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DARPA Looks Beyond Moore's Law
ddtstudio writes "DARPA (the folks who brought you the Internet) is, according to eWeek, looking more than ten years down the road when, they say, chip makers are going to have to have totally new chip fabrication technologies. Quantum gates? Indium Phosphide? Let's keep in mind that Moore's Law was more an observation than a predictive law of nature, despite how people treat it that way."
First they want to get around privacy laws, now they want to break Moore's law...these guys have no bounds!
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Why am I always being forced to upgrade, darnit?
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
perhaps stacked wafers with vertical interconnects might help... I'm not sure how you'd dissipate the heat, though.
Moore's law, bah! Thinking about it, DARPA should get Steve Jobs on board to study his Reality Distortion Field. Think of the military aspects of.......oh, wait. We already have that.
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It's just a wild guess. It has absolutely nothing to do with physics, which is the real laws we all live by. It has much more to do with human laws such as patents and copyrights that limit progress.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Didn't some of the recent quantum gate break throughs come on the former heir appearent to Silicon?
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
hardware has progressed dramatically over the past decade and left software somewhere behind... there is nt much use for faster and faster servers when software doesn't keep up the phase... this decade will be a "software decade"
Moore's law is of course set with the assumption of silicon being used as the underlying semiconductor technology. With other semiconductor tech and even alternatives to the whole concept of semiconductors emerging, it is bound to fail eventually.
--Kevin
I"m pretty excited about the new man-made diamonds that are supposed to be able to keep moore's law going for decades when they come out. Wired had an article recently and a post here on /. too
What about Al Gore?
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Therefore i propose: "Moores Law 2: Anyone mentioning his name in a discussion aboout semiconductors, CPU's or transitsors have lost the discussion."
Proud patriot and republican voter.
Multilayer chips have been around a long time. Think it's up to 7 or 8 by now. This idea, which exists outside of time, has been discovered on earth indepedendently of you. Neither you nor the earlier discoverer created it.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
This diamond article in Wired 'http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond. html' seems to indicate that Moore's law is sustainable for much more than ten more years.
Besides, I've been hearing about the death of Moore's Law for the last ten years.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Example:
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30 Re+URN; G0SUB 42
40 Print "Welcom to Windoes!":PRINGT "JUS KIFFING! HAHAHA!"
43 RUN
50 REM Copyright SCO(TM)(R)(C) 2012, NOT! HAHAHAHA
6o GOt0 14.3
Hey, it's a joke! Relax - no angry human brains will be used either!
Let's keep in mind that Moore's Law was more an observation than a predictive law of nature, despite how people treat it that way.
Let's not and say we did.*
Seriously, I doubt that many people think that Moore's law is on an equal footing as say gravity and quantum mechanics. Still, an observation that has held more or less for nearly 40 years is worth considering as a very valuable guideline. Let's keep this in mind as well.
(*Why do vacuous comments like this make it into slashdot stories?)
This idea of speeding up processing speed is barking up the wrong tree and ultimately doomed to failure. We need to be focusing our attention on biochemistry and molecular biology. We already have drugs that slow your reaction time, thus making things appear to happen more quickly.
See, if we get everybody to take xanax or zoloft, there's no limit to how fast computers will appear to be working.
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just because of huge contract lead times, and this is just simple recognition of the fact. Any number of alternatives could pop up in the meanwhile (before anybody actually does anything), and that possibility needs to be accounted for.
I bet that's what it really is, anyway.
C|N>K
The obligatory joke about you inventing the Internet goes here.
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Letter
Stefan "It's finally out!" Jones
Scientists are looking for alternatives to rats for experiments: If rats are experimented on they will develop cancer. --Morton's Law
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I saw this article about new diamond manufacturing techniques and it's an interesting read. Having diamond based processors looks like a viable technology in the near future and heat dissipation is one of the major reasons that they're considering diamond.
I'm just worried about what my wife will say when the diamond in my machine is bigger than the one on her finger...
