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End of Moore's Law in 10-15 years?
javipas writes "In 1965 Gordon Moore — Intel's co-founder — predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years. Moore's Law has been with us for over 40 years, but it seems that the limits of microelectronics are now not that far from us. Moore has predicted the end of his own law in 10 to 15 years, but he predicted that end before, and failed."
Moore has predicted the end of his own law in 10 to 15 years, but he predicted that end before, and failed.
So then it seems with regards to his Law, Moore has fallen prey to Murphy.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It will be just in time for the arrival of cold fusion.
Moore's second law: "Moore's first law will only work for 10-15 more years".
Moore's third law: "Moore's second law applies from the time it is quoted not from when it was originally uttered".
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
There are always a few of these.
I do recall someone telling me that no CPU would ever run at more than 2GHz, as it would then start emitting microwave radiation...
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
mod me funny
Next year, they'll tell us that Moore's Law will end in 5-7.5 years.
I have no idea if Moore's Law will really start to "fail" in a particular time scale (one of these times it's gotta be true, right?), but a related issue I find interesting is that CPU speeds don't seem to be being touted to computer buyers so heavily anymore. Walk into a big electronics store and look at their desktop offerings: where they used to prominently feature how many GHz they had inside (and people vaguely felt that more of these mysterious GHz was better), now the CPUs are given code names and numbers that don't reflect CPU speed: Check out this nifty X2, or the Turion 64, or ...
The new hook for consumers is the number of "cores", and once again most people have probably picked up the vague sense that having more of them inside means the computer is better. I've been told by people who might be in a position to know that it's not that they can't keep cranking up CPU speeds, but that the cost/benefit (profit-wise) stops making sense at some point because of the huge cost of implementing a new fab at a finer length scale, and we're pretty much at that point. So it makes sense that cores are the new GHz, and Moore's Law will have less and less direct impact on the end computer buyer from now on.
Maybe there's a Core Law to be formulated about how often the average number of processors per computer can be expected to double?
This is slashdot, so ...
no.
John
A realistic design for a quantum computer would probably have a classical CPU that does most of the work, with a quantum co-processor. Traditional things, like running the OS and dealing with hardware I/O, would probably still be classical. The quantum co-processor would be assigned computations by the CPU that can be accomplished much faster than on the classical CPU.
This abstraction would mean that most software wouldn't have to be written with any understanding of quantum computing: libraries and compilers would be designed to use CPU calls that launch the quantum co-processor, if available.
For many operations, the quantum CPU would not be needed. But for certain tasks, it would provide orders-of-magnitude speed boosts. If quantum co-processors became commonplace, we would see improvements in all kinds of parallel-processing tasks (matrix operations, simulations, graphics, maybe even search?).
I predict the number of predictions of the end of Moore's Law will double every six months.
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
If you accept the statement I just made about moore's law being sustained because of economics then here's a corollary which makes an observable prediction.
Moores law stays fixed because the industry invests enough research dollars--and not one dollar more-- to keep it at that rate. Their entire economic model is built on this.
Therefore, if we every do reach a point where we simply are running out of available physics and computer science (multiprocessing) then the first sign of this will be an increasing fraction of research dollars spent to sustain moores law.
Plot the industry's margin, smooth the curve, and you will be able to extrapolate to the point where the research dollars cross the profit line. somewhere shortly before that is when moore's law will end.
The only way that would not be true is if the nature of innovation changes from frequent small leaps to massive leaps spaced far apart.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
That's nonsense. The industry grew around the physics, not vice versa. The fact that the industry is predicated on a constant improvement of speed and complexity is because such a thing is achievable in microelectronics, certainly not because microelectronics is the only industry where such a thing is desirable.
I mean, who wouldn't want cars to become twice as gas efficient (without losing power) every 18 months, ad infinitum? If such a thing were technically possible, it would happen, because all the car makers would jump on the gas-mileage bandwagon to get ahead of their competitors.
Who wouldn't want the amount of food that can be grown per man-hour to double every 18 months, so the price per pound of beans and broccoli fell as fast as the price per CPU cycle of computers? If such a thing were possible, it would happen, as every farmer raced to lower his costs of production and undersell his neighbors like crazy, earning millions.
