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Strained Silicon to Perpetuate Moore's Law
An anonymous reader noted a story floating around about a new technology known as strained silicon (or maybe 'Stained' since the article calls it both ;) which AMD & IBM figure will make CPUs 24% faster. A little bit on how it works as well, but not much substance.
24% does not perpetuate moores law.
This technique will allow transistors to react 24% faster. That doesn't neccesarily translate into faster cpus. For example, if this makes transistors run hotter, they will have to lower density. Furthermore, Intel already uses a version of this.
This technology is by no means new... It's in both Intels and AMD's 90 nm offerings, and it has been discussed for years.
This is a good article (from 2002!).
The time it takes for a signal to propagate down a wire is now much more important than it used to be.
A 24% increase in transistor speed is not going to instantly create a 24% faster processor.
Slow wires (relative to transistor speeds) will soon dominate.
"Strained" is exactly that, the silicon lattice is under strain. What does this do to the durability of the chip? Does it make the chip more subject to breaking from physical shock (dropping your laptop, for example)? Does it make the chip more subject to failure from the stress of power-up?
No, but what are they going to do with their desktop x86-CPUs during 2005? The P4 is dead in the water at just below 4GHz. The dual-cores and above aren't ready for another 12 months.
When was the last time that nothing happened to a processor line for twelve months? The P4 in its various incarnations is their main desktop platform and its offspring (Xeons) are on the server side too.
I guess they could push the Pentium-M for desktops, but... let's just say that they've sort of made their bed with the gigahertz-race.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Is it an interesting technology that we'll benefit from? Sure. But the mention of Moore's Law on this topic is just plain careless.
Seen any BadMarketing lately?
There's nothing wrong with "Moore's Law".
As members of the science and engineering community, we understand that a Law is one of the highest designations we can give a phenomena. It implies that there exists consistent empirical evidence for the phenomena. Evolution and Relativity have far more evidence yet they are still theories.
What a load of utter rubbish. The reason some things are named 'laws' and some things are named 'theories' has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of them. Things were called 'laws' back in the 17th-19th century when a lot of people actually thought that they embodied some exact and final property of nature. None of them did.
The truth is, that most of the things called 'laws' are exactly like 'Moore's law': an ad-hoc mathematical description of an empirical observation.
Boyle's law, Hooke's law, Avogadro's law, Newton's law of gravity, Ohm's law, Arrhenius' law, and so on and so on. All of these laws were derived essentially the same way: By fitting a curve to experimental data.
Boyle and Avogadro didn't know what a gas was made up of. Arrhenius did not understand statistical thermodynamics, Newton did not understand gravity.
Now the theories you refer to, are something completely different in both rigor and how well the describe things. For instance the 'theory of relativity' is based on a set of basic postulates, from which the rest follows mathematically.
Einstein did not go out and measure the relationship of mass and speed and fit a curve to it. He made a few assumptions (some of which noone had dare make before) and worked out the physical consequences, arriving at something which just-so-happens to match reality far better than Newton's fitting-the-simplest-curve approach did.
A long time ago, software programming was done by people with some exposure to electrical engineering and specifically computer hardware. But from there programming became increasingly messy, less of a science. Lisp lost to C, then C++, then Java. Software Engineering has become an oxymoron; Cutler's latest Operating System has become WinXP and the situation you describe for hardware is the norm for operating systems. It would not surprise me if hardware industry becomes more infected by the "hack and check mentality." I think EDA tool venders are unlikely to do the "right thing"
Well theoretically you can have a lesser product and maintain market dominance. Not just slower clock speed, but even lower performance. Certainly the features and quality of the product has an impact, but I thinkt he biggest contributing factor is the marketability. If you can lock vendors in (microsoft), or make your brand name fashionable (nike, pepsi/coke), etc then you can hold a market.
Think about it, is coke/pepsi really about the product at all? It's flavored sugar water, there are plenty of companies that do a better job (higher quality, better taste, lower cost, whatever). This shows you the power of locking in vendors (restaurants, sporting events, etc) and applying some sort of collective desirability (drinking coke/pepsi is more fashionable than drinking faygo?).
Are consumer grade electronics any different? Maybe if the computer market was more like washing machines than it is like soda/shoes/cars we'd
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"Einstein did not go out and measure the relationship of mass and speed and fit a curve to it. He made a few assumptions (some of which noone had dare make before) and worked out the physical consequences, arriving at something which just-so-happens to match reality far better than Newton's fitting-the-simplest-curve approach did."
I think you're selling classical physics short. Newton's laws are hardly just empirical rules of thumb. I think there's hardly anything as beautiful in its simplicity as the principle of least action, and classical mechanics is embodied in it.
Kepler's laws fit your description fairly well, but Newton's laws were and still are rather profound in their scope.
Things will slow down sooner or later, but frankly I'd prefer later. As long as we have the luxury of doubling performance every few years I say lets do the most we can with it.
Eventually things will settle down, and people wishing to perform even greater computational feats will be pining for the rapid technological pace we have today.
In any case there's no use fighting progress, and if the market truly decides to demand stability over performance products will be made available. it's already ahppening as comapnies are getting less and less return on shiny new 3 GHz PCs. There will probably be a divergence between everyday desktop systems and high end workstations used in scientific computing and related areas (like the old days coming back again, just with more computers all around).
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