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."

Comments

Re:what next...

[The No Vlad Zone]

Exactly. Any new technology put out by these guys is quite likely to contain anti-privacy technology secretly embedded. My 486 running FreeBSD and lynx is still good enough for me.

Enough with "moore's law"

[Thinkit3]

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.

Re:Enough with "moore's law"

[aziraphale]

I think this is a product of the fact that, in spite of the best intentions of computer scientists and hardware engineers over the years, the massive commercialsation of the industry means that computing really lacks a scientific underpinning. Electronic engineering, on which all computing depends, of course, is applied physics, with all the laws and theories that implies. And computing brings in a branch of mathematics - information theory - which has its own laws and theorems (not theories, because it's maths, not empirical science), and that's what most computer scientists are interested in.

What computing, as a scientific discipline, should do is combine these to derive its own laws and theories for how these two worlds interact.

Communications engineering has done a great job of being a proper engineering discipline, and there's a ton of laws and theories about the maximum information you can transmit through a medium, and so on, and is full of formulae which mix up amounts of information (measured in bits) with amounts of physical stuff, like distances, energy, and time. But computer engineering seems not to have the same interest in things like 'what's the maximum amount of information you can process using x Joules of energy?'. The kind of scientific units used in computing are laughable, like MIPS and Megaflops... they're meaningless. The processor speed indicator is pointless since it only tells you that a processor does something x times per second - not what that thing that it does is. One processor might perform an eighty bit floating point operation in a clock cycle. Another might just add two eight bit numbers together. The relationship between the clock speeds of these machines doesn't tell us much about their relative information processing capacity.

There almost certainly are some laws to be found in computing if we looked for them. And they might (when combined with observations of economic development and growth of the IT industry) go some way to explain why Moore's law (which measures the increasing ability of humans to extract information processing capacity from materials over time) has held for so long...

I'm ranting, but I think the point is that if Moore's law is what passes for a law in computing, we need to get some more laws.

Moore law will be no more

[chompyZ]

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"

umm

[bperkins]

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?)

Re:Wooh there cowboy.

[Gherald]

You aren't being forced to do anything... you simply choose to do it to keep up with the times. Many consider this "progress".

I hate Moore's Law

[Liselle]

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".

Re:It's called

[Gherald]

> The Bush Method: 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

Why do you give Bush the credit? This shit is Marketing 101 and Politics 102.

Re:Stacked chips (Sloooowwww)

[temojen]

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.

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.

Re:Moore's law is already ending

[roystgnr]

For example, 90% of desktop CPU use could get by without floating point math

Well, except for games.

And anything that uses 3D.

And audio/video playback and work.

And image editing.

And some spreadsheets.

What's that leave, web surfing and word processing? No, even the web surfing is going to use the FPU as soon as you hit a Flash or Java applet.

Re:Stacked chips (Sloooowwww)

[randyest]

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. :)

Not a guess !

[The Famous Druid]

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.