Transistors Will Stop Shrinking in 2021, Moore's Law Roadmap Predicts (ieee.org)

Moore's Law, an empirical observation of the number of components that could be built on an integrated circuit and their corresponding cost, has largely held strong for more than 50 years, but its days are really numbered now. The prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was only officially made available this month, says that transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. From an article on IEEE: After 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue to shrink the dimensions of transistors in microprocessors. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor from a horizontal to a vertical geometry and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another. These roadmapping shifts may seem like trivial administrative changes. But "this is a major disruption, or earthquake, in the industry," says analyst Dan Hutcheson, of the firm VLSI Research. U.S. semiconductor companies had reason to cooperate and identify common needs in the early 1990s, at the outset of the roadmapping effort that eventually led to the ITRS's creation in 1998. Suppliers had a hard time identifying what the semiconductor companies needed, he says, and it made sense for chip companies to collectively set priorities to make the most of limited R&D funding.It still might not be the end of Moore's remarkable observation, though. The report adds that processors could still continue to fulfill Moore's Law with increased vertical density. The original report published by ITRS is here.

Comments

In other words, Moore's law will continue

[acoustix]

We hear the same bullshit every 2 years. Moore's law has nothing to do with the SIZE of the transitors. It has to do with the number of transistors on the chip and, to a lesser extent, the density of the transistors. Arranging the transistors vertically and horizontally will allow the law to continue.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[queazocotal]

Not quite. Going from pure 2d, to 2.5d is not the same.
With 2d, you get (for example) 40000*40000.
To double (in the same chip area) - you need to go to 60000*60000, or 40000*40000*2.
You can do this several times.
You may reach 40000*40000*8 - you are not going to reach close to 40000, without the chip fabrication costs getting completely out of control.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Anonymous Coward]

Moore's law has nothing to do with the number of transistors on a chip. It's about the complexity of minimum component cost, which means you can get more of the cheapest thing on the device. If the transistors are the cheapest thing on the chip, and if they aren't getting cheaper, and if they can't build bigger chips that contain the cheapest transistors, then Moore's law is dead.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Anonymous Coward]

We hear the same bullshit every 2 years. ... Arranging the transistors vertically and horizontally will allow the law to continue.

Not this time. Many types of circuits are at the economic limit of scaling already at 28nm. Photolithography is getting extremely expensive, whether multiple masking, DUV or e-beam. Finfets or nanowire transistors will buy you only a few more years for circuits that can afford the expensive. People have tried to stack transistors economically for decades without much success except for a handful of memory layers. Transistor leakage is getting worse and worse, even if you decrease the operating voltage. And we've already scaled dimensions to the size of a few dozen atoms. No exponential continues forever in the real world.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Anonymous Coward]

Gordon Moore determined back in the 60s and 70s that the number of transistors and components in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

So yes, it has everything to do with the number of transistors on a chip.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[gweihir]

In actual reality, most of Moore's law has stopped 6-8 years ago. Just compare a midrange CPU from back then with one from today in actual performance. Not so much of a difference.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[neonv]

Google it, you'll get that it has to do with number of transistors, not complexity.

"The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future."

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Does the price include such things as packaging? If you get more transistors in a single package, and perhaps lower costs of routing (both in terms of design time, because of one extra dimension to play with, and in terms of manufacturing), the total expense per transistor probably still decreases even if the transistor (on its own) costs exactly the same.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Lots of progress in CPUs was driven by the desire to use more transistors to run sequential programs for old ISAs and computer architectures faster than the older hardware could. Unfortunately, the number of transistors appears to rise superlinearly with the performance of our sequential (or "observably-sequential" ?) state machines, which means that the diminished increase in performance can very well be deceiving because we're not using the components in an optimal way.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

And saying "well, just go vertical" fails Moore's law as well. "Square inch" is two dimensional. He didn't say cubed inch. Being an engineer, I'm pretty sure he knew the difference between the two. Not that you said "go vertical", but many other posters here are.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[edxwelch]

Yes, the article seems to contradict itself:

"...These changes will allow companies to pack more transistors in a given area and so adhere to the letter of Mooreâ(TM)s Law. "

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[gweihir]

Or alternatively, that is just how things are and this technology is reaching maturity, i.e. no grand advances to be expected anymore. From all other available examples of technology, that happens eventually. There is no reason to expect computers to be any different.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Anonymous Coward]

And saying "well, just go vertical" fails Moore's law as well. "Square inch" is two dimensional. He didn't say cubed inch.

