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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."
350 may bring costs down, but it isn't a process node advancement and won't help cram more transistors per unit area into a chip.
Instead it will just let them process more chips at once in most time-consuming processing steps such as deposition and oxide growth. The photolithographic systems, which are the most expensive equipment in the entire fab on a cost-per-wafer-processed-per-hour basis, gain somewhat due to less wafer exchanging, but the imaging is still done a few square cm at a time repeated in a step-and-scan manner a hundred times or more per wafer per step. Larger wafers however are posing one hell of a problem for maintaining film and etch uniformity, extremely important when you have transistor gate oxides on the order of a few atoms thick.
When people say this, I think that the person is not being imaginative about the future. Sure, we can meet 99% of current computing needs, but what about uses that we have not yet imagined.
Image processing and AI are still pretty piss poor, and not all bound by network and bandwidth limits. Watch a Roomba crash into the wall as it randomly cleans your room, Dark Ages!
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.
Erh... no.
As an "old" programmer who happens to know a few languages, ASM for a few different machines among them, I can reassure you that you do NOT want to return to the good ol' days of Assembler hacking. For more than one reason.
The most obvious one is maintenance. I still write ASM for embedded applications where size does matter because you're measuring your available space in Bytes. Not even kBytes. Where it matters that your code takes exactly this or that many cycles, none more, none less. But these are very, very specific routines with a "write once, never touch again" policy in mind. You do not want to be the poor bastard who gets to maintain ASM code. Even less so if it's not your own (which is already anything but trivial). ASM is often a very ugly mess of processor side effects being used for some kind of hack because you simply didn't have the time and/or space to do it "right".
C is probably the closst you should get today to the "metal" anymore. Unless of course you have a VERY good reason to go lower, but I can not really think of anything that doesn't deal with the OS itself.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is not so much in the hardware than in the software nowadays...
As an addendum to the parent (I, too, have a background in ASM programming): You're working at such low level of detail that any application of non-trivial size becomes extremely difficult to write truly effectively. You just can't keep so many details in mind at once. And when you need to work as a team, not alone, interfacing code becomes a nightmare.
So of course you abstract your assembler code. You define interfaces, develop and use libraries of common application tasks, and just generally structure your code at small and large scales.
But at that point, you are starting to lose the advantage of ASM. A good, modern C compiler is a lot better than you to find serendipitous optimization points in structured code, and it is not constrained by human memory and understanding so it doesn't need to structure the final code in a readable (but slower) way.
Small, time-critical sections, fine. Small embedded apps on tiny hardware, no problem. But ASM as a general-purpose application language? That stopped making sense decades ago.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Oh look the 100th executive to predict the end of moore's law in the last month.
This hits the nail on the head. For decades, software developers have been able to play fast and loose, while counting on the ever-faster hardware to make up for bloated, inefficient programs. Those days are ending. Programmers will need to be a lot more disciplined, and really engineer their programs, in order to get as much performance as possible out of the hardware. In a lot of ways, it will be similar to the early days of computing.
It's not cheap to get rid of that much processor power without improving anything.
Office XP system requirements: Single core processor at 0.133 GHz minimum. 0.4 GHz recommended. RAM 0.024 GB (OS) + 0.008 GB (Office). Storage 0.21 to 0.26 GB.
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