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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.
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?
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.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
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.
Manuals are your last resort only
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
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?"
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.