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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?
I wonder if there's a similar law representing toxicity to the environment of semiconductor manufacturing techniques.
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 think they will just move away from silicon. Perhaps we have reached the limits of silicon but their is lots of research being done by acedamia and chip manufacturers on other materials.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
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...
...hearing this news the first time in 1989 and I read it the second time in 1994.
So. we'll see. I wonder if it now starts applying to graphic cards.
The industry is used to power leakage rates of up to fifteen per cent, but chips constructed of increasing numbers of transistors can suffer power leakage of up to 40 per cent said Grove.
:-)
No wonder my laptop only gets about a hour of runtime on its battery.
haven't people been saying that for quite a while now?
Everything is mainstream now.
So, this means that anything that possibly can go wrong no longer will! Hey, I'm all for that!
What? Moore's Law? Oh. Nevermind.
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.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
As the submitter eluded to; this has been said so many times before that I simply don't believe it. I remember reading the same thing about 100Mhz being the fastest we could build. Technology will find away as long as people are willing to buy it. And people will be willing to buy it because we all need to run Quake 4, 5, 6 etc.
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.
Now I can just buy a really fast computer and know that I'll never need to upgrade again!
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
As long as Newton's law stays in effect I am not to worried.
:-) Sjaak
BTW do most of the users really need fast machines? I can do all my work without any problems on my 333Mhz PII
CU
I was waiting for the commemorative Pentium XT running at 4.77GHz.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Intel stock goes down like 50%
If it's the end, it wasn't a law to start with, then, was it?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I wanted to live to see 1 atom wide transistors
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
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...
People have been predicting the end of Moore's law for ages - it seems to come up every couple of years at least. But, technology always seems to beat the critics (the poster mentions MOSFETs).
Just recently I attended a seminar by a Cambridge lecturer discussing the performance benefits of quantum computing - 1/n*root(n) maximum search relationship for unsorted lists, which seems silly - but thats just quantum stuff for you - who knows, maybe it'll be the next jump to break against Moore's law. Does still look like its a while off though.
Maintenance? Dont innovate - renovate.
Just because Their engineers can't solve the problem, the problem must be unsolvable.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Moore's law is finally coming to an end. Seriously, continous and rapid advance of processing power is the one thing that's holding back affordable universal and pervasive computing in schools. These cash strapped schools cannot afford to replace text books every two years, let alone computers that cost hundreds more. Things are better now because relatively useful computers can be had for very cheaply, compared to just a few years ago, but scrapping Moore's law altogether is even better. Steve Wazniak also agrees
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
While Intel's batch of in-design processors may not keep up, and the engineers' current take on things seem to be dim, I would think a longer period would have to go by before it could be determined whether Moore's laws will hold. New designs have caused great jumps in the past that have kept the overall change of things in line with Moore's law.
It's awfully cold in the server room, can I come out now?
..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....?
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
The number of stories posted on Slashdot about the end of Moore's Law will double every 18 months.
Ever so often someone prominent proclaims, "The end of Moore's Law is near!" People listen, because this person is usually someone people listen to. And then he's proven wrong.
It may be true that the current chip technology has reached its end, no more progress possible. But believing that's "the end" is shortsighted. There has always been yet another way to see the law complied with. I do not doubt we will again this time. Be it optical, asynchronous logic, new materials, or whatever, it will probably happen.
It's not time to call Moore's law dead just yet.
Someone or other is ALWAYS saying that we are about to hit the end of Moore's so-called "Law".
Then again, they said it woudl be impossible to make semiconductors using geometries of less than 1 micron; they said that 8x was the fastest a CDROM could ever hope to read; they said that 14,400 baud was the fastest the telephone system could handle; and so on.
They were all wrong, just as Mr Grove most likely will be.
Still, I suppose if you prophecy doom often enough, you will eventually be right!
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
If he can't get a 1.21 THz Pentium9 to surf the web, chat on AIM, and have his kids type school reports on? How can people possibly learn, communicate, or work? Oh, the humanity!
In Soviet Russia, Moore's Law ends YOU!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I think Silverman's Paradox applies here...
"If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will."
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Finally an American CEO that understands the problems of shifting operations overseas.
We are definetly mortgaging the future of our children for today's short-term buck. Far too many businesses are willing to sell their souls to the people that could one day go to war with the US.
How many times do we have to hear people put their foot in their mouth? I would have thought Intel would've known better!
