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The End Of The Innovation Road for CMOS
Elledan writes "According to this EE Times article, CMOS technology (also used to create CPUs with) is getting near the moment when we will no longer be able to create smaller structures with it. With the date for this moment set around 2012 and with no replacement technology in sight, this issue might become a real problem in the near future, as the article explains."
As in what, code? (CMOS holds data, blah blah blah..)
Right, right.
Anyway, I almost wish we would hit impassable physical barriers with all hardware. Everywhere I look, people sacrifice good code for simple fast-to-write code (I'm guilty of this myself on occasion).
I would love to see what we could come up with if we *had* to scrape every last bit out of the bucket, if we *couldn't* waste anything because there were no additional resources.
At what point does the performance of computers become "adequate"? Once a technology becomes mature, a slow rate of improvement becomes acceptable. Reliability gets fixed, design improves, niche markets get filled. Internal combustion engines, houses, aircraft, ships, bridges, for all of these the lack of a Moores Law isn't a "problem". Perhaps if Moore's Law finally packs in for computers, we can all stop chasing progress and concentrate on things like social implications, human factors, and software that does something useful.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
How many times have we heard this prediction?
I remember when 200mhz was the end of the road. 'They' always manage
to give us another 10-15 years. It's like drilling for oil.
Besides, while Mhz makes a big difference to speed, design is more important.
Even if we hit this wall, we'd just continue to improve in other areas.
This is a different kind of FUD, but FUD it is.
rhadc
I say this is a good thing. Let the end of CMOS come. It's time for us to move forward. I think this is just the kick in the ass we need to really start focusing on quantum computing. IBM and Fujitsu both have quantum computing research divisions, and I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't quite a few companies out there very quietly working on it. The pressure for faster and better computing will drive us forward. And when the first 64-qubit computer comes rolling down the line, I'm certain Tom's Hardware will be there to tell us how many FPS's we'll be getting in Quake8 with it:
Tom's Hardware: I can definitely say that this thing smokes. Unfortunately, due to quantum uncertainty we weren't able to give you an exact measurement of FPS's. but we can say with some confidence that it's between 189 and Infinity + 2. However, with quad-sampling anti-aliasing on, don't be surprised to see that number drop to Infinity + 1.
Damn, I need to get some sleep.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
MEMS isn't an electronic system like MOSFET or CMOS, it's a method for making mechanical systems out of silicon. Oops.
Now that you can heat your coffee by direct irradiation from the CPU, is there any need to go faster?
IRL, Microsoft will find a way. If they didn't, XP's great-grandbastard would run like a stoned sloth. Install it on a P100 for a preview of what I mean.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Would it really be so bad if manufacturing advancement in the hardware sector slowed or stopped? Companies would be forced to develop new features (like MMX or AltiVec) to differentiate their chips. Work would shift to bringing the rest of the computer up to the top speed of the processors, which it has lagged behind by orders of magnitude for years. The oft-hated hardware upgrade cycle would slow down greatly. Machines would be useful for much longer, and depreciate less. Software developers could no longer rely on increased performance, and would be forced to do real optimization.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that this is going to be the end of increased CPU speed, just the end of the usefulness of a certain technology.
I think perhaps the best thing that could happen would be about a five year freeze on increasing CPU power, so that the burden would again fall on the programmers to write good fast code.
In the past five years, CPUs have increased in speed tenfold, but computers have gained little apparent speed (applications don't load any quicker, OSes don't boot any faster) and certainly haven't gotten *ten times* more useful.
We have all these extra cycles, and all we can think to do with them is write slow, clunky but pretty window managers. (A criticism I lay against, MS, Apple, and OS) A pause in the mad rush for speed might give some time to think of what to *do* with all that power. DivX is a pretty specific use for so much general purpose hardware.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
A lot of people are saying that stopping/slowing hardware advances would improve software - it won't. The proof is in the gaming area - they optimise it as far as possible while still making the game profitable and they need the latest hardware all the time.
