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

Hmm....

[craenor]

I'm curious what kind of results the experimentation in superconductivity and semi-conductors will yield. They sound kind of mutually exlusive. But we may yet see Moore's Law revived and revised...

Course, that's probably 15 years away...

Short sighted, or just playing it safe?

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Seeing as he is a big part of a major CPU firm Intel, is he being short-sighted (which I doubt) or is he trying to brace the market for a slowdown in CPU clock speed?

It might help the company if expectations for new CPUs aren't higher than what they can produce.

Personally, my vote goes for optical CPUs as the wave of the future. Larger than curent CPUs might not be a problem if they don't put off much heat.

Re:Short sighted, or just playing it safe?

[Rogerborg]

Sounds likely. AMD have been saying - and demonstrating - for years that clock speed isn't the whole story.

Also, we're just not finding compelling applications to drive upgrade cycles in the home and office. We have a few years until we reach movie quality real time rendering, and after that, what do we need more speed for? If AMD and Intel are gambling on the mass market wanting to perform ever faster ripping of movies and audio, they'd better stop supporting Palladium, hadn't they?

Re:Short sighted, or just playing it safe?

[Usquebaugh]

Optical CPUs are still only research projects and nobody is sure these things are going to work as well as silicon. I talked with somebody at Livermore regarding feasability and his take was never. 30+ years of chip evolution is not going to be beaten by a few research projects. The bar is set to high for optical to come in.

I'm more hopeful that we might get away from the whole stupid clock idea and go asynchronos. This area seems to be opening up more and more. It's beena round for ever but nobody could find a reason to go to the extra expense.

If Moores law fails then I guess SMP will become mainstream. I mean it's either that or software engineers write programs that are efficient. I expect to see an aerobatic display by flying pigs before I see an efficient program.

I guess it isn't a Law then

[Headius]

I've always had issues with calling Moore's Law a "Law". Nobody has conclusively proven it. It should instead be called "Moore's Hypothesis" or "Moore's Theorem" if you're more optimistic...

Re:sure sure...

[cheezedawg]

A couple of things:

- Grove said basically the same thing you said- if better insulators or other technologies aren't developed, Moore's Law could become "redundant" in 10 years.

- That said, there are other ways to increase chip performance other than increasing transistor density according to Moore's law. Grove cites a few of them in that article (more efficient transistors, multiple cores, etc). So you will still be able to play the latest Quake in 10 years.

Re:sure sure...

[grungebox]

Well...it's a little bit harder to manage this time around. As transistors get smaller, if I remember correctly, one of the main reasons for current leakage is quantum tunneling between the source and drain of a given transistor as the channel length decreases (I think). Also, you get leakage through electrons/holes tunneling though the gate of the MOSFET as the insulating material decreases in width. You can't really outmaneuver quantum mechanics.

Of course, I think something else will pop up (like the aforementioned optoelectronic switch, perhaps), since companies are resourceful folks. Academia is good about researching ways to reduce current leakage, and my prof says high-K dielectric insulators are a good way to reduce leakage through the gate. Whatever...something will come up.

My point is that the situation now is a lot more physically complex than that of, say, 1989 or something, where the limitation was "we can't go past 100 MHz because we haven't thought of a way to do it!" Now it's more "we can't go past [whatever]Ghz because of goddamn physics!"

By the way, anyone else think Gordon Moore gets a little too much by having a "law" named after him? I mean, sheesh...all he did was draw a freakin' best-fit curve on a plot of easily-found data. And on top of that, Moore's Law isn't a law at all...it's a statistic.

Moore's law is all about transistor density

[stratjakt]

or am I wrong?

So we're running out of ways to pack more and more transistors into a device. There's still a ton of room to improve the layout of those transistors, the world is full of whines about x86 architecture.

This doesnt mean 'computers are as good as they're going to get', it just means the fabrication plants are as good as they're going to get.

[ More Quotes Like This ]

[ekrout]

How many times do we have to hear people put their foot in their mouth? I would have thought Intel would've known better!

But what ... is it good for?
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?
- The Quarterly Review, England (March 1825)

The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it. . . . Knife and pain are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patient.
- Dr. Alfred Velpeau (1839) French surgeon

Men might as well project a voyage to the Moon as attempt to employ steam navigation against the stormy North Atlantic Ocean.
- Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1838) Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy, University College, London

The foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialization will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments.
- A.W. Bickerton (1926) Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Canterbury College, New Zealand

[W]hen the Paris Exhibition closes electric light will close with it and no more be heard of.
- Erasmus Wilson (1878) Professor at Oxford University

Well informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.
- Editorial in the Boston Post (1865)

That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
- Scientific American, Jan. 2, 1909

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
- Lord Kelvin, ca. 1895, British mathematician and physicist

Radio has no future
- Lord Kelvin, ca. 1897.