... is it good for?
But what
- 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.
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Ya, I mistyped. Slips happen.
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Perhaps we could write code to optimize code, then run that code through the code optimizer?
I believe the SOP at M$ is to take the result of the above and the run it through the optimizer again. Usualy this results in a 5-7% speedup.
According to most sources the plan for LongHorn is to at the end run it through the optimizer one more time. They think that this could net another 2-3%. We'll see.
A law is a law...and it's time corporations were held responsible.
I expect the Feds to start handing out stiff penalties to processor manufacturers who fail to meet the law's demands.
Karma: Excer..ex...excellahhh...realll good (mostly affected by drinking not done in moderation)
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.
Random is the New Order.
Is an economic law, not a physical one. Lack of demand for high-powered processors is going to slow the progression in processor speeds.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I know he's a troll, but it was rather a nice bit of creative writing, except for the pornographic part at the end...
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
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.
Soon after AMD tells the world that they will no longer be completive with Intel, Intel comes out and says processors wont be getting faster as they used to.
Yeah NO SHIT!
Teach them Wordperfect and IE and a little BASIC. Anything else is a bonus. A computer purchased 5 years ago would work fine, and with a little service will contine to work for another 3 years.
I meet your Woz with a Clifford Stoll
...Moore's Law is the END of Any Grove!
I attended a talk some 1.5 years ago by guy from Philips NatLab (home of the CD), which was called "Mo(o)re or less?". Although the talk was extremely boring and i forgot the final conclusions i do remember some potential showstoppers he listed:
-Of course the ultimate limit of a 1 atom transistor, can't remember the date this would occur
-Limited speed of signals acros the chip: If the clock frequency gets much larger a signal would require several buffer stages to reach the other side.
-Capacity of wires gets more important: the interconnects don't scale at the same pace as the transistors. Their finite capacity limits clock speeds
Some non-technical reasons:
-Increasing costs of new fabrication processes: each new increment is more expensive.
-Limited manpower to design circuits with more and more transistors. This probably means that a larger area of the chips will consist of 'dumb' circuits like cache.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
I simply take it to mean that Intel's processes are beginning to suck. Sell their stock and buy somebody else's.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
As for Moore's Law, well it is more an observation than a law. IMHO "Law" should be reserved for more important stuff Murphy's Law and thermodynamics.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
As many people noted here, this thing is more about economics and the use of present technologies. While not being an expert on this field, I cannot believe that we are reaching the real physical limit of computing. For a simple reason... There is still a machine that is much more powerful than the fastest chip around the market. Yes, we have already see machines that can vastly outperform it. But they can't do it only in very specific tasks. And, besides, they can't do it without the help of that same machine. Anyway, the density of this machine is still much higher than the equivalent dimension in modern waffles.
Sincerly, I think we still will take some good years even to approach the capacity that hides behind the eyes that sees this text. But does this means that we have no other alternatives? Well, present chips work mainly on electron interchanges, and we still have light as an unexplored field.
Moore's law hasn't reached any limits, we have. If this is a barrier we need to overcome, we will overcome it. We could be be thousands of years ahead of our time in our technology if that was our priority as a race, or even as individual nations. If we *needed* faster, smaller processors, the governement would pour money into R&D and more brilliant minds could be gathered to work cooperatively and the results would be results :)
Seriously, we've risen above much greater challenges than this..
It sorta sounds like Intel is about ready to quit trying to innovate, perhaps this is time for AMD to take the lead..
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
It would be just plain stupid to go ahead and find this kindof a solution to a problem that doesn't exist at this time.
The most cost-effective route in the long-term is probably to develop other technologies while we squeeze every last PN junction out of current technologies. We have mult-tasking operating systems, multi-threading programs, even multi-threading kernels. There have been entire books written on the advantages of parallelizing jobs and system redundancy.
I don't see why we shouldn't have multi-threading industry research.
What's this Submit thingy do?
I want a cpu that sits idle 100% of the time, regardless what I do.
Imagine the large reducement of the energy consumption if we could put it in power save mode the whole time!
I noticed his economic predictions regarding war with Iraq. Wonderful to see political rhetoric even in TECHNICAL articles. Does this mean we will not get to DSII (Desert Storm II) commercials bearing the "intel inside" logo?