-B
a) Chips are already "stacked". Layer over layer of silicon.
b) If you are talking about stacking dice (That is, literally stacking chips inside the package) then the distance the information would have to travel when going trough the "vertical interconnects" would be thousands or tens of thousands bigger than the distance of any on-chip interconnection. Which means the communication between layers of stacked chips would be thousands of times slower. Not very good for microprocessors..
Sorry, I messed up the link
Every 18 months, someone will develop a new law to compute the rate at which the estimate of the rate at which the number of transistors on semiconductor chips will double will halve.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
> See, if we get everybody to take xanax or zoloft, there's no limit to how fast computers will appear to be working.
Let's just kill everyone, then our computers will seem infinitely fast! Dude, if you're gonna dream, Dream Big!
Their web site talks a little bit about DARPA's quantum computing projects, but the page seems to be a little outdated. Anyone know if they're pursuing this as well?
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Murphy's laws are also more observation than predictives, but I think that technology changes will not have effect on them.
No, it won't. Hope this helps.
B-b-b-ut.. Hypertransport!
(sorry, I just like the name)
It's called the Bush Method. It isn't as fast or elegant as a genuine Reality Distortion Field, but it gets the job done about as well most of the time and the great thing is, it's cheaper and anyone can do it.
The Bush Method is so simple, it's amazing no one thought of it before 2000. All you have to do is take the thing about reality you want to distort, and state that it has changed, whether or not it hasn't. The amazing thing is, if you say it enough times publicly, it actually becomes true.
The Bush Method has already revolutionized both politics and business (See: Darl McBride, career of) and i'm sure DARPA will pick up on the military applications any day now. Expect, come 2005, to see President Bush repeatedly stating on national television that microchips are a hundred times faster than they were six months ago. Once that begins, Moore's Law is toast!
It's not a law. It's a prediction. Poorly named really. Do they call it Greenspan's law when he predicts lower inflation?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Computer salesmen are using it like a club. You figure it would drive innovation, instead of driving CPU manufacturers take advantage of comsumer ignorance and do fairy magic with clock speeds. We should call it "Moore's Observation".
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
PK
Engineers arn't boring people, we just get excited about boring things.
An educated observation, which is why it basically works.
Please note that the observation was well enough educated that it includes the fact that its validity will be limited in time frame and that before it becomes completely obsolete the multiplying factor will change, as it already has a couple of times.
In order to understand Moore's Law one must read his entire essay, not just have some vague idea of one portion of it.
Just as being able to quote "E=mc^2" in no way implies you have the slightest understanding of the Special Theory of Relativity.
KFG
It seems every year "they" say that chips will have to change this or that to keep up and manufacturers seem to be able to come out with a new processes to push speeds higher.
---
Lousy rotten karmic retribution.
The physical layout is actually multi-layer already. It's on a single wafer though. Dope.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
All these other things they are talking about are vaporware. Parallel computing is here and in use now.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
If there is a group on earth that would have some idea about what the next stage technology that will upset Moore's law will be, it's DARPA. It is possible that they already are 10-15 years advanced of that which we get down here on earth (tin foil hat time), and are just planning upon declassifying it as it becomes cost-effective (read: profitable) to do so. Heh Heh.
Chips foundrys, that instead of foundering chips the traditional way, they Garflag Barg Butto Moogie KawwwooowwWwweeee!!!!
Sorry, you probably can't read that last part. I had to encrypt it as I don't own a patent on it yet. And if you Slashdotters try to break my encryption I will be forced to shoot you under the digital millenium copyright act. Don't worry though, you can pay me licensing fees for linux too. Don't pay those people at SCO, my license is better!
By the way, I own the intellectual property of "modding down", be it the "troll" variety or the "off topic" variety, so for each such mod recieved I will charge you a (very reasonable) licensing fee of only $799.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
WRONG!
It was algore who brought us the internet!
Where have you been?
can't say you're not pessimistic.
"Is it a tank, is it a missile, is it a school bus?"
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Hold fire!!! Oops, too late!
Sorry, kid! Bad time for holding this cup... looked like a grenade or someting...
Is it too much to ask for everyone to just STFU about Moore's Law? Can't we just let it go quietly? I mean, aren't there more important things than sitting around arguing the relevance (if any) of Moore's Law.
/.