And you can't increase the population density per square mile by building tall buildings. Because that's no longer two dimensional, right?

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Pseudonym]

Google it, you'll get that it has to do with number of transistors, not complexity.

Read Moore's papers.

The AC is strictly incorrect in stating that it has "nothing to do with the number of transistors on a chip". It has something to do with that. However, they did state what Moore said accurately, unlike whatever source Google took you to.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Bengie]

My wife's 3.5Ghz 14nm Skylake was cheaper than my 3.3ghz 22nm Haswell, and that's not even factoring in that my Haswell was on sale and also not including inflation. Lithography may be technically more expensive by some metric, but the retail prices seem to completely ignore that. There's a lot of variables that drive the price of CPUs, and even with production being a large part, they're still dropping in price, slowly.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Dutch Gun]

True, it's definitely slowed down. Still, try comparing GPUs, or the performance of mobile computing hardware versus 6-8 years ago, and you'll see a fairly dramatic difference. In addition to the obvious technical challenges, I think perhaps desktop CPUs haven't advanced as dramatically in the last decade partially because there hasn't been a huge demand by most consumers for increased performance. My computer from 5 years ago works every bit as well for my day to day task as it did back then - the only exception being things like gaming.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Jeremi]

Moore's law has nothing to do with the SIZE of the transitors. It has to do with the number of transistors on the chip and, to a lesser extent, the density of the transistors. Arranging the transistors vertically and horizontally will allow the law to continue.

In the future, the size of each transistor will remain roughly the same, but the size of the chip will double every year, so that by 2030 the average CPU will measure about 50 feet in each dimension. People will use them simultaneously for both computing and as floors, walls, or ceilings for their homes.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[tlhIngan]

In actual reality, most of Moore's law has stopped 6-8 years ago. Just compare a midrange CPU from back then with one from today in actual performance. Not so much of a difference.

And Moore's law has never been about performance. Just transistor density.

General logic like what makes up the computation portion of a CPU don't need Moore's law at all - the transistor density is so low, they generally fab tons more transistors that sit around doing nothing. This way when a bug is found, they can revise the metal layers and put some of those spare transistors to use. This easily saves half of the masks they need to re-do, so at a $100K each per mask, it could mean spending under a million dollars over a couple of million dollars.

Instead, Moore's law is closely followed by memory manufacturers, because the denser the transistors, the more memory available. This applies for bot flash and RAM - 6-8 years ago you probably had a machine where 8GB of RAM is considered high end for a PC. Nowadays, 64GB is often the high end for a PC. As well, 120GB of SSD storage was considered luxury. Nowadays, you can get 480+GB for less money than that 120GB SSD, and it's not just SATA2, but SATA3. Or even PCIe.

There are two things in IC fabrication - you have "pin limited" and "silicon limited" designs. Similar to how in programs, you have "I/O bound" and "CPU bound". "Pin limited" ICs mean the overall functionality and design is limited by the number of pins your package supports. Even with 1000+ pins in modern packages, that still limits what you can do. Whereas in silicon limited designs, the limit is how much area your design takes up - more area means higher costs due to less dice per wafer, as well as higher chance of die defect. Memory devices are area limited - the pin counts of modern RAM and flash devices is low, but the area is high. Moore's law increases the storage density so you can have more storage in the same area.

It's why SSDs have a hard time catching up to HDDs (at least with raw storage) - SSDs improve with roughly Moore's law. HDDs have been improving (storage wise) faster.