... it sems like that part of the problem isn't necessarily fitting in more transistors and complexities, but trying to do it in roughly the same size chips. Like personally, I wouldn't care if the chips got substantially bigger if that would help with this power leaking problem and made them easier and cheaper to build for the companies.
--on another side though, is it really "the chip" problem, or is it a 'computer" problem? Multiple processors still seem to have a long way to go to be more universally used and taken advantage of by the code itself. Computers at the consumer and prosumer level are rarely dual, single chipped models are still the most common, I think having a cheap 4 processor model that took advantage of having the multiples, plus having a LOT more ram being standard,combined with better coding will have us enjoying better computers for years to come.
On cars there's different ways to do it, have seen it comparing hotrods. Can have a big detroit machine of roughly 300 cubes has one or two 4 barrels, and I've seen a friends old v-12 ferrari boxer of roughly 300 cubes (hazy memory here now) have 6 two barrels. Most impressive. Guess which one had the better horsepower to weight ratio? Of course, one costs a LOT more money, well, ya, superior engineering works that way, and it just depends on exactly what kind of machine you want, what it's designed for, the task should determine that more than anything else..
Petroleum is created in the Earth's crust at a slow geological pace from dead plants crushed under pressure, but we consume it at a normal human time scale. Therefore a shortage does exist. It existed from the moment we started using petroleum. It *will* run out - guaranteed. The political machinations of OPEC and the democrats only affects how long until that happens, not the fact that it inevitably WILL happen. Given how dependant on petroleum the US economy is for *everything*, it makes sense to get ready with something else to be prepared to make the switch when the time comes. I agree with you that there is still plenty of time and the panic the environmentalists are trying to instill is not warranted. I disagree that this means there is "not really a fossil fuel problem." It just means it's on a more long-term scale.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
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.
The power is largely dissipated as heat. [emphasis added]
Duh! Funny, I have never seen any (properly connected) microprocessor chip generating much in the way of light , sound, or X-rays. I suppose a teensy weensy amount might go off as RF emissions, but not from the DC leakage current.
On has to wonder to what extent Moore's Law is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're in the chip business, and you don't keep striving to keep up with Moore's law, you're going to be worried about being trampled by the competition. So all the engineers and scientists are looking for breakthroughs in any areas just to keep pace with the competition. It's an arms race and it doesn't stop until you really hit the wall.
Recall, AMD just said they are done trying to up clock speeds all the time. Now Intel is outting themselves, too. The fact that these companies are not saying things like "we need to go to other materials to get higher clock speeds" is because 1) it costs huge $$$ to research and develop new materials, 2) it costs serious $$$ to change fabs to use new materials, 3) NOBODY (no, not even you) wants to continue to pay for increased clocks when there is almost zero benefit in real applications.
Moore's Law is not dead. What is dead is the need for Moore's Law. I am not alone in noticing that, after 20 years of regular performance increases, things are now pretty good on the desktop, and excellent in the server room. Real changes now need to be in software and services. Further, high-performance computing is going the route of multiple cores per CPU, multiple CPUs per box, and clusters of boxes. The latter is probably the biggest innovation since Ethernet. So, who needs Moore's Law?
Intel and AMD know *all* this. They want out of the clock race, and yesterday. They want to get into the next level of things, which is defining services and uses for their existing products. They are seeing the end of the glamour years of the CPU and the rise of the era of information applicances, which *must* be portable. Users *will* be far more sensitive to battery life and perceptions of performance (latency and ease of use) and far less sensitive to theoretical performance measures.
Flame me if you like, but the geek appeal of personal computers is disappearing. Sure there will be people who fiddle with CPUs as a hobby, just as they did 30 years ago when the Apple computer was born to serve a small group of hobbyists. But is that the mainstream? Is that going to support Intel and AMD in their race? Are those companies going to promote a revolution in fab technology, to the tune of half a trillion dollars in investment and technology between them, just to support geeky hobbyists? They could, but they won't, because that is not the future. It is the past.
The future will still be interesting, mind you, but the challenge has changed. A phone that fits in your rear molar and runs off chemical reactions with your own saliva looks far more lucrative to these companies than a CPU that runs at 100Ghz and consumes as much power as an appartment complex.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
These quotes obviously prove that whenever someone says that something is impossible or useless, they are always wrong.
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.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
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.
Stop the brainwash
so moores law applies to moores law? every 5 years the law itself is challenged... ironic.
Hmmm....
Normally I'm a big fan of recursive ideas, but that one doesn't really do it for me. And I can't say I really see the irony there.