Then again, I post on
...but they will never break Brannigan's Law! Branigan's law is like Branigan's love...hard and fast!
Moore's law is already ending. Intel's Prescott (i.e. Pentium 5) CPU dissipates 103 watts. That's beyond anything you can put in a laptop, and it's arguably beyond anything that should be in a workstation-class PC. But it also may not be that we're hitting CPU speed limits, just that we're hitting the limits of type types of processors that are being designed. Much of the reason the PowerPC line runs cooler than the x86 is because the instruction set and architecture are much cleaner. There's no dealing with calls to unaligned subroutines, no translation of CISC instructions to a series of RISC micro-ops, and so on. But there are the same fundamental issues: massive amounts of complexity dealing with out of order execution, register renaming, cache management, branch prediction, managing in-order writebacks of results, etc.
Historically, designing CPUs for higher-level purposes, other than simply designing them to execute traditional assembly language, has been deemed a failure. This is because generic hardware advanced so quickly that the custom processors were outdated as soon as they were finished. Witness Wirth's Lilith, which was soon outperformed by an off-the-shelf 32-bit CPU from National Semiconductor (remember them?). The Lisp machine is a higher profile example.
But now things are not so clear. Ericsson designed a processor to run their Erlang concurrent-functional programming language, a language they use to develop high-end, high-availability applications. The FPGA prototype was outperforming the highly-optimized emulator that had been using up to that point by a factor of 30. This was with the FPGA at a clock speed of ~20MHz, and the emulator running on an UltraSPARC at ~500MHz. And remember, this was with an FPGA prototype, one that didn't even include branch prediction. Power dissipation was on the order of a watt or two.
Quite likely, we're going to start seeing more of this approach. Figure out what it is that you actually want to *do*, then design for that. Don't design for an overly general case. For example, 90% of desktop CPU use could get by without floating point math, especially if there were some key fixed point instructions in the integer unit. But every Pentium 4 and Athlon not only includes 80-bit floating point units, but massive FP vector processing units as well. (Not to mention outmoded MMX instructions that are almost completely ignored.)
But also thousands or hundreds of thousands of times smaller than going outside the package; which would make it ideal for multi-processors, array processors, or large local caches.
A lot of posters sem to think that DARPA, the US military, or the US government is a unified thing. It's not. Each part often have their own agendas. Research is very frequently driven by those agendas.
However, DARPA often CYAs when it comes to research too. If you come up with a whacky idea that might just work they often will fund it even though it is in competition with another they have. The reason being that they then can see which whacky idea actually works. Often none do. or one does. or nother that seemed like a sure thing doesn't.
A long story short, if quantum computing doesn't turn out to be all that, they've covered their techno @$$3$.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
False, there is just one active layer of single crystalline silicon that contains the devices. The remaining layers are interconnects.
b) If you are talking about stacking dice (That is, literally stacking chips inside the package) then the distance the information would have to travel when going trough the "vertical interconnects" would be thousands or tens of thousands bigger than the distance of any on-chip interconnection.
How, why? the lateral extend of any die is usually bigger than its height. In fact the distance would be much shorter. Active layers would be seperated by less than 100micrometers.
BobAbooey had more barely plausible obfuscated technobabble than you in the nail of his little finger!
The era of biological computing when I can just sneeze on my PC to double its RAM!
AT&ROFLMAO
- Ray Kurzweil
The entire text
They were even supposed to be funding the crackheads over at OpenBSD for a while.
(Just kidding, Theo.)
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They made an announcement about it less than a year ago. They don't say if they'll be doing anything special about heat problems, though.
Thank Goodness someone has finally said something about it, even if it was just in passing. The bonus is that it is on the front page of Slashdot.
t m
"Moore's Law" is no more a "law" in the sense of physics (or anything else for that matter), than any other basic observation made by a scientist or physicist.
Oddly, you'd have a hard time believing it wasn't a Law of Nature by the apocalyptic cries from the technology industry when "Moore's Law" falls behind - spouting that something *has* to be done immediately for Moore's Law to continue, lest the nuclear reaction in the Sun cease. Or something.
