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."

Comments

"The End"

[FosterSJC]

The end of Moore's law is heralded on Slashdot every 2 months or so; it comes at the hand of new materials (copper, etc), new layering techniques, the ever-popular quantum computing, etc. Frankly, it doesn't seem to me to be that useful a benchmark anymore. The article says it will come sooner, but I foresee in 7 to 10 years the physical production, leakage stoppage and general quality of the chips will be so perfected that Moore's law will no longer be applicable to silicon chips. But, by then, new sorts of chips will be available to pick up the slack. So let us say farewell to silicon, and enjoy it while it lasts. It is like the fossil fuels problem really, except the industry is slightly more willing to advance, having set up years in advance a healthy pace to keep.

So, back to Don Knuth's Books?

[sisukapalli1]

I hope this means back to actually finding ways of optimizing code, and not the standard "We can throw money at it", or "Next year computers will be twice as fast".

However, may be better processor architectures and clusters will keep the march going.

Either way, I believe some progress would be made.

S

The End of Moore's Law

[jazman_777]

If it's the end, it wasn't a law to start with, then, was it?

Well maybe...

[Chicane-UK]

..if Intel and AMD hadn't got locked into that stupid GHz battle and instead concentrated on optimizing their CPU design (rather than just ramping up the speed silly amounts) then there might have still be a few more years left before it became such a problem.

Maybe thats the way forward? Optimisations and improvements on the chips instead of raw clock speed....?

Re:Well maybe...

[dillon_rinker]

If there'd been no competition, you're absolutely correct that we'd have had better CPU designs, and overall performance would likely have been orders of magnitude below what it is now.

So, speed and feature size are as good as they're going to get, and they were easy to do. Now we can work on the hard stuff with the benefit of all the processor power we've got sitting around unused.

Don't optimize the hard stuff until you've optimized the easy stuff.

Depends how you define Moore's Law

[Drakonian]

If you restrict it to silicon-based ICs as we know them today, this may be right. Intel is the expert on this after all, and I'm willing to take their word.

However, if you define Moore's law as computational capacity doubling every 18 months, than it is very unlikely to end. If you project back to well before integrated circuits, or the law itself, computational capacity has been growing at this same exponential rate for many decades - even back to the earliest mechanical based "computers". There will be something to replace the current paradigm; the paradigm has already changed numerous times without throwing off the exponential curve.

For a facinating look at this phenomenon at what it holds for the future, I'd recommend The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil.

Moors Law

[avandesande]

Is an economic law, not a physical one. Lack of demand for high-powered processors is going to slow the progression in processor speeds.

This is consistent with the SIA roadmap

[Animats]

"Grove suggested that Moore Law regarding the doubling of transistor densities every couple of years will be redundant by the end of the decade." Not this year, eight years out.

That's about right. It's a bit more pessimistic than the SIA roadmap, but it's close. Grove was just stating, for a general audience, what's accepted in the semiconductor industry. Optical lithography on flat silicon comes to the end of its run within a decade. Around that point, atoms are too big, and there aren't enough electrons in each gate.

There's been a question of whether the limits of fabrication or the limits of device physics would be reached first. Grove apparently thinks the device problem dominates, since he's talking about leakage current. As density goes up, voltage has to go down, and current goes up. A Pentium 4 draws upwards of 30 amps at 1.2 volts. We're headed for hundreds of amps. It's hard to escape resistive losses with currents like that.

There are various other technologies that could lead to higher densities. But none of them are as cheap on a per-gate basis.

Threshold Voltage

[Erich]

One of the problems with "leaky" parts is that the threshold voltages are kept very low. This makes the transistors switch much faster, but makes them leak current quite a bit.

You can fairly easily raise the threshold voltage (for a process). It makes the chip slower, but leaks less current (and therefore usually uses less power). This is one of the key elements of "Low Power" processes like CL013LP.

For more information, the Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics is sure to help.

Interestingly, Using leaky transistors that switch faster has been a trick used for a very long time. One of the reasons the Cray computers took so much cooling was that they didn't use MOSFETs, their whole process was based on PNP and NPN junction transistors. For those who don't know much about transistors, FETs (or Field Effect Transistors) make a little capacitor that when you charge it up (or don't charge it up, depending), it lets current flow through on the other side. It takes a while to charge up the capacitor (time constant proportional to Resistance times Capacitance, remember!), but once it's charged there isn't any current (except the leakage current) that flows through.

At least, that's what I recall from my classes. I didn't do so well in the device physics and components classes.

Density is not everything

[panurge]

First, Moore's Law is about transistor density, not clock speed. If it runs out by end of the decade that's still an increase of around 32X - and unless we suddenly have a need to become amateur weather forecasters, it's difficult to see any obvious applications. [cue enormous list from /. readers].
We've now reached the stage where handheld devices have the same sort of processing power and memory of respectable desktops of a few years back, and I find it interesting that the sudden big hype is the tablet PC, which is relatively low speed but has good battery life. That could be the direction things are going, and if so it is hardly surprising Andy Grove is worried about leaking electrons, what with Transmeta, Via and Motorola/IBM having lower power designs.

A case in point about technology demonstrators. Someone mentioned aircraft. OK, how much faster have cars got since, say, 1904 when (I think) RR first appeared? Not an awful lot, actually. They are vastly more reliable, waterproof, use less fuel, handle better, are safer, and enormously cheaper in real terms BUT they go about the same speed from A to B and carry about as many people. And they are still made of steel and aluminum, basically the same stuff available in 1904.

This is far from a perfect analogy because, of course, the function of the computer keeps getting reinvented: it is applied to more and more jobs as it gets cheaper, more powerful, and more reliable. But it does point out that the end of Moore's law is not the end of research and development.