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Andy Grove Says End Of Moore's Law At Hand
Jack William Bell writes "Intel chief Andy Grove says Moore's Law has reached its limit. Pointing to current leaks in modern chips, he says -- "Current is becoming a major factor and a limiter on how complex we can build chips," said Grove. He said the company' engineers "just can't get rid of" power leakage. -- But, of course, this only applies to semiconductor chips, there is no guarantee that some other technology will not take over and continue the march of smaller, cheaper and faster processors. I remember people saying stuff like this years ago before MOSFET." Update: 12/11 22:01 GMT by T : Correction: the text above originally mangled Andy Grove's name as "Andy Moore."
Shouldn't that be Andy Grove and Gordon Moore?
Ya, I mistyped. Slips happen.
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
I'm looking forward to semiconductors based on carbon crystals. (read, "diamond.") Germanium, Silicon and Carbon all have the same number of valence electrons (4), which is what makes them good semiconductors.
Interesting to note, though, that while a germanium PN junction only has a voltage drop of 0.3V, silicon has a drop of 0.7V. Anyone know what the voltage drop would be for a carbon junction?
Also, one of the main reasons they switched from germanium to silicon was silicon's greater endurance to physical stress. I'm pretty sure diamond will be still stronger, despite the doping.
Maybe, just maybe, they'll be able to use channels in the diamond crystal as optic conductors. Considering crystalline Si is opaque, that would be a huge advantage. Wouldn't it be great if your clock signal was represented as a flash of light through the entire die? (Have to worry about reflection off the sides, though. Hmm.)
Anybody else have thoughts or knowledge?
What's this Submit thingy do?
Urban Legend
Gates is supposed to have said, "640K should be enough for anyone." The remark became the industry's equivalent of "Let them eat cake" because it seemed to combine lordly condescension with a lack of interest in operational details. After all, today's ordinary home computers have one hundred times as much memory as the industry's leader was calling "enough."
It appears that it was Marie Thérèse, not Marie Antoinette, who greeted news that the people lacked bread with qu'ils mangent de la brioche. (The phrase was cited in Rousseau's Confessions, published when Marie Antoinette was thirteen years old and still living in Austria.) And it now appears that Bill Gates never said anything about getting along with 640K. One Sunday afternoon I asked a friend in Seattle who knows Gates whether the quote was accurate or apocryphal. Late that night, to my amazement, I found a long e-mail from Gates in my inbox, laying out painstakingly the reasons why he had always believed the opposite of what the notorious quote implied. His main point was that the 640K limit in early PCs was imposed by the design of processing chips, not Gates's software, and he'd been pushing to raise the limit as hard and as often as he could. Yet despite Gates's convincing denial, the quote is unlikely to die. It's too convenient an expression of the computer industry's sense that no one can be sure what will happen next.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Richard Feynman's address to the American Physical Society is a good intro to the physical limitations of miniaturization as it applies to Moore's Law. Also intersting, is the Law from the Horse's mouth found on this Intel page.
Logic is not Divine.
IBM has been using partially-depleted SOI which actually increases leakage current and therefore increases standby power.
Fully-depleted SOI should have lower leakage current due to better control over the transistor channel. While Intel doesn't call it SOI, they announced their "terahertz transistor" sometime last year which is actually a fully-depleted SOI device.
Another way to reduce leakage power would be to use dual-gates when building the transistor. There is a decent amount of research going on in this field. Dual gate would offer large decreases in leakage current.
actually newtons laws were proven wrong a long time ago. they fail to correctly estimate the orbit of mercury correctly as when you close to a body of large mass the inverse square approximation down not work so well. Einstienien mechanics that model as a deflected curve predict the orbit of mercury bang on.
so sorry newtons laws are already old
You have to remember the chips improve with time. More importantly things other things that effect speed also improve quite a bit. For example when the 386-20s came out there weren't caches so the chips ended up pulling no ops extremely frequently.
Anyway taking your comparison and using a benchmark of the time (the Norton System info benchmark):
80286-16 got a 9.9 (i.e. 9.9x as fast as the XT)
80386-20 got a 17.5
More importantly the cache configurations that came with the 80386-25 raised the score to a 26.7
adjusting for the increase in mhz:
26.7 * 16 / 25 = 17 which is close to double.
I'll stand by my statement.