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

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?

[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.

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.

[ 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.