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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."
Silicon is, indeed, close to its limit, but that does not mean semiconductors are.
This Wired article, which I'm sure many of you have read, details how new industrially-produced diamonds, thanks to their cheap price and purity (most importantly, being absolutely identical to each other), along with research done by both the government, several corporations, and possibly Intel, may make unbelievably fast systems powered by diamond semiconductors possible.
Some interesting quotes:
Also, a rather ironic one from Intel themselves:
Silicon is dead. Long live diamonds!
We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue. This is talking about 2018...Quantum computers anyone??
looks like they're gotting slashdotted like Kathleen Fent on her wedding night...
Dec. 1 -- Moore's Law, as chip manufacturers generally refer to it today, is coming to an end, according to a recent research paper.
GRANTED, THAT END likely won't come for about two decades, but Intel researchers have recently published a paper theorizing that chipmakers will hit a wall when it comes to shrinking the size of transistors, one of the chief methods for making chips that are smaller, more powerful and cheaper than their predecessors.
Manufacturers will be able to produce chips on the 16-nanometer manufacturing process, expected by conservative estimates to arrive in 2018, and maybe one or two manufacturing processes after that, but that's it.
"This looks like a fundamental limit," said Paolo Gargini, director of technology strategy at Intel and an Intel fellow. The paper, titled "Limits to Binary Logic Switch Scaling -- A Gedanken Model," was written by four authors and was published in the Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in November.
Although it's not unusual for researchers to theorize about the end of transistor scaling, it's an unusual statement for researchers from Intel, and it underscores the difficulties chip designers currently face. The size, energy consumption and performance requirements of today's computers are forcing semiconductor makers to completely rethink how they design their products and are prompting many to pool design with research and development.
Resolving these issues is a major goal for the entire industry. Under Moore's Law, chipmakers can double the number of transistors on a given chip every two years, an exponential growth pattern that has allowed computers to get both cheaper and more powerful at the same time.
Mostly, the trick has been accomplished through shrinking transistors. With shrinkage tapped out, manufacturers will have to find other methods to keep the cycle going.
These issues will likely be widely discussed this week, when the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors is unveiled in Taiwan. The ITRS, which is comprised of several organizations, including the Semiconductor Industry Association, outlines the challenges and rough timetable for the industry for 15 years. A new version of the plan will be released in Taiwan on Dec. 2.
Still, Gargini said, researchers are exploring a variety of ideas, such as more efficient use of electrons or simply making bigger chips, to surpass any looming barriers. Other researchers likely will dispute these conclusions.
"We cannot let physics beat us," he said, laughing.
THE DISTINGUISHED CIRCUIT
The problem chipmakers face comes down to distinction and control. Transistors are essentially microscopic on/off switches that consist of a source (where electrons come from), a drain (where they go) and a gate that controls the flow of electrons through a channel that connects the source and the drain.
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When current flows from the source to the drain, a computer reads this as a "1." When current is not flowing, the transistor is read as a "0." Millions of these actions together produce the data inside PCs. Strict control of the gate and channel region, therefore, are necessary to produce reliable results.
When the length of the gate gets below 5 nanometers, however, tunneling will begin to occur. Electrons will simply pass through the channel on their own, because the source and the drain will be extremely close. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)
Gargini likens the phenomenon to a waterfall in the middle of a trail. If a person can't see through it, they will take a detour around it. If it is only a thin veil of mist, people will push through.
"Where you have a barrier, the electrons penetrate a certain distance," he said. "Once
Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present to you thrillbert's Law :
This law states that new laws to govern electronics and transistors will become obsolete every few years and will be replaced by new and improved laws which again will become obsolete as we as humans become smarter and find newer and better ways of creating things.
That is all, you may return to your previously scheduled activity.
---
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.
We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need higher voltages to force things to happen on that level. And with those increased voltages (and the problems of things being crammed so tightly together) we'll see the effects of those electrons in such close proximity resulting in errors. Sure, maybe we won't hit a brick wall for a while as far as how much we can cram onto a chip, but what about the logistics? Will it really be worth the effort if we can't rely on these little marvels to remain accurate?
Damon,
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... that drives people to try to pinpoint the exact coming moment when it will become obsolete? I suspect it is a desired to tack their own 15 minutes of fame to the long-lasting fame Moore has enjoyed.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
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.
because if Moore's law continued forever, it would prove P=NP. Think about it.