The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades.
-Wikipedia
Nevertheless,here is my recursive version:
The observation made in 2002 by Hell O'World, ruler of universe, that the number of Moore's Law's per year had doubled every year since Moore's Law's was invented. H O'W predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but Moore's Laws have doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of H O'W's Moore's Law, which H O'W himself has blessed. Most experts, including H O'W himself, expect H O'W's Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades.
Clustering, fast networks, bigger and better nonvolatile storage technologies...all of these could crank up the apparent performance of a computing utility without much change in the CPU, although CPU speed would ultimately impeded these utilities as well.
Programmers get lazier, dumber, and more stoned. If I were a bettin man, I'd bet that in 10 years, we'll have a word processer that will talk, teach you grammer, and all that good stuff and was all programmed on some psuedo-6th generation progamming software by a slack-jawed idiot who can barely count to 6, much less comprehend C...and it'll run slow too.
Not that I think we should go back to coding in fortran. Hell no, I wouldn't wish that even on a competant mind. I think we should at least require programmers to have a basic understanding of electronics, assembler, basic, C, C++, etc such and so forth, going through all of the basic generations of language. Just because they can make something doesn't mean they will do it well.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
I thought the root of Moore's Law wasn't the technology involved but the drive for improvement in computation. So that the chips may not improve beyond a certain point but then making a massively parallel system on a 2"x 2" card would still go into Moore's Law. It is hardware independent.
I'd never put a limitation on this since somebody's going to come up with an idea to eek out more clocks.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Not too concerned here to see Moore's law finally fizzle out... just as long as Black's corrollary to Moore's law survives. That's the one that postulates that "the amount of porn available over the Internet will double every six months".
When it looks like Black's is going to fizzle, maybe we can come up with a wide-scale parallel distributed porn-server project - we could call it TITS@home.
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.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Just enclose the processor in a static warp field and adjust the speed of light in your new proto-universe. Sheesh, come on people.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
...you can reliably do branch prediction, very time. Otherwise, refilling a 40-50 stage pipeline every couple of cycles wont get you very far. Here's to good compilers and risky-yet-hopefully-profitable design desisions.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Andy Grove, Intel Chairman
Gordon Moore, Intel Chairman Emeritus
Gordon Moore on his law, in which he boldly predicts it will hold another score years.
I hate call waitin`~+~~~
NO CARRIER
Colloquially we speak of Moore's Law and we mean "Chips get twice as fast every 18 months."
This is not what Gordon Moore said. Moore's statement was based on transistor density. Indeed, perhaps we may not be able to cram transistors together as much in the not too distant future.
Does this mean that chips won't continue to get twice as fast every 18 months? It would surprise me if processors slowed down their rate of speed growth much this decade. As people begin playing with digital video on the desktop, as people write games that can actually push enough information to a GeForce4 FX to make it worth spending money on, people are still going to want faster and faster machines. And while AMD still exists as a competitor to Intel, even those people who don't really need a 7 GHz machine are going to find that that's what's available.
So while Moore's law, as it was stated, may be nearing its end, Moore's law, as it is usually spoken will probably stick around for a good while longer.
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).
...what this means in relation to Intel's .09 micron work with Prescott (slated for late next year)? Could be nothing, could be indicative of INtel hitting some stone walls in .09 micron development (which I always knew would be a tough row to hoe for complex cpus.)
Read one post earlier in which the poster thought AMD was abdicating a "clock speed" race. Obviously, this sentiment, among so many like it, comes from Hector Ruiz's speech last week in which he said that AMD wasn't going to do "technology for technology's sake." I wish Hector had made himself a bit clearer...;)
What I think he meant was that unlike Intel with Itanium, AMD was not going to design brand-new technologies with no practical worth simply for the sake of performance (because Itanium has no software it's very nearly useless--except for doing PR benchmarks for Intel.) That's why AMD chose to do x86-64--because it is technology for practicality's sake. That's my take on that statement.
Also, AMD has been out of the "clock race" ever since they designed the K7. The race AMD wants to win, and has been winning, is the "performance race" which doesn't depend on raw MHz. Any P4 will be much slower than any K7, when clocked at the same MHz speed. That's why AMD's been using performance ratings--because they are much better measures of performance than mere MHz speeds could ever be between competing cpus with differing architectures.