The reality is that software has aquired a whole heap of extra features that we take for granted and they take up space. There is no reason to want highly optimised code because it limits what is financially viable to develop. Optimisation is hard, takes time and costs a heck of a lot of money, there would be a lot less software out there if it had to be fully optimised to be usable.
In short, just because you think you're "l33t" by optimising your code so it runs on a 286, you're just wasting your time because computers are fast enough to not need that. Look at the amount of processor cycles donated to projects like Seti@Home - there is no need to optimise code, so stop whinging.
Slowing the hardware improvement cycle will just slow/stop the innovations in software. The first place it will hit is scientific areas, then the gaming arena and it will hit the average user because the cool high-end stuff just won't trickle down to them (like video editing has recently done).
Yes, this is the more unknown part of moore's law: Chip-fabrication cost doubles every 18-24 months. This will probably be the barrier for most "chipsmiths"; not the physics..
...computers would be obsoleted at the speed of every other technological innovation of the last 2000 years.
10. To decrypt those files Mulder stole from the Pentagon.
9. John Connor has smashed your defense grid, and you need an edge, pronto.
8. Nothing can cheat like a quantum aimbot in Quake 4...
7. Negative ping times.
6. The shifty eyed salesmen at CompUSA talked you into it.
5. Opens up the exciting new possibility of quantum porn.
4. Windows.NET 2010 runs like a dog on your 2048-cpu, 900 Teraflops cluster with 8 petabits of ram.
3. The ability to render away the clothes, in real time, of your favorite TV show.
2. Your scheme to perform nuclear yield simulations with imported Playstation 2's ended in a trade embargo.
And the #1 reason to like quantum computing is...
*drum roll*
So here's my theory of what will happen if we hit a wall in processor performance:
1) Software developers will aim to better optimize the software.
2) Hardware developers will work at moving software-dependent things off on to hardware.
Some years back, I had a machine capable (at least to my untrained eyes) of full-screen, full-motion movies, under win 3.1. Of course, this was thanks to a $100 Sigma Designs VLB hardware MPEG decompressor, but ever since, I've wondered what all the excitement has been about in the last year or so with people talking about how great it is to have a CPU fast enough to handle movie playback. (one of these days, I'm going to put the old DX4-100 back together and see if I can get it to play dvd's through that card). But this seems to be a common trend. Stuff lives on hardware because it can be done fast. Stuff moves to software because it can be done cheap. Having major speed increases in the processor market has helped, but I think it'd be a hard sell to say that everything that's done in software currently couldn't be moved off into hardware. Find me 10 people that are convinced that hardware-accelerated 3d is soon to be eclipsed by software, and perhaps I'll consider that as an argument.
Does this mean that everything needs to be moved off to hardware? Probably not, but I'd like to see some of it offloaded. Some could arguably be better off as hardware (I could be wrong, but I think a cheap usb camera duct-taped to a lava lamp would make a better random number generator than most of the algorithms out there.)
As for software optimization, here's where the annoying part comes in. How many self-taught people know the difference between O(n) and O(2^n)? It's not the sort of thing you can rely on your compiler to fix for you. Perhaps we'll be coming to an age where the difference between doing the time in formal education learning the foundation becomes apparent from those who bought a "Teach yourself C++ in 10 minutes" book.
Umm, first of all, it's EE Times. Second of all, the quote is from the VP of R&D at TI. Get your facts straight, knucklehead.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
According to this paper (pdf) entitled "Scaling of Electronics" from 2001, the following conclusions are drawn:
* Moore's law will hold for 20 more years.
* There is a potential performance increase of 10000x with current CMOS-technology
* The minimum gate: needs 12(!) electrons to switch.
We'll see. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for CMOS to hit the roof though.
I find all the "who cares" and "good" posts bizarre.
End of Moore's law - or 2/5/7/10 year hiatus - is very bad news.
It means an end to cheaper faster computing power - and that means an end to expansion of the embedded sphere and the increasing use of computing power in business.
In other words - slower growth, collapse of hardware industry (why buy a new machine if its not any faster) and programmers out of jobs (what do we need you for - we have all the word processors we need).
Bad, bad, bad...
