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Moore's Law Blowout Sale Is Ending, Says Broadcom CTO
itwbennett writes "Broadcom Chairman and CTO Henry Samueli has some bad news for you: Moore's Law isn't making chips cheaper anymore because it now requires complicated manufacturing techniques that are so expensive they cancel out the cost savings. Instead of getting more speed, less power consumption and lower cost with each generation, chip makers now have to choose two out of three, Samueli said. He pointed to new techniques such as High-K Metal Gate and FinFET, which have been used in recent years to achieve new so-called process nodes. The most advanced process node on the market, defined by the size of the features on a chip, is due to reach 14 nanometers next year. At levels like that, chip makers need more than traditional manufacturing techniques to achieve the high density, Samueli said. The more dense chips get, the more expensive it will be to make them, he said."
I thought Intel, Samsung and TSMC claim that the upcoming 350mm wafer going to bring along another round of cost saving.
Are they telling the truth, or are they blowing smoke ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Used to be you used to have to upgrade every 2 years. Now you really have to upgrade every 5 or 7 years. Once every 10 years sounds pretty good to me. As the pace of computer innovation slows, less money has to go towards upgrades. Computers are now more like appliances, you run them down until they physically break.
Of course if you manufacture computers or work in IT, then such a proposition is horrible as a long product lifecyle means less money coming to you. As a consumer, I like it because I no longer have to shell out hundreds of dollars every other year to keep my computers usable.
Well, we had a good run. 99% of the computing needs of 99% of the people can be met by the existing chips electronics. For most people network and bandwidth limits their ability to do things, not raw computing power or memory. So Moore's observation (it ain't no law) running out of steam is no big deal. Of course the tech companies need to transition from selling shiny new things every two years to a more sedate pace of growth.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
About ten years ago, I went to a talk at Stanford where someone showed that the increasing costs of wafer fabs would make this happen around 2013. We're right on schedule.
Storage can still get cheaper. We can look forward to a few more generations of flash devices. Those don't have to go faster.
The most advanced process node on the market, defined by the size of the features on a chip, is due to reach 14 nanometers next year.
Actually, the "process node" hasn't meant anything for years now.
If that's true, we can only hope that the exponential bloating of software stops as well. Software has been eating the free lunch Moore was providing before it got to the users; the sad reality is that the typical end-user hasn't seen much in the way of performance improvements - in some cases, common tasks are even slower now than 10 years ago.
Oh sure, we defend it by claiming that the software is "good enough" (or will be on tomorrow's computers, anyway), and we justify the bloat by claiming that the software is better in so many other areas like maintainability (it's not), re-usability (it's not), adherence to "design patterns" (regardless of whether they help or hurt), or just "newer software technologies" (I'm looking at you, XAML&WPF), as if the old ones were rusting away.
Yeah, well, we have been in somewhat a flat stage, and will be for a while. Here is a good graphic.
http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchips-appears-be-coming-end-no-moore
If Intel's investor day meeting is to be believed this is not true at least for their next 2 process nodes
http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/INTC/2827417808x0x709360/2D44DBF8-58B8-403F-B0E8-16E114CFF0E8/2013_IM_Smith.pdf .
Look at Slide 36.
--whacky
Oh look the 100th executive to predict the end of moore's law in the last month.
wrong. your reading comprehension is abysmal. The number of transistors doubling says NOTHING about density, only the number of transistors without any mention of area taken. Speed is not mentioned at all.
But an end to Moore's Law has been predicted before multiple times, and it hasn't happened yet. (Things have slowed down, yes, but they're far from stopping.) A few years back hard drives were predicted to reach a storage density limit, but this was solved by turning the magnetic cells vertical. So Moore's Law may finally be coming to an end, but don't be surprised if something new comes along and blows silicon transistors away.
As a non-American, that one doesn't bother me much :)
Encourage inventors rather than patent troll them into oblivion.
Just a thought, I know it would destroy much of the current economic model, but maybe - just maybe - those expensive techniques are merely the product of insufficient brains. Does the semiconductor world forget so soon that "cutting edge" in the 1970s was to melt silicon and scrape off the scum on top? Does it eve r occur to anyone that, just as we use reduction techniques to obtain silicon today because older methods were crap, there exists the potential that the expensive, low-quality techniques of today could be the rejects of tomorrow?
There are no inventors any more because silicon is a bloody expensive field to get kicked out of by patent trolls. Mind you, it's also a difficult area to get into, what with TARP being used to fund golden parachutes, bonuses and doubtless a few ladies of the night rather than business loans and venture capital. There's probably a few tens of thousands of mad scientists on Slashdot, and I'm probably one of the maddest. Give each of us 15 million and I guarantee the semiconductor market will never be the same.
(P.S. For the NSA regulars on Slashdot, and if you don't know who you are, you can look it up, feel free to post on your journals or as an article all the nifty chip ideas you've intercepted that have never been used. After all, you're either for us or for the terrorists.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
8 years ago I was rocking a single core pc with two gigs of memory and a phone with ~320mhz cpu....
and when did they attach to moores law "lower power use" - if that were it then the law would have been out of the window 1985 and athlons would never have been either..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It was good while it lasted.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
The thread is about application development on general-use PCs, which means Intels compiler, the MS compiler, gcc and the like on x86 or ARM.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Let me guess, you're a huge Ray Kurzweil fan.