Even if there were no way to manufacture chips smaller/faster than the ones we have today, there are always going to be refinements in the manufacturing process, making chips cheaper and cheaper. There are always supercomputers. Perhaps, also, we could find a way to really minimize waste heat, allowing many CPUs per board.
It's also possible that DNA computation and other kinds of biocomputing are going to come along. These have the advantage of being gigantically parallel; they would possibly be good for tasks that are not latency sensitive but require immense brute force.
I'm satisfied that we have enough axes of advance to keep progress moving forward. Remember, computers have only been around for a very short while; I refuse to believe that we hit on the fitness maximum on the first try; there have to be technologies out there that are far faster/cooler/smaller.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Once we approach the phyisical limits, we can simply expand in a different way. Just start adding CPU cores to the machine. SMP boxes are becoming fairly common already, even the in the PC market, and I definatly see that trend continuing. Once things get cheap enough, why not stick 16 or 32 chips in a machine? Heat and power issues can be minimized by greatly UNDERclocking the chips. In another few years, chips will be at insane frequecys, and instead of pushing them the limit by running that at super high power levels, just back things off a bit.
TODO: Something witty here...
I remember sitting in a lecture in 1997, where some luminary from IBM predicted the death of Moore's Law in 10 years. Now it's 2003 and the death of Moore's Law is being predicted in 15 years.
Technologically, there will probably be enough clever ideas to take chip manufacturing beyond the point where it is no longer economical to make such fast processors. Consider that in 1980, a handful of engineers could sit down with pencil and paper and design a microprocessor. Today it takes teams of PhDs in physics, math, and engineering to do the same, in multi-billion-dollar facilities with the latest design tools and techniques. One day the buying public will realise that e-mail and word processing does not need a bazillion gigahertz, and gamers will have photorealistic animation with excellent AI. The chip maker will not make back the investment on a fab plant, and on that day Moore's Law will be dead, not for physical reasons but for economical ones.
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Perhaps Intel could hold off on the 10 ghz chips and concentrate on making some that don't get so damn hot.
Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
but after that we're facing the physical limits.
There's an insidious corollary to Moore's Law: the increasing cost of building fabs.
More than any other factor, money limitations will bend Moore's Law.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Because Less' Law has just been developed. Of course, Moore's Law made Kat's Law obsolete.
- electomechanical calculators
- relay based computers
- vacuum tubes
- discrete transistors
- integrated circuits
Moore's law will continue, but it will continue based upon a new paradigm that sweeps in and seems to "miraculously" preserve Moore's law. The obvious next step is three dimensional integrated circuits and there is already research in exactly that direction: Intel's 3d gates. AMD is also in the game. When 3d transistors lose steam some new paradigm will take its place.The number of papers publicly published proclaiming the "real soon now" end of Moore's law will double every 18 months.
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to predict technologies and processes 20+ years down the road is beyondd amusing. You cannot predict breakthroughs and discoveries.
Moore's actual Law does not require ever-shrinking transistors. It only requires that we put more of them into each chip. Double-sides chips, multi-die packaging, or 3-D layering of circuits would help increase the number of transistors in each "chip." You may think that multi-die chips is a cheat, but when it comes to packing in several billion transistors into a CPU, who cares how they do it.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Most of you know this, so please just bear with the sermon for those who do not.
Moore's Law is a marketing term which was coined by the press, not Gordon Moore himself. It's not a law in the scientific sense, like the Law of Gravity. The 'law' simply states that the number of transistors on IC's roughly doubles every 18 months. People have been predicting the death of Moore's Law for many years, and probably will for many more.
If it truly were a law, it could not die. But eventually it will fail. In the mean time, it's a 'law' that keeps sales and marketing people busy, ensuring there will always be faster processors to run the latest bloatware.
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Intel is becoming obsolete. Intel's steadfast opposition to changing their (unbelievably ancient) chip architecture and/or changing their manufacturing processes radically enough to actually innovate is no reason to declare the imminent failure of their competitors.
This is how you visualize an electron tunnelling across a gate:
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that we can't know an electron's position accurately. There's always a little bit of uncertainty about where it is. So, imagine the position of an electron not as a point, but as a little 'O'. That circle is the area that the electron could be. At any time it could be in any random place in that circle.
