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How Much Smaller Can Chips Go?
nk497 writes "To see one of the 32nm transistors on an Intel chip, you would need to enlarge the processor to beyond the size of a house. Such extreme scales have led some to wonder how much smaller Intel can take things and how long Moore's law will hold out. While Intel has overcome issues such as leaky gates, it faces new challenges. For the 22nm process, Intel faces the problem of 'dark silicon,' where the chip doesn't have enough power available to take advantage of all those transistors. Using the power budget of a 45nm chip, if the processor remains the same size only a quarter of the silicon is exploitable at 22nm, and only a tenth is usable at 11nm. There's also the issue of manufacturing. Today's chips are printed using deep ultraviolet lithography, but it's almost reached the point where it's physically impossible to print lines any thinner. Diffraction means the lines become blurred and fuzzy as the manufacturing processes become smaller, potentially causing transistors to fail. By the time 16nm chips arrive, manufacturers will have to move to extreme ultraviolet lithography — which Intel has spent 13 years and hundreds of millions trying to develop, without success."
They're going to hit atomic scale transistors fairly soon from what I can see as well, the manufacturing process for those is probably prohibitively expensive but that is as small as they can go(according to our current knowledge of the universe at least).
I can't imagine Intel has all of its eggs in one basket on Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography though. Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.
At the extreme, maybe it might be time for a new CPU architecture? Intel has been doing so much stuff behind the scenes to keep the x86 architecture going, that it may be time to just bite the bullet and move to something that doesn't require as much translation?
Itanium comes to mind here because it offers a dizzying amount of registers, both FPU and CPU available to programs. To boot, it can emulate x86/amd64 instructions.
Virtual machine technology is coming along rapidly. Why not combine a hardware hypervisor and other technology so we can transition to a CPU architecture that was designed in the past 10-20 years?
Distant parts of the chip then have a communication lag, but yes, this will really help. Certainly much less lag than communicating with something outside the die.
Wouldn't that suggest that three dimensional chips be the logical next step. Although heat dissipation would become more difficult, not to mention the fact that the production process would be an order of magnitude more complicated.
For one, Itanium is still going strong in high end servers. It is a tiny market, but Itanium sells well (no I don't know why).
However in terms of the desktop, you might notice something: When AMD came out with an x64 chip and everyone, most importantly Microsoft, decided they liked it and started developing for it, Intel had one out in a hurry. This doesn't just happen. You don't design a chip in a couple months, it takes a long, long time. What this means is Intel had been hedging their bets. They developed an x64 chip (they have a license for anything AMD makes for x86 just as AMD has a license for anything they make) should things go that way. They did and Intel ran with it.
Ran with it well, I might add, since now the top performing x64 chips are all Intel.
They aren't a stupid company, and if you think they are I'd question your judgment.
Making 3D chips is the holy grail of semiconductor processing but is still beyond reach. They've not been able to lay down a single crystal second layer to make your stacked chip. They have tried using amorphous silicon but the devices are not near as good so there is no point.
We are already seeing the outcrop of all of this, as next years machines are not necessarily 2x the performance at the same cost. I really think that money would be better spent helping all of you coders out there in creating a language/compiler programing paradigm that can use 12 threads efficiently for something beyond rendering GTA. I certainly don't have the answer and given that that problem has not been solved yet, neither does anybody else at this time.
Its a very very hard problem. It is going to be interesting here in the next few years. If nothing changes, your going to have to start becoming accustom to the fact that next years PC is going to cost you MORE not less and thats really going to suck.
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