or later, you need a CD. And then a DVD. Et cetera.
It'll still be quite a while, but eventually silicon will simply be the wrong technology, the wrong process. Of course, a processor technology lasts MUCH longer than a subcomponent, such as a floppy drive technology.
Moore's Law. Too bad it's "only" x2 and not ^2.
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I'm sorry, but won't creating processors with such high clock frequencies just be negated by the inherent slowness of the bus? One of the things you have to remember when designing hardware with such short clock cycles are the inherent speed limits on signals propagating through it. Light can only travel 1.5 cm in the time afforded by a single cycle from a clock running at 20 GHz. Electrons are much slower. The implication of this are that, given current motherboards, the CPU will stall for a hell of a lot more cycles waiting for a memory read/write.
Caching can only go so far. It seems to me that increases in overall computing power (however you wish to measure it) will not come just through cranking up the clock speed, but will require fundamental architectural changes to the PC as we know it (main storage on the CPU, overall miniaturization, etc).
Personally, I don't think we're going to see silicon dioxide go away for quite some time. Yes, it does have some physical limitations, but few inexpensive alternatives seem possible within a 5 year time span.
Of course, new designs and materials will come (Toshiba is starting to use diagonal circuitry, helping efficiency). Silicon is just too cheap and abundant to give up on right now - we'll probably see it for a few decades into the future in things like appliances, calculators, and handheld computers because they're cheap to manufacture in mass quantities and the material itself is one of the most abundant substances on the surfaces of the planet (it's a large component of common sand).
Therefore, I think the prediction of silicon dioxide fading away in just a "few years" is a bit premature. If we've learned anything from the tech industry, old standards tend to stick around for a VERY long time (witness floppy drives, ISA slots, and serial ports).
mmm...physics...
Wow. just think...
What would happen if computing hardware technology reached hard atomic limits?
A new era would begin...programmers would actually have to write efficient code! The end of bloatware as we know it!
Moore's Law II: On average, every 15 months, code would suck 50% less...
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
The number of people talking about how long Moore's Law will last doubles every 18-24 months.
"And like that
For all you non-EEs out there, Silicon Dioxide (SiO_2) is used in chips as an insulator. It is not that we're removing all the silicon from the chip, just replacing some of the insulating material. These articles are not talking at all about the silicon wafer substrate.
Some of the silicon dioxide has already been replaced for a couple years with materials called "low-k dielectrics" which basically means it results in lower capacitance (lower capacitance == faster chip) than silicon dioxide. This is only on the metal layers which are relatively far from the transistors. The silicon dioxide mentioned in the article is the insulator used in the actual transistor itself. It is the one that is going to be "atoms thick" and it is one of the fundamental parts of the transistor.
A recent Slashdot story covers the posabilities of .01nm transistors and how there currently is a theoreticle limit with our current process of .002nm
Just once, I'd like to read an article about a new microprocessor technology that doesn't have some silly quote about what kind of AI feature it will enable.
For decades, hardware has been proving exponentially. For decades, they've been predictiong that the new features will magically enable intelligent software.
All we've got to show for it so far is Clippy the paper clip. A mere 10X speedup won't make Clippy any less annoying.
Hint for futuristic article editors: the human brain has a hardware and software architecture that has absolutely nothing in common with that of an electronic computer.