Limits to Moore's Law Launch New Computing Quests

tringtring alerts us to news that the National Science Foundation has requested $20 million in funding to work on "Science and Engineering Beyond Moore's Law." The PC World article goes on to say that the effort "would fund academic research on technologies, including carbon nanotubes, quantum computing and massively multicore computers, that could improve and replace current transistor technology." tringtring notes that quantum computing has received funding on its own lately, and work on multicore chips has intensified the hunt for parallel programming. Also, improvements are still being made to current transistor mechanics.

Comments

Is this necessary?

[nebaz]

I don't really think a prize is necessary for this technology. Unlike space travel, reearch in chip design have shown to be profitable at the commercial level, and there is also no government monopoly to stifle progress in this area. Whether or not a prize is offered, faster computers and better technology are what we as consumers expect in this area, and what we will pay for.

Re:Is this necessary?

[Eravnrekaree]

Capital investment is most important with things like this. The purpose of the prize however might not be that it is necessary, but rather to accelerate development, speed it up. The benefits of course of improving technology would be significant, more powerful, faster computers.

Re:Is this necessary?

[Mike1024]

I don't really think a prize is necessary for this technology.

Who said anything about a prize? The PC World article talks about 'funding for research', i.e. cash given to researchers to develop new technology.

Unlike space travel, reearch in chip design have shown to be profitable at the commercial level, [...] Whether or not a prize is offered, faster computers and better technology are what we as consumers expect in this area, and what we will pay for.

It's true that a lot of commercial effort goes into current chips and the improvement thereof, but there isn't much commercial effort going into areas like quantum computing because the potential rewards are a loooooong way off. Your money is much safer invested in designing a 32-core Core2ThirtyTwo to be made in 3 years, compared to quantum computing, a technology that faces substantial scalability roadblocks and that no-one knows how to design algorithms for.

Most of the current quantum computers which have been demonstrated rely on Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), but it is thought this technique will not scale well - it is believed less than 100 qubits would be possible. As of 2006, the largest quantum computer ever demonstrated was 12 qubits (making it capable of such tasks as quickly finding the prime factors of a number... as long as that number is less than 4096.

In summary, promising future technologies often make poor investments because they are (a) experimental and (b) a long way off. So some funding to make research possible wouldn't go amiss.

Just my $0.02.

Re:cost per computation / 3-D Chips

[mean pun]

Even if we keep getting exponential growth of transistors per dollar in the coming years, the question is what to do with them. Arranging them in useful circuits is increasingly difficult because at a certain point adding cache and execution units to a processor just isn't very helpful (hence multi-core). Adding more cores is also not going to help at some point. Moreover, power dissipation can't keep growing proportionally, which means that with increasing transistor counts each transistor will have to dissipate less, which means lowering the average number of switching events per transistor, and how are we going to arrange for that?

Moore's Law is bullshit.

[Xiph1980]

Moore just happened to make a prognosis that transistordensity would double every 2 years.
It just happened to work out that way. We're about to reach a point where current transistors won't cut in anymore. At such a point we'll either stagnate because we can't make a smaller process than 10 nanometer and we can't find a different functional tech, or we'll make an enormous jump in performance because we'll find something in a different field, be it optics or nano-tubing, that does make processors a lot faster.

Moore's law isn't a law, and should never have been called that way. It's merely a prognosis.
microprocessor technology is driven by the market. If the general consumer thinks their pc is fast enough, manufacturers will focus on energy-efficiency to sell more cpu's, and speed will start to be a secondary concern.

Re:Killer app?

[master_p]

How about:

1) parallel search
2) accurate text translation
3) accurate human speech rendering
4) raytracing for 3d graphics
5) advanced physics in 3d applications
6) more dynamic programming languages
7) better video and audio decompression
8) much faster compression
9) ultra fast large WORD document repagination
etc

Re:Killer app?

[Anonymous Coward]

And what would be the killer app that needed all that extra power?

Well, there are a couple, graphics processing for example. Governments in particular however might be interested in two different areas which would profit considerably from massively parallel computing: (semi-)brute force cryptanalysis and simulation (think weapons, in particular, nuclear ones since it's difficult and expensive to do real tests with them).

Re:patents?

[Jasin Natael]

It's not a prize. It's funding; A budget. This is the older-than-dirt story of, "If you build it, they will come!" vs. "I have a 0.01% chance of succeeding if I try to build it, so who's going to feed my family in the 99.99% probable case that I fail?"

Re:Moore's Law is really about price-performance

[billstewart]

Sure, Moore expressed his observations in terms of transistor density, and the speed factor of 1-2 years has varied a bit over the last few decades, but what it's really about is price-performance of technology in a positive-reinforcement market. If you want to sell more chips, you either have to make them faster or cheaper or both, unless you're the only player in an underserved market.

So the expensive fast chips get faster to sell to customers with the need for speed, and the production technology gets refined to make more chips cheaper at a given speed, so the currently-fast speeds get cheaper, and the currently-cheap chips get faster, but on the other hand you do spend more capital on each new generation of fab plant.

And as the chips get faster, the software makers use up the available speed, and as the software makes machines slower (but more useful, or more friendly, or more popular), the customers want faster chips or bigger memories or bigger disks or all of the above.

The big threats to Moore's Law right now aren't so much that we're running into the edge of silicon technology, but that Microsoft Vista is sufficiently unsatisfactory that people aren't buying it unless it ships on their new laptops, so there's less demand for faster machines, and also that gamers are playing more MMORPGs, where faster CPUs and graphics chips don't make as much difference in game capability as they do with standalone games (but even so, a cutting-edge graphics card costs more than a business-class desktop computer.)

On the other hand, virtualization (which is pretty much the reinvention of time-sharing) is pushing the business sector toward doing new and exciting technology for clustering storage, and at least creating some demand for RAM, and using up some of those multi-core CPUs even though they're buying fewer of them. And we're starting to hit environments where the cost of electricity for cooling and power exceeds the cost of the CPU itself, so price-performance is starting to get measured in watts/bogomips, rather than just dollars/bogomips.