Although I agree with almost everything you said, I disagree very much with your conclusion. Slashdot rocks. Why? Because of posters like you, who take the time to write long, well-phrased articles about things like 'why slashdot sucks' or, well, why 'slashdot sucks' perhaps.
It's not because of the goatse.cz guy, or the penis bird, or Natalie Porter Nude and Petrified even (although I'll admit all of those were funny once, and the last thought can still send shivers down my spine if it catches me unawares.)
Anyway, I don't think the point to the site was ever to be some sort of hallowed highbrow thing. Yes, it's pitiful the average intelligence they're catering to now, but it's still a little better than many 'mainstream' sites, and a lot of interesting stuff does get posted. A terribly large dose of bullshit too, of course, but ese es el vive, no?
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
I do know that CMOS stands for Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor and it's uses N and P type transistors to do logic functions (AND, OR, XOR) but after that, it's all a bit hazy.
Can anyone provide a nice translation to English for us dummys?
Thanks!
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Chip makers complain because the "CAD Community" isn't coming up with solutions to some of their problems, but University R&D programs are unable to keep up with fabrication standards as the equipment gets more expensive.
Isn't this a problem waiting for a few self-interested chip-makers to whip their wallets in the direction of a few universities?
But even the article repeatedly says that the mask cost issue is a problem for the little guys, not the large ones like Intel. They can and will cheerfully swallow $600k respin costs, and more, to tapeout a successful new processor. So this aspect won't hurt processor development at all.
As for the CMOS scaling issue, the processor companies- i.e. Intel and AMD, have the pockets AND the incentive to find work-arounds. I promise you all that processors will continue to advance well beyond the year 2012. It may not be CMOS, and it may not be pretty :-), but it will work.
So for all of you who posted asking "what will we do when processors no longer advance", let me set your mind at ease- THAT won't happen for a long while yet.
Finally, while the subject of my post is "the end of processor advancement", I'll say a few words regarding other types of chips. I work as a hardware engineer for an ASIC house, and we produce at TSMC using the 0.18u process. The point is, that for our chips there is NO incentive to go to 0.13u or below. Nor will there be a reason for quite a while. The same is more or less true for MANY MANY other ASIC companies. So while the cutting edge- processors, Flash and graphic-chips companies will probably need to switch from CMOS to some other technology around 2012, that will in no way spell the end of CMOS, not for a VERY large segment of the ASICs market, and not for a VERY long time.
You mean I have to wait till 2012 before there is a reason to remove all the bloat from software so that it runs at optimum speed and does something useful?
Hmmm, what's the copy protection pushing politicians gonna use as an arguement for slowing computers down with bloat, in 2012?
I work in research at a university, and my PhD project is going to help solve this problem (and others) long before 2012. I can't get into specifics because of disclosure issues. But, understand that already a HUGE amount of work has been done behind the scenes and most other researchers don't yet know of what's to come.
.18um fabs could easily be refitted with strained Si material and compete with the .13um fabs. Actually, it's even better than that--the increases in mobility have been up to 8 times over that of Si.
CMOS isn't going to die. Turns out that we're not limited in the horizontal direction like everyone predicted years ago (remember how lithography was always the big problem?). Instead, it's the vertical direction. Our gates are having to get too thin. SiO2 just doesn't work well with 10A thick layers because of trapped charge and whatnot. Also we can't properly control doping at very shallow levels.
But all that doesn't matter. Strained-Si technology is where it's going. If you're interested, check out AmberWave. It turns out that we can increase the mobility of holes and electrons--so even older
No, CMOS isn't going to die. It's going to change and morph. Just like it has in the past. We don't need a revolution like many engineers are claiming--we simply need evolution. Strained Si is an evolution that will make for revolutions later. Current fabs can just swap out their current Si wafers and get strained Si ones--most everything else in the fab stays the same. Talk about a huge cost savings to boot (no need to rebuild a new fab for billions).
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
With the date for this moment set around 2012 and with no replacement technology in sight...