I see many emerging technologies that promise further great progress in computing. Here are some of them. I wish some industry people here could post some updates about their way to the market. They may not literally prolong the Moore's Law in regards to the number of transistors, but they promise great performance gains, which is what really matters.
3D chips. As materials science and manufacturing precision advances, we will soon have multi-layered (starting at a few layers that Samsung already has, but up to 1000s) or even fully 3D chips with efficient heat dissipation. This would put the components closer together and streamline the close-range interconnects. Also, this increases "computation per rack unit volume", simplifying some space-related aspects of scaling.
Memristors. HP is ready to produce the first memristor chips but delays that for business reasons (how sad is that!) Others are also preparing products. Memristor technology enables a new approach to computing, combining memory and computation in one place. They are also quite fast (competitive with the current RAM) and energy-efficient, which means easier cooling and possible 3D layout.
Photonics. Optical buses are finding their ways into computers, and network hardware manufacturers are looking for ways to perform some basic switching directly with light. Some day these two trends may converge to produce an optical computer chip that would be free from the limitations of electric resistance/heat, EM interference, and could thus operate at a higher clock speed. Would be more energy efficient, too.
Spintronics. Probably further in the future, but potentially very high-density and low-power technology actively developed by IBM, Hynix and a bunch of others. This one would push our computation density and power efficiency limits to another level, as it allows performing some computation using magnetic fields, without electrons actually moving in electrical current (excuse me for my layman understanding).
Quantum computing. This could qualitatively speed up whole classes of tasks, potentially bringing AI and simulation applications to new levels of performance. The only commercial offer so far is Dwave, and it's not a classical QC, but so many labs are working on that, the results are bound to come soon.
If _nothing_ changes, yes this will all come to pass.
BUT
Want to bet that in a lab somewhere, there is something that will let Moore's continue?
Think: how many times has this prediction been made and then proven wrong? Wonder if these statements are just ploys to jack up prices?
Sit back, relax, and be prepared to be amazed.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Storage / RAM is not the only application for memristors. As they can serve as single-element excitation counters, they enable extremely power-efficient neuromorphic chips, as described in this paper from Intel (PDF warning): Proposal For Neuromorphic Hardware Using Spin Devices
We present a design-scheme for ultra-low power neuromorphic hardware using emerging spin-devices. We propose device models for 'neuron', based on lateral spin valves and domain wall magnets that can operate at ultra-low terminal voltage of ~20 mV, resulting in small computation energy. Magnetic tunnel junctions are employed for interfacing the spin-neurons with charge-based devices like CMOS, for large-scale networks. Device-circuit co-simulation-framework is used for simulating such hybrid designs, in order to evaluate system-level performance. We present the design of different classes of neuromorphic architectures using the proposed scheme that can be suitable for different applications like, analog-data-sensing, data-conversion, cognitive-computing, associative memory, programmable-logic and analog and digital signal processing. We show that the spin-based neuromorphic designs can achieve 15X-300X lower computation energy for these applications; as compared to state of art CMOS designs.
It’s not about “green idiots.” It’s about the fact that chips will melt (burn? fry?) if you don’t keep them cool, and you can only dissipate so much heat from air cooling. Water cooling is used in HPC systems, but that too only goes so far. What’s next? Everyone needs a supply of liquid nitrogen to run their desktop PCs?
The “power wall” is a real, practical problem, which we reached somewhere around 2001, where power dissipation hit ~150 Watts in high-end systems. And the challenges go beyond cooling. Did you know that half the pins (around 1000) on a modern CPU are used just for power and ground? Do the math on trying to get 150 Watts at 1 Volt through a single pair if wires.
Oh, and what about mobile computers? Current battery technology can only old so much charge. Do you want your cell phone to get only an hour of useful life before recharging?
Bomb the right 20 places on the planet an the human race would need a few decades to be able to make chips again.
No, you are mistaken.
In the 8088 days the term "fabless semiconductor company" was still a new concept (1978 versus 1979 for the 8088) since every man and his dog had a fab. Any university wth a condensed matter physics department has a clean room and fab facilities. They're not set up for mass manufactuing of chips right now because there's no point.
There are thousands of places on the planet that could make chips on the level of an 8088 pretty much today.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
One thing that really hobbles the PIC platform is the lack of a good and free compiler for the 12, 16 and 18 ranges.
The one thing that really hobbles the PIC platform is the lack of a good architecture (save for PIC32, perhaps).
Ezekiel 23:20
They have. Functional programming. By explicitly avoiding side effects huge chunks of code can execute independently and in different orders. Moreover by organizing the code using functional looping constructors the parallel compilers can tell how to break things.
Functional makes parallelism much easier.
Which is actually of surprisingly little concern in most companies. As odd as it may seem, vendor lock-in doesn't faze managers in the slightest. Maybe because it saves them from having to make decisions about stuff they don't know jack about. "Oh, we cannot switch to $other_system, because $mission_critical_app won't run" seems to be an asset for them, not a limitation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.