At the time it was coined by the *press* in 1965, only a small fraction of what we now know was known about the physics of integrated circuits and semiconductors at the time. So, looking back it's easy to see that the exponential trend in density would continue as long as the knowledge and abilility to manipluate materials increased exponentially.
Yes, it is rather surprising that Moore's observation has held true as long as it has. And this isn't to say that the growth trend won't continue, but it will certainly level off for periods while materials or manufacturing research comes up with some new knowledge to advance the industry.
As the article indicates, things are likely headed for a plateau, possibly toward the end of this decade or start of the next. And at that point, Moore's observation will simply no longer be true or appropriate.
Let the cries of armageddon begin as "Moore's Law" is finally recognized as an observation that will eventually be outlived.
For a little "Moore" background, see http://www.intel.com/research/silicon/mooreslaw.h
a working link
Some observations:
Given that, I'm sure they could figgure out a way to make the distance between any two points on two wafers 1cm2 less than 0.5cm., say by making the interconnects gold studs a micron or so high all over the surface of the wafer, and aligning them face-to-face.
Now that fast floating point hardware is standard on desktop CPUs, I take advantage of it whenever I can. Fixed point arithmetic is an error-prone kludge for CPUs without floating point hardware. I've waited decades for floating point hardware to become a standard feature of PCs. Take it away and I will have to break someone's legs.
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1) As Moore's Law goes further down the exponential path, errors will increase as well (specifically with hard drives)
2) The complexity of setting up chips
3) With technology updating so quickly, disposal of old PCs
The other point once made (although I can't find a link) was Moore's Law could arguably be perpetuating itself. Instead of looking at it as what is orginally was, an observation, many see Moores Law as a guide and judge the growth of the Industry--making it a goal companies strive to attain.
Just my 2 cents...
"The truth suffers from too much analysis"
DARPA (the folks who brought you the Internet)
Shouldn't their acronym read FBI insted of DARPA, then?
Let's keep in mind that Moore's Law was more an observation than a predictive law of nature, despite how people treat it that way.
Not entirely. The folks designing FooCorp's next generation of e.g. chip fabs generally use Moore's Law to tell them where the competition will be by the time the fab is built: FooCorp needs to be competitive at that point in the future. Then the folks designing e.g. PDAs use Moore's Law to tell them what processor power, memory capacity, etc will be available to them by the time their next PDA is in production.
In short, Moore's Law is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This sort of effect, BTW, is one of the big causes of the dot-bomb. Companies that had been counting on communication tech being there to support their business went under themselves when the telecom companies went under. Companies counting on building a business on middleware went under when their customers did. It only took a few dominos tipping over to start the whole cascade. Thankfully, this hasn't happened in the CPU, memory, or storage business. Yet.
Right on a). well, mostly -- IBM has a new process that does allow transistors in some area-IO to be placed over logic gate transistors. It's more trouble than it's worth, though (unavoidable interactions are hard to calculate accurately).
:). See, it's not that it's further to go vertical from one die to the next, rather than packaging each individually and connecting them horizontally. The problem is it's hard to go vertical. This is true from design, manufacturability, and reliability points-of-view.
And right on b) -- the distance between 2 dice stacked is much shorter than 2 side-by-side. But this is totally irrelevant, mostly due to previous posters
First, by area-IO I meed input/output (IO) drivers or receivers that can be placed anywhere in an area, rather than only around the circumference (preipheral IO). We have area-IO at the package level (such as BGA, or Ball-Grid-Array and FCBGA, or Flip-Chip Ball Grid Array [best for area-IO, and expensive]) and area-IO at the die level. Do we connect the dice before or after packaging?
Either way presents problems. Such as (for pre-packaging connections):
How do you electrically connect 2 area-IO dice? Usually, a die has little square landing pads, and these are only about 50um square, spaced every 200-250um or so on center in 2-D arrays of up to 70x70 and more. To be able to do anything with these tightly packed little signals, we drop special tiny drops of metal that stick to the pads, and press this up against a package substrate (ceramic), which includes routes to space those signals out more, like every 1.0mm or so. Even this is expensive and hard to mount to PCB, since it's hard to ensure both things are perfectly flat (package and PCB) so that all balls connect.
