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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?
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!
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.
..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!!"
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.
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
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I predict that, henceforth, these "The End of Moore's Law" articles will double in number every 18 months or so. Eventually all the posts we see on Slashdot will be about The End of Moore's Law. Furthermore, I propose we call this new law Les's Law.
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.
Well, don't worry. I'm sure one of the crack Slashdot editors will just go in and fix... oh yeah.
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
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