I've seen so many people say something like this, and each time I get really vocal. CMOS will die. Eventually. Big deal. We're counting oxide thickness in angstroms now ("how many atoms are in that?"), but get this -- gate tunneling leakage, source to drain leakage, they're making this a technology we wouldn't want to take further. That's right, DC current is becoming astronomical.
Replacements? The first one I think of is BiCMOS. That's our old standby. Current FET beta ratios are quoted at 100, but it's lower for each newer technology. Bipolar, on the other hand, is 300. That means that a bipolar transistor is 3 times as strong as a FET in terms of current it can source (or sink). Bipolars are big, and currently yield poorly. Throw the weight behind the technology and I bet we get some of that learned down. (For the curious, it yields poorly because to make a pnp transistor out of n silicon, you have to dope a big bowl of p, smaller bowl of n, but really hard to overcome the p you just did and finally a pretty small bowl of p, exceptionally hard to overcome the n you just did hard. Think about how CMOS makes a p type FET on p silicon -- light n to make an n well, then you can dope your source and drain.)
Oh, and Research is being done all the time to replace CMOS.
"No replacement technology in sight". Bah. Maybe for consumers. I'll throw my professional weight behind this: "All CMOS replacements have their own strengths and weaknesses, just as CMOS does. Some of them are already better at what we have CMOS do."
...the US patent office will close some time before 2012, as there will be nothing left to invent.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Historically, increased CMOS speeds have come from one thing: shrink the features. Atoms being small, this works for quite some number of doublings. Techniques such as strained Si, alternative gate dielectrics, etc. are a qualitative change in strategy. They have potential to help, but they don't have the long-term extendability that we've seen from shrinkage. Let's say strained Si gives a factor of 8 in mobility. That's great, but in 3-4 years it's done and we need some other idea orthogonal to the previous one. Having to come up with a qualitatively new enhancement every 3 years is very different from the make-it-smaller world to date.
Curtains for windows?
You mean like a balanced ternary?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Why does this become "a real problem"?
It would seem to me that the rate of development in technology could slow or even pause for a while and still not become "a real problem". But then maybe I don't understand.
From what I see of things we already have plenty of wonderful technology that isn't being used to its fullest. I'm curious if the real problem isn't that we aren't first taking full advantage of the technology we have now, finding more efficient and productive ways to use it.
Maybe, in a Douglas Adams sort of way, it's because we already have the answer, we just don't know what the question is. Just what is it that we're trying to accomplish? Do we know that?
I know that in the last few decades the microprocessor and memory seem to have replaced the muscle car. Bigger, faster, badder is better. It's a macho thing, sure. But what really is the point? Why is this "a real problem"?
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Okay.
First, how is this the end of innovation? Is the current increase in CMOS detail every year innovation, or just a method being refined? Exactly. It's refining.. not innovation.
Necessity is the mother of all invention... we've all heard that one before, and it's true. If there is a need for more computing power, we will have it 10 years from now when this article talks.
Oh.. and how many technology predictions about how things will be in 10 years are accurate? not many.
As for computers being 'fast enough'... that's 2-edged. We can deal with a slowdown in computing advancement at the moment.. we aren't stuck. The rapid increase in speed of CMOS technology has meant less effort in developing better algorithms, tighter code, parallel computing, etcetera. There is plenty of room for more work to squeeze more out of our computers. The paradigm can change.
Still, there are other technologies out there. There is much more that can be done once we reach the limit of cmos detail. what about going to chips with more layers? Newer materials that can aid in cooling? thicker chips with more components? Bigger chips? There are many avenues we can explore to get more speed out of our chips than mere detail.
In every other industry, the name of the game is being able to do more with
less resources. And in every other industry, quality has improved, productivity
has improved, and more can be done now with fewer resources!
In the software industry, the name of the game is using as many resources as
possible to get what you want done. And in the software industry, quality has
remained steady, productivity hasn't improved since the first word processors
and spreadsheets, and now software takes up more resources than ever before!
The software industry has been in this situation for decades, and the day that
Moore's law slows down is the day that software, like all other goods and services
will need to do more with less resources. And when that day comes, expect the
quality of software to improve drastically, and expect productivity to improve
as well.