Regarding the natural world environment, you're correct, as I've seen some harsh criticism of the volume and toxicity of waste byproduct of semiconductor manufacturing. It's not so simple as, just add a little sand and some magic and voila! It's probably not reported so much because the wonders of innovation and heated competition make for more sexy news writing.
Something not mentioned much, but observed by more than a few grumbling parties, is the ever increasing size of code. My first encounter with this was upgrading from RSTS/E 7.? to 8.0, which was darn exciting back in the day, yet the size of the kernel would have been about 50% larger if we activated all the features *I* wanted to (and since I was the admin, lemme tellya, it was darn painful to trim off a few features I lusted after to squeeze it into our memory and performance target.) These days, it's often the OS, ever notice how Windows installs got to needing more space than your entire first harddisk? Common response seems to be, just throw more memory at it. Yet, I think there's a Moore-like law with versions of Windows, i.e. every 2 years a new version comes out with twice as much code.
With physical limitation of the current components nearing the top of the "rate of declinging return" curve, poor performance of the software will eventually catch up with users expectations. Thus, leaner, faster code could become a market direction.
"** NEW: Office-O-Lux, With 50% less redundant code! ***"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Slashdot repeating the commentary of an idiot pundit is one thing, but Andy Grove is head of Intel and should truly be ashamed of himself.
Of course this isn't the end of Moore's Law, it simply means an end to Intel's ability to keep up. Remember, we had the Alpha, Sparc
I am reminded of one forward looking quote in particular, that resemble's Andy Grove assertions as to the end of Moore's law in a way that would be quite amusing, were it not so pathetic that such people, like those who declared travel to the moon to be "impossible" a few scant years before it happened, simply never learn:
Andy Grove should have been wise enough to learn from the countless other fools of history, who have predicted an end to progress, an end to exponential progress, and end that, despite the depridations (and damage) patents cause, simply refuses to come, and has refused to come for all of the thousands of years short sighted pessimists have been predicting it.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
No, the other way around. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says that a particle always has a range of positions and a range of momentums, and the more you reduce one, the more you increase the other. But there's always a range, not just a single exact position or momentum. This is not a funny artifact, it's the underlying nature of what it means for things to "exist".
(Note to nitpicking physicists reading this: Dirac Delta functions are an abstraction that do not exist in the physical universe; they are only approximated in nature.)
The application of this to tunneling is that the range of positions of an electron includes the far side of a potential barrier. The narrower the barrier, the more likely that any given electron will turn up on the far side.
The application of this to pair production is related: there's always a finite probability that the vacuum energy will give rise to a particle and its anti-particle, but usually they both disappear again before they can be directly detected (even in principle).
Due to the odd nature of space-time near an event horizon, however, one of the pair might be created on the outside of the event horizon while its anti-particle is on the inside. This prevents their recombination, and thus the particles escaping from just outside the event horizon are seen as Unruh-Hawking radiation (there is a related Unruh radiation in accellerating free bodies).
The mass of the black hole decreases in the process, thus maintaining the conserveration of mass-energy. Spin and charge and such are also conserved globally, as is clear if you think about what is retained by the black hole versus what it loses, together.
Pair-production is not an absolute; it is one of several ways of describing the physics. There are other ways as well. Thus pair production really shouldn't be considered to be fundamental to anything at all.
(Note: each of these ranges is real; the electron is in many positions at the same time, and has many momentums at the same time, each represented by a probability amplitude -- square root of probability. The area under the curve sums to one, always ("probability is unitary"). The old-fashioned view said that it took a measurement in order to collapse one or the other range down to a single precise number, but that is as bad of an oversimplification as is the solar-system model of atoms. Atoms aren't solar systems, and "measurements" aren't central to the universe, much less measurements by conscious beings. The new understanding is based on entanglement and coherence of state. But all of this is exceedingly difficult to intuit without lots of practice.)
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
In practice, it's actually stronger than law. Unfortunately, a number of things are called 'laws' when there aren't any true laws. For example, the laws of thermodynamics - it's just a theory (although a damn well trusted one). AFAIK, nothing is called a theorem without actually being one.
Eventually you will reach a limit on the size of the individual swtiches. The one the article gripes about appears to be the sloppy wave function of the electrons letting them tunnel across the junction. But matter is lumpy (quantized) and eventually you'll hit a just-a-few-atoms wall.
... Keep this up until you are done. Laying out your gates for minimum signal run length means you end up with a cube, or something close to it.
