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Intel Researchers See Moore's Law Becoming Obsolete
prostoalex writes "A paper, published by Intel researchers, claims we might be the witnesses of Moore's Law becoming obsolete, as the rate of shrinkage for transistors goes lower with each year. In 2018 we might be able to get the chips manufactured with 16-nanometer technology, then one or two more manufacturing processes will shrink it even further, but after that we're facing the physical limits."
Engineers will be able to continue the shrink for another 15 years based on what we know now. However, the cost for designing setting up manufacturing for a chip will continue to increase exponentially. It will only be worth the money to do this for a part that can be sold in the billions, and there will be few such parts. The end will come not because the technologists can't reduce feature sizes any further, but because no one will be willing to sink an investment equal to the GDP of a mid-sized country into a fab.
At least, that's the case for CMOS silicon chips. To get Moore's Law to continue to operate in a meaningful way, something completely new is likely to be needed: maybe molecular gates that self-assemble or something equally exotic.
You obviously didn't RTFA.
These fundemental limitations are not material specific. When you get geometric feature sized on your transistor where the source and sink are within 4-5nm of each other, the electrons can tunnel from source to sink more than 50% of the time, regardless of the field imposed on the electron. Therefore it cannot be used as a basis for a logic circuit. Essentially you are killed by Heisenberg uncertainty.
I agree, Diamond based transistors look very very promising, mostly for their thermal properties. When you can maintain a very high thermal gradiant, while maintaining your semi-conductor properies, you can clock the chips much faster without having to worry about overheating and thermal effects, but this research article that Paulos wrote if about a much more fundemental problem.
The content of this paper is pretty much old news, but it is actually promising to see this published by Intel researchers. Intel is well aware of the fundemental limits of its current design, this does not mean the end of Moore's law, in it's most general meaning, this just means that Intel will find new better ways to keep increasing it's core competancy, making amazing CPUs with very low manufacturing costs.
-PT
The article wasn't based on silicon or anyother substance, but fundimental physics.
From my understanding of the article, the limit toted by Intel is based on leakage due to quantum tunnelling over distances of 5 nanometers or less. Now, IAAP (I am a physicist), and I know that tunneling probabilities have an exponential dependence on both distance and the height of the potential barrier which is being penetrated through. This barrier height depends on the particular materials used to manufacture pn semiconductor junctions; therefore, the OP was correct in pointing out that using different materials can get around the problems which silicon will soon meet.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
1GB/3GHz = 0.3 Byte/Hz
32MB/100MHz = 0.3 Byte/Hz
Basically, as processors have gotten faster, the resources attached to the processor have gotten correspondingly larger. Thus it takes more clock cycles to initialise these resources and get them ready for use (ie. 'boot' them). The end result is boot times will be approximately constant (as observed).
By way of comparison, my first computer had 6kB of RAM and a 3.6MHz processor. 6kB/3.6MHz = 0.002. As one would expect, this computer booted in milliseconds!
Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.
:-)
I think this paper is 'more' (sigh) significant than many are taking it to be. What they are saying is that the electron will no longer be able to provide us with greater computing power in twenty or so years time. Super computer builders prepared to pay will get a little extra milage out of stacking and clever parallelism but your desktop computer will never get any faster after this time using electronics as we understand it.
What we need is a breakthrough as fundamental as the discovery of a new law of nature to get any further.
Quantum computers show some possibility along with self organising molecules to instantate them - but we are still at the practical ability to do this, that we were at with electricity when kite flying in the clouds was a good way to study electrons.
It is prahaps somewhat significant that the number of gates on a chip will be comparable to the number of neurons in the human brain by the end of this decade. Maybe we dont need faster computers at all, maybe the clever thing will be expecting a computer to do something that it cannot do at the momment - think for itself. Sadly creating artificial intelligence has proven a brick wall that has almost no mainstream spin off so far unless you count Microsofts ghastly paper clip...
However my bet is that when the megahertz race is over, the new race will be how to make the compute element more intelligent - through a mixture of software and hardware. Sadly it seems to be a lot more than twenty years away as we cant even program all human brains to read and write despite the several hundred thousand years of development that have been applied to the grey matter
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.
When light-through-air microscopes reached the physical limit, we came up with light-through-oil to get a greater magnification than was "physically possible". Then when that reached its limit we replaced the light with electrons....Even if this is a fundamental limit of electrons-through-solid, who says we're limited to that technology?
Jason
ProfQuotes
Progress is not going to end, but the automatic metronome of Moore's law will no longer be the driver. The rate of progress will slow for a while then start to pick up. The Intel paper says as much.
Incidentally the point of the paper seems to be to push out the end date and fend off rivals proposing the same ideas. The tunneling effect is quite definitely the end point of traditional logic gates. The astonishing part of the paper is that the end they cite is a 16nm process (with a 5nm gate), the smallest scale currently in use is 37nm. In other words there are only four more generations to go, two generations resulting in the feature size halving which means four times the number of transistors. So if the old two year schedule were kept Moore's law comes to an end in 2011.
They also point to the fact that Intel themselves have pushed out their dates for adopting new processes and are planning for three year gaps between generations. I have suspected that Intel has been the main factor in keeping the industry to the roadmap of Moore's law for some time.
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