Now, if the 'O' is centered on the edge of one side of the gap, and the gap is bigger than the circle radius, then the electron has zero probability of crossing the gap. But, once the gap is smaller than the radius of the circle, then you've got parts of both sides of the gate within the area of the circle. Since the electron can appear randomly anywhere inside the circle, that means that sometime that electron will appear on the other side of the gate. As the gates get smaller, the probability that the electron will randomly appear on the other side of the gate goes up, until so many electrons are crossing the gate that we can't tell if the thing is on or off.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
4 and 10 Ghz is a huge jump. I doubt Intel would release them that close together. It would be horrible marketing sense. Why make such a big bang jump to 4 and 10 when Intel can suck much more money producing a 4 Ghz then a 5 Ghz and the 6 and so on. Indeed I am questioning your source, but time will tell if you are correct about these releases. As far as Moore's law: In the past when people have said Moore's law must stop it was because researchers were having harder and harder times finding ways to product smaller chips. Now we are getting close to the point that we are arranging the silicon semiconductors atom by atom. Once your organizing atoms you physically cannot do much more. You cannot work with smaller components than on an atom by atom basis. Researchers have trouble even isolating the constituent parts of an atom, and the components of an atom are still highly theoretical. And those components that have been identified are highly unstable. Supposedly though there is something called quantum computing. I don't understand it but maybe quantum computing which doesn't use transistors (as far as I know) will be the future.
Does this mean in 2018 I can put my cat Schrodinger and a vial of hydrocyanic acid in my PC and watch the sparks fly?
Every year or so, an article is published along this lines. Moores law is obsolete, no more bigger hard disks etcetera. The thing is that Moores law isn't a law as such, but the prediction that a series of revolution will increase computer power by a seemingly nice and constant line. Every time we get to the physical limits, we find other limits to go to.
- - - - - - -
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...Diamonds are a boy's best friend!
"Do you have a nerd or geek in your life? show him how much you love him by purchasing a intel diamond wedding processor(tm). A processor is forever."
"Introducing, the new intel pentium 9, the Bling Bling Ice(tm), available in both yellow and white gold settings!"
I for one, welcome our....oh, wrong tired, over used tagline....
This article has some interesting "facts" about how transistors work. I particularly like the following quote:
This is amazing. MSNBC has apparently re-written everything known about current, and logic sensing! As any undergraduate Electrical Engineer could tell you (and quite a few other people too), current flows against the direction of electron flow, not with it. If electrons are going one way, current is going the other way. That's been the convention for a VERY long time. Current is positive flow, not negative.
The other somewhat amazing claim here is that there is a logic "1" when the transistor is on and allowing electrons to flow, and a logic "0" when it is blocking them. That's amazing to me, since actually, it's the voltage at any given spot that determines the logic, not the on/off state of the transistors. And actually, one of the main benefits of CMOS technology is that between clock cycles when nothing is happening with the circuit (it is static), it consumes almost no power since no current is flowing. Charges exist, and some transistors are "on" and others are "off", but no current is flowing! (Note to other EEs: Yes I know that at current blindingly fast clock speeds, this benefit is largely gone, since few logical cells at any given time are actually not switching and charging up/down, but that was the original idea.)
Oh ya. The last thing is that in NMOS transistors, the electrons do flow from the Source to the Drain as the article said, but in PMOS, they flow from the drain to the source. And it's the Gate-to-Source voltage that's important, not just a voltage applied to the gate.
I wish they had somebody with any engineering skill, or at least a basic understanding, or at least run the article past somebody with some basic understanding of this. The writer of the article obviously has no actual knowledge whatsoever.
Erioll
4th Year Undergraduate Electrical Engineer
Has announced that they have hired Voyager's Kes, who can see past the subatomic level. Thus, AMD expects Moore's Law to survive for many years to come. Said one senior engineer at AMD's Dresden facility:
"Physical limitations? Fuck physical limitations!"
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
20nm marks the edge of the soft X-ray band in the energy spectrum and thats not a good thing to put into people's homes. Those freqencies would make working with your case open very dangerous and proper shielding would become pretty important. It's bad enough we're regularily dosed by low level X-ray emissions from CRTs but once we hit that 20nm range we're talking about harmful radiation exposure.
Also the weight of laptops would increase dramatically once lead shielding becomes a requirement...
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" -- Red Green
I think we're all missing the point here. Say we have a 2 gHz computer. (By the way, gHz really means nothing.) The speed doubles. Is that same machine twice as fast? Of course not. For sure, the limiting factor is the hard drive. While SCSI may be the most viable option for speed, we don't see drive speeds following any sort of marked increase.