But there's more that can be done - in terms of geometry and organization.
Current chips are a single two-dimensional array of components (or sometimes a small number of layers). But build your gates and interconnects in 3-D and you can go farther on two fronts:
- Speeding up the individual functions a bit further. (The more complex, the more improvement).
- Combining a LARGE nubmer of parallel elements into a small space (so they can talk to each other quickly).
Back in the '70s I had a rap I'd do called "preposterous scale integration". Basic idea:
- Use diamond for the semiconducting material (because it conducts heat VERY well).
- Grow a LARGE sheet of it, writing the domain doping and interconnects with ion beams as you go.
- TEST the components as you go:
- Negative power lead is a slow (low accelleration voltage) electron beam.
- Positive power lead is a fast (high accelleration voltage beam) electron beam, causing secondary emission of more electrons than are in the beam.
- Test injection probes are smaller versions of the power leads.
- Test probe is a very slow electron beam, where the electrons turn around at the surface, and a positively-charged region will suck 'em to the chip.
(These are all variants of electron microscope imaging hacks that were in use as far back as the 70s.)
- If a component fails, turn up the current, vaporize it, and deposit it again. Repeat until you have a good one.
- When you're done with the layer, don't stop. Deposit another layer, and another,
- Apply power to two opposite faces of the cube. Use bus bars the size of the cube face - at least near the contact point - to minimize IR drop. Use a good conductor, like copper or silver.
- You need a LOT of cooling. So circulate cooling liquid in the buss bars. (Copper and silver are also good heat conductors, and water is a terrific heat carrier.)
- The other four faces are for I/O. Use semiconductor lasers, photodiodes, and fiber optics light-pipes. You can COVER the faces with fibers. Put your drive electronics and SerDeses in the layer just under the pipes - or dope the index of refraction of the diamond to make a light-pipe into the depths and distribute them throughout the volume.
- Diamond is stable up to very high temperatures, but you need to protect it from air when it gets hot (or it will burn). So put it in a bottle with an inert gas just in case. Limitiing temperature structurally is about where it starts going over into graphite, so you can let it get up to a dull red glow (if your I/O is at some bluer color and that temperature doesn't create too much thermal noise).
- How big can you get? Square-cube law limits your I/O-to-computation ratio, since the I/O is on four faces that go with the square of the linear dimension, the computation goes (approximately) with the volume, or the cube of the dimension. The cooling-to-gate ratio suffers a similar square-cube issue (plus a linear penalty for power losses from the internal distribution busses). You also have an interconnect penalty - as you get bigger you have to give a higher fraction of your volume to power and signal lines (or signal repeaters), but this actually improves the square-cube problems. Finally, construction time is about proportional to number of computational elements. So let's pull a number out of nowhere and say two meters on a side.
Of course the punch line is what the device would look like:
- A six-foot cube of diamond.
- Glowing cherry red.
- In a glass bottle of inert gas.
- Supported by water-cooled silver bus bars.
- And connected to everything else by an enormous number of glass fiber light-pipes.
In other words, the kind of thing you'd expect to be the ship's brain in a late model Sklyark spacecraft, from one of George O. Smith's golden-age science fiction novels. B-)
====
This rap was always entertainment rather than a serious proposal, and is no doubt buggy. For instance: I hear doping diamond is a bit problematic. And these days I'd suggest doing chip-under-construction powering and testing using physical contacts and JTAG fullscan or a variant of the CrossCheck array, rather than (or to suplement) the electron beams.
But I hope the point is made that, for parallizable tasks at least, we still have a LONG way to go with improved geometry before we finally hit the wall.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Removing redundant functions and sharing memory are both strategies that Knuth would subscribe to, since they are in fact algorithm optimizations.
By sharing memory, you cut down the memory cost of the application.
By removing redundant functions (presumably be being smarter about how you do things), you are also improving the algorithms - though at a different level.
You simply cannot get away from the O(), and memory footprint.
Stop the brainwash
Maybe instead of just blindly throwing more transistors at the problem, they will be forced in the future to design energy efficient chips using reversible logic that recycle much of their computational energy? This becomes obvious every time I open the closet and the blast of hot air from the space heater masquerading as an SMP server hits me in the face.
Da Blog
Yeh. Tell yourself that, when someone writes some "fancy pants programming" program that fundamentally breaks all current cryptography.