In fact, we rely on the package (often including an internal metal "stiffener") to keep the die nice and flat, which helps avoid de-lamination (layers peeling apart). Two dice pressed next to each other would require some space between them to make the connection (i.e., some bumps for the connection, and valleys for no connect areas), and this and the elasticity of the electrical connection medium would leave enough play to let the dice warp all over the place.
It'd be even harder to tell which ball(s) aren't connected. We do this now by confirming that the PCB is OK (usually pretty easy, so it makes a good reference), make the chip send specially-controllable data out (and take data in on inputs), then check to see what's right and wrong by measuring at the board level. If my board is another chip, how do I know which one I am debugging? This debugging (we call mfg testing) happens to all chips, not just some samples. If it isn't, failure rates will go up to unacceptable levels (like 20-50% or more).
Testability is hard if you stack dice before or after packaging. Design is a bizzotch too, since you can't very well even model one whole chip at a time (and how the circuit performs depends on process, voltage, and temperature), much less two chips stacked with an insulator and some kind of very short, very small, very fragile, very susceptible to noise and crosstalk hunk of 1000+ wires between them. One local hot spot at X,Y on die A can mess up operation at x,y on die B, and we'd never be able to practically predict that.
Most importantly of all, part of the reason chip design even works at all, and that we can churn them out for pennies each (after massive design and capital outlay for a fab), is that we can simplify the design dramatically by making assumptions, modelling the target device in isolation, verifying it in isolation, and then being able to safely assume this (truly wrong) assumption of isolation is close enough to true that the part will work in the system. Single packaged die are relatively infinitely insulated from everything except the I/O we carefully design. Stacked dice would not be -- they would interact strongly with each other in unpredicatab
everything in moderation
10^3-10^5 is a an overstatement. Standard silicon wafers are 500-1000 microns thick. An average polysilicon interconnect line on a non-stacked chip is 1-20 microns. A metal interconnect line on a non-stacked chip will range from 2-10^5 microns.
Going from one corner of a reasonable sized chip to another is definitely further than hopping up one chip thickness.
Think about this: Why is video graphics hardware so much faster than CPU's? You might say that it is because the video card is specifically designed for one task... however, these days, that isn't really true. Modern video cards allow you to write small -- but arbitrary -- programs which are run on every vertex or every pixel as they are being rendered. They aren't quite as flexible as the CPU, but they are getting close; the newest cards allow for branching and control flow, and they are only getting more flexible. So, why are they so much faster? There are a lot of reasons, but a big one is that they can do lots of things at the same time. The card can easily process many vertices or pixels in parallel.
Now, getting back to C... A program in C is supposed to be executed in order. A good compiler can break that rule in some cases, but it is harder than you would think. Take this simple example:
This is just a piece of C code which takes a list of numbers and produces another list by adding one to each number.
Now, even with current, mostly-serial CPU's, the fastest way to perform this loop is to process several numbers at once, so that the CPU can work on incrementing some of the numbers while it waits for the next ones to load from RAM. For highly-parallel CPU's (such as many currenty in development), you would even more so want to work on several numbers simultaneously.
Unfortunately, because of the way C is designed, the compiler can not apply such optimizations! The problem is, the compiler does not know if the "out" list overlaps with the "in" list. If it does, then the compiler has to do the assignments one-at-a-time to insure proper execution. Imagine the following code that calls the function, for example:
Of course, using the function in such a way would not be very useful, but the compiler has to allow for it. This problem is called "aliasing".
ISO C99 provides for a "restrict" keyword which can help prevent this problem, but few people understand it, even fewer use it, and those who do use it usually don't use it everywhere (using it everywhere would be too much work). It's not a very good solution anyway -- more of a "hack" if you ask me.
Anyway, to sum it up, C generally requires the CPU to do things in sequence. As a result, CPU manufacturers are forced to make CPU's that do one thing at a time really, really fast, rather than lots of things at the same time. And, so, since it is so much harder to design a fast CPU, we end up with slower CPU's... and we hit the limits of "Moore's Law" far earlier than we should.