On (+V), Off (grounded), and Float (no connection)
Modern CPUs already use this. Say you have several things connected to a bus, any of which may need to write to the bus at times. You wouldn't want more than one of them to write to the bus at one time, because you'll run into some nasty problems (the circuit won't work) if, for example, both 0s and 1s are being written to the bus at the same time. Solution? Schedule bus writes so that only one thing writes to the bus at a time, and tri-state everything else at that time.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
We don't necessarily have to reduce transistor size to improve ICs. We can, at least as an interim technology, use a better semiconductor than the dirt cheap but fairly mediocre "Silicon" that has been in use for decades.
... though fairly expensive semiconductor.
What about gallium arsenide? Crays used to use this, as did many other supercomputers. Sure, it would make your processor poisonous but it's a small price to pay. Who licks their CPU more than a few times a week anyway?
What about Germanium? Germanium is an excellent
IBM has made incredible progress actually creating a hybrid semiconductor of silicon and germanium, which can be read about briefly here
Has there ever really been a time in which electronics engineers have been stuck such that computer technology could not advance? No, but there have been many, many times in which there were predictions about how the limits of a technology would stop everything up X years downthe road. While this is a good thing, because R&D firms start trying to find the next big thing before it is already needed, does anyone really believe that in ten years we will have no means to increase the number of transistors (or whatever is used then) to improve what they are used in?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
AMD's Hammer chips, for example, use a bus which is designed to make SMP systems easy; You just chain the CPUs along. You can have odd numbers of CPUs. I don't think they do ASMP, so you are still stuck with the problem that they all must run at the speed of the slowest CPU, but that is a relatively small price to pay. Eventually we'll all be using systems with more than one CPU. It looks like the way hammer is set up that AMD could actually do processor modules which plugged into one socket (or slot or whatever they end up with for hammer, I'm sure it'll be a socket) which had multiple CPU dies in the same package - If they could just work out a package that would handle this. Then you'd drop it into your SMP-capable motherboard (A matter of BIOS more than anything else) and bam, you'd have an eight processor hammer system.
Of course, I haven't done all my homework, so there may be reasons other than packaging why this wouldn't work, but it seems to me that their bus standard is intended for this kind of thing, the idea minimizing the glue logic and support hardware necessary to do SMP. It would be fantastic if they even offered chips which had TWO processors in them, let alone more. But I'm pulling for about eight. Just think, a single-socket board could be an eight processor 3d graphics rendering powerhouse, especially when coupled with four-way interleaved DDR333 memory.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The point is, that for our chips there is NO incentive to go to 0.13u or below.
.13u imply more chips per wafer, and therefore a lower cost basis?
Huh? Doesn't
C//
Your examples don't do anything to disprove the article (which I predict you either didn't read or simply did not understand). Fiber interconnects or spin transistors are not CMOS. The author of the article was saying that the industry needs to begin thinking about retooling to something else. A process for constructing photonic transitors would be that something else. Get it?
C//
Start cuting down and burying trees now!!!
Sure it will take a little will, but all that oil will be there in the future.
Help the future generations - think of the little children!!!
With computers, it's not really a problem since nothing really crucially depends on getting more powerful computers all the time.
Oh, yes there is - the profit predictions and stock prices of several big companies.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Now that's what i call a post.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
They've been saying the end of the road is 10 years out for around 20 years nows. And every few years a new discovery is made that shifts it out another 10 years. So I'll start worrying if in 2010, they're still saying the end of the road is in 2012.
Yes. The main computers used in academia were around 1 MIPS in 1969, and were still around 1 MIPS in 1983. DEC was stuck at 1 MIPS for a long time.
Yeah, and the point here is that EVENTUALLY, barring a completely new technological path computers will STOP getting any faster (I'm sure we'll see more multiprocessor systems and the like, but it'll still be slower progress). So the only way to improve performance will be optimization.
Remember the good old days when a good engineer could race a computer to a solution with a circular slide rule? I do. Then there were complete IC based computers and we couldn't do that anymore. Then around 1987 we all said 25 nano lithography was the theoretical limit of the physics. Which of course was wrong because it was based on materials science that was already old.
