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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'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.
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.
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If it's the end, it wasn't a law to start with, then, was it?
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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...
Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she's losing. Well I say, "Hard cheese."
I write in my journal
..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.
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!!!!
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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.
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
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.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
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.
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).