In contrast, functional languages (such as ML, Haskell, Ocaml, and, to a lesser extent, LISP), due to the way they work, have no concept of "aliasing". And, despite what many experienced C programmers would expect, functional languages can be amazingly fast, despite being rather high-level. Functional languages are simply easier to optimize. Unfortunately, experienced C/C++/Java/whatever programmers tend to balk at functional languages at first, as learning them can be like learning to program all over again...
So, yeah. I recommend you guy
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The true definition merely states - "The density of transistors on an IC will approximately double every 18 months". Many people seem to think that this implies a processing performance doubling, or a frequency doubling. It is nothing of the sort.
The only direct effect is that the cost for a chip is halved every 18 months (assuming cost ~ die area). A side-effect is the fact that smaller transistors can be run at higher clocks than larger transistors, and/or dissipate less heat.
It is upto processor architects, and designers to make better use of the larger number of transistors available. Dr Yale Patt, of UT Austin, stated in a lecture that his team had found that chip architects had improved the performance of their designs faster than Moore's law by adding new features when they got more transistors to play with.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
That is a lot of writing just to lobby your opinion that x86 sucks.
-Eyston
We're trying.
:)
But how do you get "micron high" little gold studs to stick to the die in exactly the right places? How do you make sure each gold stud is exactly the same height (can't have a short one anywhere, even by a femto-meter)? Then, how do you physically/mechanically line them up exactly and keep them together perfectly for long priods of time under fairly wide ranges in vibration and temperature ranges? How do you prevent the dice from warping if each stud isn't 100% identical (such as if you try to tolerate some height variation by making the studs slightly compressible)?
Since you're using area-IO to connect the dice, how do you power them? Usually, in area-IO die the power comes from the top (like an IO buffer), but in a stacked die this would just lead to another die. You can't power from the "bottom", since that's not metal (it's Si substrate), and you need really big power wires to get all over the dice from somewhere. If from the top, do the tiny wires shoot out the sides between the two dice and then go to a power, uh, plug? Connector with tiny wires on one side, or what? And I do mean tiny -- the little metal studs would need to be placed every 200-300um apart, in a 2-D array, and some would have to connect to a power source, somehow.
If you got this far: how do you design a chip with identical, but mirror-image IO locations of another chip, which presumably does a different thing? It's a huge battle in system design these days to get a chip package pinout that makes both the PCB designers and the die designers happy. Making 2 die designers happy with one chipl-level pinout would be impossible.
Finally, given that gross simplifications and assumptios about near-perfect isolation used in modern chip design, how long until you can have the hardware and software ready for me to be able to calculate iterative solutions to 500 million simultaneous, co-dependent variations on Schroedinger's Wave Equation? (of course, it's intractable, so iteration is your only hope -- better pray for convergence too!) Oh, and I need that to take less than 6-12 hours each run to make a reasonable design schedule.
everything in moderation
That's pointless. Why would I prefer 8 chips? Wouldn't it make sense to make a die that's 8 times as big? Then, at the same feature size (0.18 or whatever), you get the same number of total transistors in both systems, same area dedicated to CPU per rig, but less slow (ie, FSB) interconnects, allowing for a higher degree of integration. If you're going to invoke the parallel argument, you have to be better than using one chip with the same total area, and that's not the case.
Bottom line is, you could at best tie, if the amount of processing speed per transistor were equal using one or many chips. This isn't the case though - it scales more like log(x) because of the overhead. That's where you lose your tie. Remember, you won't win unless separating one chip into lots of chips is somehow beneficial, which it's not.
Finally, there's no reason we can't do parallel *and* whatever else we were going to do anyway. They're not mutually exclusive.
If anyone still doesn't see it, look at it this way: To keep getting the same performance boost/year we're used to, we would have to *at minimum* double the number of chips in our box every 18 months. This is assuming that power scales linearly with # chips. So, do you want 64 chips in your rig in 9 years? Not really feasible. And remember, Moore's law is the reason you can't keep making them smaller in the first place, so that won't work.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
My athlon is about 1cm x 1cm
So, making it 1 inch square (about 2.54cm square) would make it about 6.25 as big. That's like having a 6-processor system!
