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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
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
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"
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.
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.