In very few industries other than microelectronics has anything like Moore's Law applied, and that's not from a lack of economic incentive, but from the plain uncooperativity of Mother Nature. You're arguing backwards, from effect (the economic structure of the industry) to cause (the physical nature of microelectronics).
Whenever one process technology reaches its physical limits, we get a new one, because the new process makes money.
.NET and Java are a little interesting, but programming computers is still a PITA.
I kinda agree and kinda disagree.
Moore's "Law" is clearly stated in terms of physics. It says that the number of transisters will double, not the speed will double over time.
However, as Kurzweil and other's have observed, the speed of _computation_ has doubled over time before Moore's law and there is no reason or hint that this will stop once Moore's law is obsolete.
Take a peek at http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 specifically http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/images/chart03.jpg
ICs have been good for a while, but then so were abacus' at one time.
CPUs are simply different than they were a few years ago. Things like the Niagra chip from Sun and the multi-core stuff from AMD and Intel is pretty different design (SMP on a chip -- yes, that is an oversimplification).
10-15 years is about in the middle of 2020, which seems to be a common point of a number of interesting stuff. Physics computations are predicted to be pretty interesting by then. Computers are predicted to be interesting by then. Who knows what else.
Its not hardware that I think is the problem or challenge, its the pains of software that seems to be more challenging. I mean its 2007 and we have what for software? OSes and compilers and whatnot have pretty much stagnated since the early 70s. Sure, we have 4g languages that are easier for us stupid people to program with, but from a performance and efficiency POV they are backwards, not forwards. JIT stuff in
I guess we will have to wait and see.
They only change in ways that are generally not possible to anticipate, hence which haven't been predicted.
And of course they would. Technology, like the stock market or the weather, is inherently a chaotic system over a certain characteristic timespan (1-2 weeks for the stock market and the weather, 25-50 years for technology). That is, over the characteristic timespan very small causes can produce enormous, system-wide effects, what you might call the butterfly wing flapping causing the hurricane phenomenon.
For example, a couple of guys (Jobs and Wozniak) screw around in the garage in the early 80s, trying to put together a really cheap personal computer. That's a very small cause. And twenty-five years later, it has had a giant effect: iMacs and iPods and iTunes oh my. Problem is, there was no practical way in the 1980s to distinguish the small cause that mattered (Jobs and Wozniak) from the other 50 zillion small causes that didn't matter (the other 50 zillion pairs of scruffy entrepreneurs in garages whose brilliant idea went nowhere).
This is why predictions of the future out more than 50 years usually end up looking hilarious in hindsight. When sf writers of the 50s and 60s predicted the present, they projected the dominant themes of their time (spaceflight, atomic physics, the struggle with Soviet Communism). They did not -- and could not -- realize that all three themes would pretty much abruptly and surprisingly come to an end in the 90s. When present writers predict the future, they project the dominant themes of our times (e.g. networked computing). It's very likely these projections, too, will end up wildly wrong. Networked computing is likely to become as humdrum and static as telephony within the next half-century or so.
I'm not sure if this is the same article that you saw previously, but this paper discusses that topic:
Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation" Nature 406, 1047-1054 (31 August 2000) | doi: 10.1038/35023282 (for those without access to Nature articles, this arXiv preprint appears to be the same article).
The article reviews the absolute maximum limits for computation, based on current understanding of thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics.
The basic conclusion of the paper is that a theoretical 1 kg computer (confined to a volume of 1 liter), operating perfectly at the edge of what is physically possible could compute 10^51 operations/second on 10^31 bits of information (as compared to our current computers: 10^10 operations/second on 10^10 bits). Naively scaling Moore's law from current sizes, this suggests that we will reach such limits in 250 years. Of course the paper repeatedly points out that this is for an unrealistically 'perfect' computer, that is somehow able to perfectly organize all its internal matter solely for performing the computation at hand. For instance when running a computation it effectively has a temperature of ~10^9 Kelvin, which is considerably hotter than any known material could withstand.
Nevertheless, it's interesting to see what the fundamental principles of relativity and quantum mechanics indicate as a boundary for any sort of computation. The article is an interesting read.