The interactive internet as of today could not exist without a proper sql database - or similar technlogy - that uses trees for indexing data. In an index, you'll access the tree five times before you reach the data, rather than traversing the file with 50 000 disk accesses. It's all about split seconds, rather than minutes.
The technology you're using to deride formal algorithm analysis and "fancy pants programming", would not be available without such tools.
Stop the brainwash
SMP systems became the only acceptable standard and that person shut up, after saying quote: "What? But.. the benchmarks! The benchmarks stay the same!" and pointing to a system which was using the latest in benchmarking technology on one proccessor and proccessing SETI@Home units on the other proccessor, which had been detected as completely idle.
Proccessors dont have to keep getting smaller for the technology to keep getting smaller. And proccessors arent going to stop getting smaller any time soon, the method proccessors use will change, though. And proccessing speed will continue to increase regaurdless of limits put on how small proccessors can get.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The problem is that the terminology of science and math has diverged from common usage. In technical parlance, it is now understood that there is nothing whatsoever that is "obviously and necessarily true".
One example of this is Euclidean Geometry, which was considered inevitable and inescapable... until non-Euclidean Geometry came along in the 1800's and turned out to be logical, consistent, useful, and even to be a better description of the universe's space-time than Euclidean Geometry.
Similarly in philosophy and math. It turns out that you have to have some unproven and unprovable starting point in order to develop any system. The items in that starting point are now called "axioms", yet in some sense they are completely arbitrary, and anyone can use different axioms.
Philosophically the trouble is that, if two people don't agree somehow, some way, to use the same starting axioms, then there can be no successful discussion (formal proofs) between them.
Thus technically "axiom" means what you meant by "postulate" -- sort of, but with the understanding that it doesn't get any better than to have some set of starting axioms...you have to start somewhere.
The technical meaning of "postulate" is...can you guess? Yep...same thing as what you meant by axiom. At least some times. Other times it is taken as equivalent to the technical meaning of "axiom".
The technical term for "educated unproven guess" is "conjecture". (Or "lemma" if it is critical to some important line of argument.)
The technical meaning of "theory" is also quite different from non-technical language. In common usage, "theory" is often the same thing as "conjecture": a guess, educated or not.
But technically, "theory" means a conjecture that has been widely tested without being proven wrong and is therefore widely accepted as true by technical specialists in the relevant field of study.
Thus when creationists say "evolution is only a theory", they're mixing up technical and common language. In common language, evolution is a *law* of nature. Only in technical language is evolution a "theory" -- meaning much more than a mere conjecture.
And that brings us to "law of nature", which technically is similar to a theory, but which applies to such a narrow and precise set of circumstances that it can be described with a single equation, as with Newton's Law of Gravity.
Most theories deal with phenomenon far too complex to describe with just one equation, which is why, technically, people don't talk about the Law of Evolution and the Law of Subatomic Physics (yet), and the Law of Internal Combustion Engines. They're complex systems.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
Hey, it looks like everybody *except* Intel is trying to reduce dramatically the problem of leakage currents by using silicon-on-insulator processes (IBM has been since some time). When Intel dismissed SOI about a year ago they pointed out that leakage currents weren't such a big problem, it looks like they have changed their mind in the meantime.
It says that either processor speed (or density) will double every 18 months OR (and it's a big or) the price will halve in 18 months.
So logically we could continue on with the same speed processor and just have them get progressively cheaper. But hmm, I wonder whose profit margins this would affect? What he's setting us up for is that Intel will refuse to lower their prices. They'll continue to make the chips cheaper and cheaper but they won't sell them for any less.
I actually look forward to an end in ever increasing clock rates, because then we can all get back to programming skillfully and making tight efficient code.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
What's remarkable is that this is well more than 1000 times as fast. Between chips becoming more effecient and complilers becoming more effecient you get a massive speed up even on a cycle by cycle basis:
1 double between 8088 and 80286
double from 286 to 386
double from 386 to 486
double from 486 to Pentium I (note skipping DX2)
double from Pentium I to Pentium II (skipping Pentium Pro, MMX..)
double from Pentium II to new Pentium IV (skipping Pentium III and old Pentium IV)
So we are talking more like 64,000 as fast.
No thanks, there is a discharge battery application in Mac OS.
AMD, on the other hand, is finishing up a 64bit processor that suffers zero (or at worst nominal) slowdowns on systems with 32 bit OSs when compared to comparable 32 bit processors, leaving plenty of room for their power to continue to grow as the software catches up.