Of course, heat dissipation is a concern, but a good water-cooler could handle it easily. This may be the reason water-cooled PCs become mainstream.
Al Gore invented the internet!
http://saveie6.com/
It wasn't a guess, it was a statement of company policy.
The manufacturers try to strike a balance between a high R&D investment (with rapid advances in technology) and keeping the technology in production long enough to generate a good return on that investment. Moores Law represents the 'sweet spot' that manufacturers had settled on.
While it's held quite well in recent decades, there's no guarantee it will continue to hold. If they hit a technological wall, or economic conditions cause a drop in investment, things could slow. If a major discovery is made, or an 'arms race' develops between the major players, things could speed up. IBM did this in the hard disk market, they cranked up their R&D effort, and for a while hard disks advanced more quickly than Moores Law would predict.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
wait.. the guy who set up intel.... ...doesn't moores law smell like a snake oil scamola to keep mining the rich seam that is the non-risc single CPU architecture until they reach the physical limits and are forced to use one of the other things they have been researching.
which then, in turn is bolstered by a partnered software company to keep bringing out the next vital OS which only runs on the next generation hardware and is barely backwards compatible, if at all?
if that makes sense then it should be familiar..
but if that is at all true couldt they just have skipped to 4 gHz 4 years ago? would not that have bee nicer of them?
Past performance does not guarantee future results, but it's pretty fucking spooky.
This is one of the weakest and thinnest articles I have read from slashdot in a while...
ThunderDome........!
That's right. You heard me...
You could make the die the size of a 300mm wafer and your yield would go to zero. I don't know of a process that can produce a wafer without any flaws (typically due to foreign material).
Next thing you know they'll be making a time pod and send agents a week into the past to stop things like assasinations.
I don't actually exist.
Don't be so easily misled by neocons, who like to portray Al Gore as laughing stock (literally).
Someone decided to fund that research. Someone deserves some credit.
Its still completely free using a link below the rest. here.
Checking out my form of escapism.
I didn't know Al Gore worked for DARPA.
Moore's Law is the observation that when people are allowed to freely interact without the burden of government, they produce at an exponential rate.
We can apply it to other industries and seen the same effects.
For instance, before deregulation, long distant phone calls were expensive. Today, they are dropping in price, while the QOS and coverage is expanding.
The software industry, due to almost complete government non-interference, is able to take software to completely new levels every two to three years. The hardware industry, thanks to non-interference, is doing the same.
Compare and contrast with heavily regulated industries. Is your medical care costs going down, while the benefits are expanding? Are houses getting cheaper to build, while becoming better and bigger? Are your cars getting safer and cheaper, with stronger yet more fuel efficient engines? The reasons why these industries do not experience the effects of Moore's Law is because government is a roadblock to their progress.
Moore's Law will cease to apply the second government decides to start regulating the computer industry.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Your *conclusions* about regulation/innovation cause-and-effect are wildly distorted and, on the whole, mostly "wrong".
>>Moore's Law is the observation that when people
>>are allowed to freely interact without the
>>burden of government, they produce at an
>>exponential rate.
Are the problems facing both industries equally difficult? Are the financial incentives to innovate the same?
Most people can't drive 300 mph safely (and won't be able to until an AI agent automates driving for us) but we all love CPU's that are 3x faster than last year's CPU's.
Do you really think these industries are so comparable as to support your proposition?
>>Are your cars getting safer and cheaper, with
>>stronger yet more fuel efficient engines?
Historically, the government forced auto makers to improve their vehicles' "safety" and "fuel efficiency". Do you see auto makers surpassing government standards in these areas?
>>For instance, before deregulation, long
>>distant phone calls were expensive. Today, they
>>are dropping in price, while the QOS and
>>coverage is expanding.
Innovation, education, and an increasing human head count spur further innovation. Have you not noticed a general acceleration of technological development over the past few hundred years??
>>Is your medical care costs going down,
("Is our children learning?")
>>while the benefits are expanding?
After basic needs are met (e.g., food, shelter), what else do people want? People want to *live longer*. Thus, you should *expect* medical expenses as a percentage of GDP to increase over time -- in the absence of any regulation.
