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

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

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.

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.