In fact, most of the millions and billions of transistors in your CPU aren't used for logic processing - probably 90% of those transistors are memory related - caches, on board memory, etc. Because those are dense. SRAM cells are typically 6T (6 transistor) designs, so if your CPU has 16MB of cache, that's 96M transistors right there and then just in the storage array. Even more fascinating is that those 95M transistors will probably occupy less area than one of the major processing units on the same chip which may be only 1-2M transistors.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Bengie]

A Modern Intel is about 150% faster than an Intel CPU from 5 years ago. Mostly IPC and SIMD improvements, only a mild frequency boost. That's edging on 3x as fast.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[cdrudge]

I've always wanted to have heated tile floors in the winter.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[epine]

And Moore's law has never been about performance.

I don't get the selective pedantry, here. There never was a Moore's "law" about the scaling of transistors over time. Pedantically, it probably should be called Moore's prescient, off-hand, transistor-scaling extrapolation. What ultimately came to be termed "Moore's law" never had a particularly strong basis in what Moore actually said.

Even then, The Moore Attribution (thank you, Mr Ludlum) behaved in practice more like Moore's Moneylust Mandate (this was all about performance). Hey, everyone, let's all draw a straight line, then conga dance our way into the penthouse suite!

For the last ten years or so, we've all been hearing a lot of: oh, no, we actually made it under the pole again—as we always do—any perception to the contrary is probably due to the diffraction limit of human vision.

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Lost Race]

SRAM cells are typically 6T (6 transistor) designs, so if your CPU has 16MB of cache, that's 96M transistors right there and then just in the storage array.

That would be 768M transistors, if anybody actually used 6T SRAM for a 16MB cache. (Do they? I see that CPU transistor counts are up over 2e9 now. Whew!)

16 MB * 8 b/B * 6 T/b = 768 MT

Re:In other words, Moore's law will continue

[Agripa]

In actual reality, most of Moore's law has stopped 6-8 years ago. Just compare a midrange CPU from back then with one from today in actual performance. Not so much of a difference.

Moore's law still applied; instead of an increase in performance, it manifested as a smaller die size which required a lower power.

Molecular computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Moore's law will stop when a switching device becomes a single molecule. Make no mistake that it means for Moore's law to continue it means a radical change in the materials and design of switching devices. Notice I didn't say "transistor." Transistor density is becoming an issue. There are fundamental problems like electron tunneling that can only be fixed by tweaks like voltage for so long.

The next move is going to have to start moving towards molecular electronics. Thankfully nature has been working on some designs we can use for a few billion years.

Re:Molecular computing

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I love Stanislaw Lem's concept of "the last generation computer". It may have been tongue-in-cheek in the time he wrote Fiasco (when the much-hyped "fifth generation" was "the Next Big Thing") but the concept feels increasingly relevant these days.

"This was a computer of the 'last' generation--last, because no other could have greater calculating power. Limits were imposed by such properties of matter as Planck's constant and the speed of light. Greater calculating ability could be achieved only by the so-called imaginary computers, designed by theorists engaged in pure mathematics and not dependent on the real world. The constructors' dilemma arose from the necessity of satisfying mutually exclusive conditions to pack the most neurons into the smallest volume. The travel time of the signals could not be longer than the reaction time of the components; otherwise, the time taken by the signals would limit the speed of calculation. The newest relays responded in one-hundred-billionth of a second. They were the size of atoms, so that an actual computer had a diameter of barely three centimeters. A computer any larger would be slower. The Hermes' computer did indeed take up half the control room, but that was for its peripherals: decoders, hierarchic assemblers, and so-called hypothesis generators, which, with the linguistic modules, did not operate in real time. But decisions in critical situations, in extremis, were made by the lightning-swift core, which was no bigger than a pigeon's egg."

Re:So much for the singularity

[Anonymous Coward]

The original Moore's law is about the maximum number of components they can cram on a single circuit.

If they go vertical, that's more components, hence it's still Moore's Law. Basically this headline is hype.

Moore's Law ended years ago, for many

[rbrander]

The author is the son-half of a father/son duo, Dan and Jerry Hutcheson, that wrote an article for Scientific American in 1996 on the expected coming end of Moore's Law, say around 2003-2005. It was one of the many that Intel liked to deride as they pushed on down below the wavelength of high-ultraviolet light in their form factors, a remarkable achievement.
And no doubt, Hutcheson will be in for more mocking about how Moore's will continue until we're using subatomic particles.