Recommendation: Forget what you think you learned thus far and re-evaluate the world anew.
Oh great... now they will provide tiny little missiles to Iran.
>:-(
--hongpong.com
Moore's Law was passed as a rider to that law that says that spam can be sent to anyone any time, as long as it contains a reference to HR4176 or whatever it was. So, you see, it really is as law now.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
We may hit a wall before that. Power dissipation may limit device density before atom size or fabrication technology doesn. In that case, memory devices, which use less power per unit area, will continue to be fabbed at smaller scales, while busier parts (CPUs, graphics engines) will not progress as much.
There's still no good technology after silicon. There are lots of ideas, but so far, they're all worse. Many of them involve technologies previously considered marginal, like germanium and gallium arsenide. Remember, not only does the next technology have to be smaller, it has to be cheaper, too. That's hard.
Multilayer approaches have been suggested, but they don't reduce cost per gate much. Getting rid of heat from the interior layers is very tough, too.
A look at the history of aviation shows what a wall looks like. From the Wright Brothers first successful controlled flight in 1903, progress was steady. Aircraft got bigger and faster every year. Technologies changed, from wood to aluminum and from pistons to jets. Aircraft grew steadily in size and range.
The 1960s saw the development of the SR-71, the C-5A, the Concorde, and the Boeing 747. And then, suddenly, it was all over. Those planes are still flying today, and really haven't been improved upon much. The SR-71 still holds the speed record, the C-5A's size has only been exceeded slightly, and the 747 remains the bulk carrier of the skies.
At the time, people in the industry didn't think it was over. There was talk of hypersonic transports, suborbital ballistic aircraft, and VTOL jetliners. Even antigravity was discussed seriously. But it didn't happen. None of those technologies worked well enough to use.
That's where semiconductor technology seems to be headed.
I think I read in one of the article about it that some team had achieved a speed of 360Ghz (yes 360 Giga-Hertz) in transistor using this technology.
With a chip going this fast synchronization between parts of a large chip becomes the main issue as light travels only 3/100 of an inch per clock cycle at this speed.
-John Fenley
Quantum computing is not the answer to Moore's Law; quantum computing is a shift in computing paradigm. The thing is that there are computing problems that can't be solved efficiently on classical computers that can be solved efficiently on quantum computers (efficient beeing defined as it usually is in CS). Problems that have equally efficient solutions on classical computers will probably be solved a *lot* slower on early quantum computers.
In other words, you don't want a QC if you want to run Gnome, but you certainly will want a QC if you want to factorize numbers (that is, crack RSA) or search huge databases (these are two of the algorithms that have been designed for QC that are beleived not to have equally efficient solutions on classical computers)
The indutsry base their planning and research funding on this law (i.e. 'we must not lag behind moore law!' -PHB), there is no wonder it still holds.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
I note there's no link for Moore's Law. Instead of one person putting in one link at composition, now the 10 people who don't know what Moore's Law is have to go search for it. It's the /. model of efficiency.
sic
... then the enemy will simply use different vehicles, e.g. placing soldiers in schoolbuses. What we need is something that can look "through" the vehicle and see what is inside. Perhaps some of the technology being used to monitor crowds and pick out distinctive behavior patterns could be applied to vehicles to determine which ones are most likely to be a threat.
Languages like C (or C++, Java, Perl, Python, Fortran, etc.) are inherently serial in nature.
Yes, Fortran started as an inherently serial language but many, many of its modern revisions is to increase the areas in which a compiler can safely apply parallel optimizations.
For example: your "incrementing" code snippet:
(incrementmyArray + 1, myArray, count);
is written thus in modern Fortran using two arrays of dimensions 1 to n (arbitrarily defined indices):
REAL
array2=array1 + 1
And if you only wish slices of the array:
array2(x:y) = array1(a:b) + 1
Anywho, just a few sentences an examples to show you that not all of those languages have to be or continue to remain "primarily serial".
I always get the shakes before a drop.
It'll just predict American waistlines rather than chip densities.
If the US becomes socialist under Democratic rule, we go bankrupt.
If the US becomes imperialist under Republican rule, we start World War III.
So, what now?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin