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Intel Says Chips To Become Slower But More Energy Efficient (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: William Holt, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group, has said at a conference that chips will become slower after industry re-tools for new technologies such as spintronics and tunneling transistors. "The best pure technology improvements we can make will bring improvements in power consumption but will reduce speed." If true, it's not just the end of Moore's Law, but a rolling back of the progress it made over the last fifty years.
Hopefully if this does happen they will keep making the existing products, at least until they *do* manage performance improvements that catch up / exceed older stuff. Where I work we have lots of customers that *need* more processing power, and efficiency be damned.
William George
I can't imagine that there will simply be zero demand for fast, or faster, chips, regardless of the power efficiency. Some applications just demand it. If Intel won't do it, then someone else will, whether that's AMD or some new competitor in China or wherever.
On the other hand, there's certainly a market for more efficiency, especially in mobile devices, so I can certainly see lines of chips designed for that heading in the way described.
A flight from London to New York takes as long today as it did about 50 years ago. But the current planes achieve that more efficiently, with slightly larger windows, and some more pressure and humidity in the cabin. How depressing to think that the computing world might be about to enter a similarly dismal stage as well.
So the plan to make transistors tolerate higher clock speeds by using better materials is not going to happen?
Yet another restating of Moore's Law? The thing gets revised to whatever the latest growth area is.
The original 1965 article it was about "component counts", then it was revised in a later talk to be "circuit density", then revised in 1975 to be "semiconductor complexity", then revised in the later '70s to be "circuit and device cleverness", has been restated yet again when serial devices flatlined in favor of highly parallel chips.
Assuming this goes through the chipset, it will likely be restated again in terms of whatever other factor on the chips continues to grow.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Lots of ways to get "speed."
On the other hand, designs with less energy loss will open up the potential of higher speeds, once the techniques get refined.
One of the (many) limit issues with trying to force current CPUs faster is that the waste energy grows quickly as you increase switching frequency. Energy density becomes a significant problem, and manufacturers are not content with the idea of making all consumer devices use liquid-cooling and/or refrigeration techniques to prevent CPU melt. Take a couple years learning a more efficient set of components and tools, and the cap may raise past something (currently) silly like a passively cooled 8GHz chip.
MS are playing a very long game because they can afford to. Despite it's well-publicized problems, I find Windows 10 is fast and rock-solid on a desktop and on a Lumia phone. They already have Windows compiled for ARM and they have Office desktop apps compiled for ARM. OK it's a kludged version on the RT platform, but most of the work is done. They are making it easy and attractive (at least in a 'hell, why not?' sense) for new app development to compile for both x86 and ARM. I think one of the reasons why Windows 10 Mobile ('Phone') still exists is because it keeps the ARM branch current and that has sufficient value for MS that they don't even care if the phones never sell.
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
I don't see how in the world *Windows* is going to break into the mobile market. They have been trying for over a decade, repeatedly without success. Particularly now it seems a pretty cemented Android/iOS landscape. The only hope I could see is Intel getting some hardware makers onboard and that being a platform for MS to push their continuum concept (yes it can work with ARM, but back to square one, a bunch of my enterprise applications are not about to spend money to dust off the build trees and build ARM for the fun of it)
MS mobile strategy is going to have to settle for trying to make money off of iOS and/or Android users/developers. They can (and do) provide hosting, applications, and services. They miss the revenue opportunity of a curated application distribution platform, but I think this is the best they can hope for.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Except that Intel has been a licensor of ARM for a very long time, so even if there was some magical shift to ARM in non-mobile ultra-low-voltage devices, Intel would still be able to apply what they know about advancing the state of the art.
Don't worry about Intel, they'll be just fine.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
The cortex-A series of chips appears to be catching Intel CISC in some of the raw compute numbers on a per-core basis. Will this possibly rekindle the RISC vs CISC battles of the 90s?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Exactly. Apple kept a secret x86 / x64 version of Mac OS X in the closet for 5 years as a hedge against IBM screwing them over on PowerPC. Turns out to be one of the best decisions that they ever made.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
> Going beyond 5Ghz limit has been a problem for the last decade or so.
Last decade? Uhm, try the last ~40 years. A close friend of mine worked with the military running GaAs CPUs at ~4.7 GHz in late 70's. He also worked on GaAs devices operating up to ~100 GHz. Hey, when you have a nearly unlimited tech budget you can do all sorts of things that the commercial sector won't have access to until decades later.
Anyways, the problem with Silicon is that it needs to be < 110 degrees C. In contradistinction GaAs only need < 175 degrees C.
Hardware designers have known about alternatives for years -- Silicon is just plentiful, dirt cheap, and "good enough." No one wants to pay $100,000 for a 10 GHz GaAs CPU, when you could buy 2,000x Silicon chips instead for the same amount of money.
I'd argue that it's also the case that most computers for the past decade have been ridiculously overpowered for what most average consumers are asking of them. That's partly why the market is moving to mobile. For many common tasks, a tiny mobile computer is still more than enough to do the job just fine. And in the case of Windows, the required minimum specs for an OS hasn't jumped nearly as substantially since Windows Vista, as MS focused quite a bit on performance optimization rather than letting things keep bloating up. If you had a reasonably powerful computer that could run Windows Vista when it first came out, you could almost certainly still run Windows 10 on it.
Vista recommended specs:
1-gigahertz (GHz) 32-bit (x86) processor or 1-GHz 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40-GB hard disk that has 15 GB of free hard disk space
Windows Aero-capable graphics card w/ 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
Windows 10 minimum specs:
Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit
Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS
Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
Note that I'm comparing recommended to minimum specs, but it's still fairly impressive given the time between these two OS releases. In general, I just think there's less market pressure to keep creating faster and faster CPUs.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.