While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
- Lee DeForest, 1926 (American radio pioneer)

There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.
- Albert Einstein, 1932.

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 19,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh 1.5 tons.
- Popular Mechanics, March 1949.
(Try the laptop version!)

There is no need for any individual to have a computer in their home.
- Ken Olson, 1977, President, Digital Equipment Corp.

I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't lastout the year.
- The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957.

[Quotes from this page.]

Re:[ More Quotes Like This ]

[Waffle Iron]

OTOH, you could probably dig up thousands of quotes made in the 1960s that optimistically predict continual improvements in the speed and cost of airplanes. Most airliners will be supersonic, etc.

From 1903 up until that point, aircraft design was on a curve almost impressive as Moore's law. In the 1960s, the rate of improvement hit a wall, and there have only been small incremental improvments since then. (And much of that has been achieved by "cheating": glomming onto Moore's law by cramming electronics into the aircraft.)

Electronics technology is bound to hit a similar limit of economically feasible improvments sooner or later.

Yep, O(log n) will be king again

[Jeppe Salvesen]

I guess algorithm analysis will at some point become more mainstream again. I suppose application profiling will also become more popular.

Interestingly, the available memory will continue to grow, so we might end up structuring our data structures so that access time will be minimal. That is - our data structures will continue to change focus from compactness to raw speed. And big O analysis is part of that picture.

I think we'll see some interesting things happen with fiber technology, though. When those envisioned optimal silicone chips become commonplace and thus really cheap, all appliances might run on them, and thus make it feasible to distribute your processing between your computer, your fridge and your iron. We'll just interconnect everything - perhaps a new fibre connector in our electricity plugs.

Re:Other materials

[IPFreely]

IIRC, Moore's law says computing power compared to cost will double every so-and-so. This doesn't have anything to do with the specific technology used to generate that power.

If Chip design is at its limit for reduction, then other factors an still come into play. Parallelization and multiprocessing coming to mind. Multiprocessing hasn't reached any type of limit. As chipsets improve, and CPUs play better together, then overall computing power can continue to increase. (Yeah, all you geeks go on and tell me how multiprocessing isn't really doubling and is not as optimized, yadda yadda).

The point is, CPU reduction is not the only path to processing power. It has just been the easiest so far. Watch for other paths to be optimized and utilized as this option peters out.

What may be coming...

[Fnkmaster]

Several posters have pointed out that in the longer term this may lead to a resurgence of interest in algorithmic efficiency, parallel algorithm development to take advantage of available parallelism (clustering, SMP, etc.). Certainly there is merit to these arguments, and I do think interest in these topics will increase greatly over the next few years, at least for problems where they are necessary (i.e. where computational power is a limiting reagent, which isn't really the case in most business software).

Honestly, I think a bigger trend will be to take advantage of formalisms that let developers develop more reliable and stable software. Now, I know and you know that things like functional programming have been out there for years, and haven't succeeded because first, they were too slow and therefore wasted too many processor cycles. This is obviously much less of a problem now - Java "wastes" lots of processor cycles, but for a lot of software needs, saves so many human "thinking" cycles that it pays off in spades for businesses that need business or enterprise software to Do Stuff for the back-end sides of industry.

So what big problem(s) are left in the software world? Well, people still bitch about how fucking unreliable most software is. In particular, core, critical system areas, like the interface between hardware and software - as more hardware is out there, and more drivers are developed, and backwards compatibility is an issue, hardware interactions have not become substantially more reliable. And frankly a lot of applications themselves, have become substantially less reliable - the big problem is that adding features and changing GUIs seems to break too many things and introduce too many potential problems (look at Outlook XP vs. Outlook 2000 - fixed some security holes, made a prettier GUI, and made the damn thing crash all the time).

Look at a lot of the academic work being done in computer science, especially in programming language design, operating system design, parallel algorithms and parallel languages. Sometimes researchers head off down dead-end paths, but sometimes they have it right, and it just takes a while for industry to see what they need this stuff for. That being said, it'll always be cheaper to teach people "Programming in Java 101" in India and then hire 1000 of them to hack away at code, admitted usually for the most uninteresting and repetitive types of development work (at least, this will hold until economic parity in the third world becomes a reality).