I don't see an end to Moore's law. But instead of ever faster CPUs, we'll see improvements through massive parallelism. In 10-20 years, your desktop may well contain hundreds of CPUs, each with their own memory and a fast communications network. We don't need any new technology for that, just steadily decreasing manufacturing costs.
We've heard it all before...
Moore's law will end, riots in the streets, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
100 MHz? What the hell are you talking about? Did you mean 100 GHz? If so, it is probably not a digital chip.
.02 GHz out of a chip, but what if the money was spent to find a better material with more capability?
Anyway, at the moment no one can make complicated germanium circuits cost-effectively. All the processing techniques are silicon-based.
And germanium is rare, compared to silicon. And the power dissipation is driven by laws of physics. It isn't some stupid little snag, it is a show-stopping problem.
You seem to think that these practical problems are no big deal, but the practical problems are actually the most significant ones in something as emminently practical as running a chip fab.
I don't see it as "No Big Deal", but I'd like to see more development in areas that show promise, rather than trying to squeeze more out of a material which is now causing the posting of this article.
I mean, I'm sure it's cool to spend $3 million to get another
Only in slashdot are posts of solidarity modded at -1 Redundant, while posts of antagonism are modded as -1 Flamebait.
I said this once before and got modded troll, but I'll try it again. It Seems To Me like Moores law, practically at least, has already failed. I'm not operating under scientific data here, but listen: It was about this time 4 years ago that AMD introduced the first 1 Ghz chip. Today the best you can buy (I think) is 2.4 Ghz, from Intel. In four years the speed should have doubled nearly 3 times, which would put us at 8 Ghz. So unless I'm missing something here, Moore is already dead.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
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.
Wow, the misinformation and narrow-mindedness has been flying on this topic!
I see a lot of stock "What, again!?" responses. Realize that Moore's law could continue, but we're past the point of diminishing returns. It's gotten to where Intel releases a chip that has a clock increase of 9%, resulting in a benchmark increase of 4%, for a 12% increase in power consumption (and a price increase 100%). This obviously is not a good road to continue down.
But realize, and this may come as a shock if you think that Processor = Intel and AMD and maybe PowerPC, it's not that difficult for a college student to design, implement, and test an FPGA processor that outruns a Pentium 4 for certain, specialized tasks. It's also generally accepted that 90% or more of the transistor space in a "modern" commercial CPU is not actively being used for computation: instruction cache, data cache, branch prediction cache, and so on. It gets worse if you consider all the space for x86 instructions that rarely get used, like all the old segmented mode stuff, MMX, and the huge number of transistors required to implement an 80-bit floating point unit. Floating point is good, yes, but even the 3D games which are what really pushed the need for floating point are just fine with 32-bit single precision floats. Not to mention that everyone else stops at 64-bits.
The point I'm driving towards is that we could do a lot more with current processor design technology if we weren't expanding in all directions at once, trying to design a general purpose processor that runs at 4GHz. You can greatly release the pressure by looking at exactly what kinds of operations modern software needs and designing a chip around that. There have been a number of real cases where a simple, FPGA processor beats off-the-shelf hardware by factors of 30 or more.
For example, C and C++ have been steadily on the decline for a number of years now. Why write C when you can write Python? You can even write some impressive games entirely in Python these days. Or why not move on to more reasearchy languages that used to be laughably slow in the MS-DOS days, but but fly on any computer released since 1998? The oft-cited reason C is still used is because it's a system-level language that matches the hardware. But what if the hardware matched something else?
I'll be glad to see the end of the current desktop PC fiasco, even though it may result in turmoil for a while.
Check out the rest of Clarke's Laws here.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
When Intel/AMD hit physical fab process limits, better architectures like PowerPC will probably have two or three Moore's Law generations to go before they hit the same limits.
And they'll probably need one of those generations to catch up to raw Intel/AMD performance.
Just once, I'd like to live in a world where the most elegant engineering solution actually won. *sigh*...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Here lies Lester Moore.
Four slugs from a 44.
No Les.
No More.
I didn't say anything about being sold out by the government or "Pleasing the MPAA"
I'm talking about people buying new toys.
I said that consumers like to buy shiny new toys. Because they do.
If they don't.. explain why we have useless shiny new toys all over the place?
And how, exactly, are you comparing Canada & China? I'm curious.