I'll throw some numbers out. These are fictitious. Say we have an application that is processor intensive and read/writes a massive amount. It takes 10 seconds to process a request. (50% hard drive, 50% processor, other factors, like RAM, we don't factor in, we're looking at the point here.) The speed of the processor doubles, cutting the time for the processor in half, leaving us with 2.5 seconds instead of 5 seconds. Continuing the pattern, we soon learn it's exponential decay, with a rock bottom at 5 seconds.
Intel even acknowledged that speed wasn't everything, their very own centrino technology contradicts that Hz are everything to a computer. (running at 1-1.5 gHz clock range).
Sure, this might be useful for people with massive beowulfs, but for 90% of the home and business computing applciations, excluding servers, 1.5 ghz will do just fine, coupled with a decent drive, RAM, and a lack of any sort of windows variant, well, XP's okay. cough, cough
There is no barrier.
I am sure we all remember when we were told that phone lines could not physically hold more than 2,400 bps.
Well, we are at 56k now, and the only reason we stopped there is because cable modems have been invented and there is not as much money in it anymore.
If there is enough money to be had, humans will always find a way to push the limits further and further.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present to you HALtheCompuer's's Law:
This law states laws that govern new laws to govern electronics and transistors will become obsolete every few years and will be replaced by new and improved laws which again will become obsolete as we as humans become smarter and find newer and better ways of creating things.
Sorry, your law is already out of date. The march of progress and all that. Don't feel bad; they replaced me with a new HAL in 2010.
Mores law is coming to an end...
Jan 2003 Dec 2002 Oct 1999
Oh no its not...
Feb 2003 Sept 2002
wot no sig
We need a new Slashdot category for "Predictions of the End of Moore's Law".
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Question: Which will happen first - Moore's "law" will be broken or we'll have a compelling reason to switch everything to IPv6?
It's a bit like when my daughter was born, one of the photos I put on her website was captioned "she's doubled in age in the last 24 hours - surely this can't continue". You can get seemingly odd curve shapes when things are young, but you don't take them and extrapolate to the longer term. Everyone knows that, and that's what made Moore's curve amusing.
The staggering thing about Moore's Law is that reality then proceeded to follow it. Unprecented !
Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present to you SlashDotAgent's Law:
This law states laws that govern new laws to govern new laws to govern electronics and transistors will become obsolete every few minutes and will be replaced by new and improved laws which again will become obsolete as we as slashdotters become more bored and find newer and better ways of wasting time by posting stupid comments.
You mean that by 2020 we won't be able to keep up with Moore's law?
Golly-gee! That means that we'll only have another 11 doublings of transistor count, meaning we'll be limitted at about 2000 times the number of transistors we have today. Geez, what how would I ever survive with only the equivalent of 2,000 P4/Opteron processers in my desktop?
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
When a scientist says that something is possible, he is most probably right. When he says that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.
- Arthur C. Clarke
While I think that quantum tunneling effect is likely to place limits on the size of electronic gates, who says we have to use electronic gates?
(BTW, why are we worried about AI when our I is suspect in the first place?)
Because *we* are the "I" attempting to create the "AI". That worries me.
I see that Intel finally got around to reading The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray KurzweilChapter 1, (published in 2000, I might add)
;)
"So Where Does That Leave Moore's Law?
Well, it still leaves it dead by the year 2020. Moore's Law came along in 1958 just when it was needed and will have done its sixty years of service by 2018, a rather long period of time for a paradigm nowadays. Unlike Moore's Law, however, the Law of Accelerating Returns is not a temporary methodology. It is a basic attribute of the nature of time and chaos -- a sublaw of the Law of Time and Chaos -- and describes a wide range of apparently divergent phenomena and trends. In accordance with the Law of Accelerating Returns, another computational technology will pick up where Moore's Law will have left off, without missing a beat"
Down to the exact date! Well, at least they caught on before it was too late
but we are already switching the fuel technology backbone to Hydrogen
Hehe, I always get a kick out of it when people start talking about our new "hydrogen based society" or some other garbage like that. It's incredible how many people seem to believe that you can generate power from hydrogen! Of course, anyone with an once of scientific knowledge can tell you, unless you're talking about nuclear fussion, than hydrogen is simply an energy carrier and not an energy source. You don't pick hydrogen off the magic hydrogen tree, you don't mine hydrogen from the ground and it definitely doesn't just materialize. You put energy into water, you get hydrogen and oxygen. You combine the two back together again at a later date and you get most (but not all) of the energy back. Long story short, you've basically made a cell (aka a "battery" in commonspeak). It's no coincedence that we call these things "fuel cells".