At any rate - I don't feel comfortable making prognostications about technology 10 years in the future. Any every time I think about I also think about Turing's paraodx. That says, that if you need 10 years to solve a problem today but in 3 years you will probably have the technology to solve it in only 5 years then you should wait 3 years to start and you will be 2 years ahead of the games already.
Yes, but I really don't think you're getting it. The author of the article at EET was saying that CMOS is done for. Something _like_ spintronics or some other technology must take its place. You came off being critical to the article, but cited directions which actually seem to support his case.
C//
Maybe this is what it takes to bury the x86 family. By then chip designers will have to do better than just shrinking and speeding up the chips.
Customers would need to compile software for all sorts of architechtures, and therefore would demand opensorce software.
btw. when were we all supposed to buy ia64 machines?
Huh? Doesn't
As long as your chip is mostly digital, then yes it might.
However you must evaluate if the longer design time, increased mask costs and potentially higher tool costs (timing closure is a bitch on
As for circuits with analog components. These don't nearly shrink as much as digital (indeed they often grow due to the exotic solutions swhich might be needed) with smaller processes.
Isn't that the end of the world according to the Myans?
After Earth computes the answer to the ultimate question, then it won't be needed any more will it?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
P.S. Note for confused moderators: This post is Offtopic (-1) and should be modded as such.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Next we will exhaust quite some amounts of helium into our atmosphere, okay helium is a inert gas, so doesn't react so quickly, but what effects of high additional amounts of helium can have, we don't know.
Helium does not tend to stick around much on a planet like Earth. Indeed the only reason there is as much as there is is due to helium generated by alpha decay of radioactive materials.
I have one workplace which uses 32MB P133s, carefully stripped of non-vital processes, as TS clients (only!) under Win2k.
OTOH, until a power surge killed its serial-port card a few months back, I was using a 486SX40 (ie souped-up '386, no FPU) + 12MB (4x1 32-pin, 1x8 72-pin) + 250MB (samsung) as a gateway, dialin (x2) dialout, SQL server, webserver, mail server, name server and web server with uptimes exactly matching the power outages. It hung from my ceiling and was powered by a real-original IBM PC/XT PSU.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It may be the end of the road for general-purpose CPUs, but the door is wide open for more specific hardware solutions. For example, no one questions that having custom texture mapping hardware is The Right Thing. You'd need a 10GHz CPU with its own power supply to do what a GeForce 2 does.
In the past, the prevailing opinion was that custom hardware was a bad thing. Remember Wirth's Lilith? And Lisp machines? But this is changing, especially as CPUs continue to run hotter and get more and more complex. Ericsson uses a functional, concurrent language for some of its development--cutting edge stuff. Because CPU manufacturers continue to ignore power consumption and heat generation (you do not want a two pound heat sink in embedded systems), they designed their own processor to run their language. This is no big deal any more: you can use an FPGA. What did they find? They got a 30x performance increase over high-end Ultra SPARCs, they cut power consumption by over 90%, and the custom processor solution is cheaper to manufacture in quantity. This is going to become more and more common. The "Look! I got a 12% increase by buying an $800 CPU that uses 20% more power than the last one" incremental frame of mind is coming to a close. Why nickel and dime the increases when there are HUGE leaps to be made with currently available technology?
To be honest... I couldn't come up with 10. *frown*. And the others were good, but just didn't have quite enough punchline for #1.
Leaving it blank was the best punchline you could have had! Frankly, I thought it was intentional, and it was the funniest thing I've seen in a while. To make it explicit:
And the #1 reason to like quantum computing is...
*drum roll*
Oops! When I looked at the punchline, I collapsed the wave function, and it disappeared. Sorry.
This is why you're never supposed to explain a joke -- it causes it to lose coherence.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I recall reading somewhere that the cost of a state-of-the-art fab line was doubling roughly every 36 months (approximately half the Moore's Law rate). The article predicted that about 2010, the fixed costs for such a line would make chips produced on it so expensive that there would be very little market for them. Can anyone with actual experience in the field comment on how that cost prediction is holding up?