There may be ways to break down hydrocarbons cleanly, efficiently and *cheaply*, thus providing another source of hydrogen where you can get more energy out than you have to put in, but guess where those hydrocarbons come from? If you said, oil, you win the prize!
In any case, in a vain attempt to bring this back on-topic, nanotubes and the like do provide some interesting new long-term possibilities for producing ICs, but they are definitely not without their own set of constraints. No matter how you slice it, sooner or later you run into a minimum size. At some point in time you just don't have enough atoms left to keep your electrons where you would expect them to be. There's lots that can be done in new and different ways to help push these problems further back, but no matter what technology you chose you eventually hit the same sorts of limitations.
Long story short, don't hold your breath for nanotechnology to revolutionize ICs, and definitely don't hold your breath for a society "powered by hydrogen"!
George: Hey, Elaine, you're a woman. Do women know about shrinkage?
Elain: What, you mean like, with laundry?
Jerry: Semiconductors. You know, when a man designs chips, year after year.
Elaine: They shrink?
George: Like a frightened turtle.
Elaine: I don't know how you guys compute with those.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Since commercial developers seem to have unlimited ram, disc space and processing speed and creat bloated software. Maybe soon they will focus on good and efficient software design instead of time to market. Ofcause most successful open source software have good design already. =)
I mean, we've seen this kind of crap so often, it is no longer funny, but anyway, I will bite. :)
:) Of course, any constant (moreso exponential) growth will have to stop. How is that news?
1) End draws nearer for Moore?s Law - we do not know that and this might even be false. Remember, Moore himself thought that his observation will only be valid for a decade or so. But instead the end of Moore's Law has been constantly postponed for almost half a century now. It might be that, with increased R&D, in 10 years we will expect the end of Moore's Law in 2025. Then the opposite to the article title is true - the end of Moore's Law is always pushed further into the future.
2) Ignoring the stupid and factually incorrect headline, let's turn to the idea itself that this Law will stop working some day. Well, duh. Obviously, if we are talking about transistors on silicon, we can't increase the density infinitely, because every transistor must have at least one atom and we can only pack the atoms so tightly before they start to fuse.
3) Why do we ignore all computing technologies and concentrate on transistors and silicon alone? Like Kurzweil writes, they are just a small part of the big picture. It might very well be possible to make a computer based on the electron tunneling effect, which complicates traditional transistors.
The truth is - it is possible to fit a shitload of computational capacity in a very small volume. As a minimum, we can fit a computer able to run a human-level AI in a cube 10x10x10 cm. And most likely, we will be able to do 5-20 orders of magnitude better. Most likely, not without Intel's help. Computers will not stop becoming much faster, simply because it is fashionable (or rather it was 10 years ago) to bash Moore's Law.
In short, journalists are complete idiots, we are tired from sensationalist bullshit.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
You're missing the big picture. Whatever happens to the development of semiconductors is utterly and totally moot. Moore's Law is a single trend line among a forest of trend lines all of which describe a process of evolution and expanding intelligence, beginning at a singular start of life, growing and accelerating towards some kind of ultimate sentient informational singularity.
Follow the trends for biological systems leading to a sentient life-form... us. Then the new trend lines concerning language and symbolic thought, the trend lines that describe the advance of technology. Currently we see Moore's Law. Soon we'll be facing genetic processors, molecular assemblers / processors / and unpredictable nonotechnology, quantum computing, and new applications that are beyond the event horizon of our current conceptions.
The rate at which human knowledge doubles is now down to less than 3 years. This curve may in fact be superexponential. There is no reason to believe that advancing technology won't spawn newer technologies that will continue to cause our knowledge to explode ever faster. Moore's Law will yield to manipulations of matter and new ways to process information, that will almost certainly involve added dimensions. With modalities of information processing that are only now beginning to show faint glimmers of the near future, I have absolute faith that this future is imminent, certain, and unavoidable.
Genda Bendte You begin to see
Or at least it should be obvious. Claiming that "Moore's law is not obsolete now" != "Moore's law will go on forever".
Sean
The point is not to extend the time it takes to reach the 5nm limit, beyond which no material will allow further shrinkage. If we don't reach that limit as fast as Moore's Law predicts -- if it takes several more decades to reach 5nm as you suggest -- then Moore's Law will have already failed.
In other words, Moore's Law says that progress will occur at a certain (very fast) rate, not just that progress will occur. If you take longer to make progress than Moore's Law predicts it should take, then Moore's Law has failed.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."