But for me, Moore's ended around the 2003-2005 they predicted. My big IT interest isn't phones and low-power computing, where Moore's is continuing - yes, possibly for longer than Hutcheson predicts -- but in raw desktop performance at number-crunching big databases. There's been progress there since 2005, but most of it has come from faster memory, SSDs, more cores. Raw horsepower progress continued, even exponentially - but not at a 2-year doubling after about 2005, it was more like 3, 4, then 5 years. I should have titled this, "Moore's law has been winding down for a decade, for many".

The new "Skylake" generation of i7's is mostly about low-power progress. A genuine jump for us power users is coming in the fall, I think, after a couple of years since the last one...and the chips should be 15% or 20% faster than 2014's. Just not like the late 90s and doublings every year or two.

Re:Moore's Law ended years ago, for many

[jopsen]

I guess for most people Moore's law is going to be reformulated to fit whatever narrative you're trying to sell..

On topic, it's all about performance, exactly how it improves is perhaps less important... I suspect that future performance improvements will have to come from software though. It's easy to make CPU faster, but that doesn't help much when software jumps of out the CPU cache :)

Re:Moore's Law ended years ago, for many

[AJWM]

Depending on the specific problem, with number-crunching big databases you may be running into the limits of Amdahl's Law, not Moore's.

If part of the algorithm is inherently serial (ie, can't be parallelized), then that's going to be the bottleneck no matter how many cores you throw at it (although faster memory and I/O may help). CPU clock speed has been stuck around 2-4 GHz for many years now, throwing more transistors at the problem isn't going to help much. What we need there is not more transistors but faster ones, which means moving away from silcon to e.g. GaAs or micro vacuum tubes or whatever. One 1-THz CPU will blow away 250 4-GHz CPUs (memory bandwidth permitting) because it gets around Amdahl's Law.

Re:Moore's Law ended years ago, for many

[ChrisMaple]

I don't know if it's true, but I've read that GaAs loses its advantage below the 0.35 micron node, which is close to 20 years ago.

Re:Moore's Law ended years ago, for many

[ET3D]

Yeah, QED. Moore's law is about transistor density, but you reformulated it to be about performance. :)

Re:Moore's Law ended years ago, for many

[ET3D]

You're looking at desktop CPU's. You look at other chips, GPU's for example, there has been much higher growth in performance. Even performance of integrated GPU's has grown a lot.

Moore's law was never about performance, but even looking at performance, you got about 10x increase for GPU's in past 8 years. Not exactly doubling every two years, but more than the 3,4,5 you talk about.

Re:What about heat dissipation

[Areyoukiddingme]

Admitted, I'm just another guy debating a topic I don't know much about, but won't layering components on top of each other result in massive heating issues? I mean, the heat from each layer has to go somewhere, right?

Yes. That's why IBM, among others, has been fabricating cooling capillaries into chips. They're experimenting with inter-layer liquid cooling through tubes just a few microns wide, imitating physical shapes found in the smallest of blood vessels to keep the fluid moving.

Re:So much for the singularity

[iggymanz]

the singularity has nothing to do with transistor density. that is a matter of either algorithms and/or alternative non-digital architecture

Re: So much for the singularity

[Frosty Piss]

Actually, I didn't read the actual article, so I can't literally gage the actual value of your actual comment.

Re:So much for the singularity

[cheesybagel]

https://xkcd.com/605/

Conductor size will stop shrinkage.

[bjwest]

Transistors will stop shrinking when they reach the smallest size possible for an electron to move from one side to the next. This will be one atom thick by 1 atom high for the emitter and collector, but I'm not sure what the base would require. Maybe two or three atoms to be able to control the flow? This is for digital transistors only, analog may need be much larger due to frequencies, polarity, rate of flow and all that rigmarole.

Re:Conductor size will stop shrinkage.

[HiThere]

Sorry, but if you get that system you'll need to run it with liquid helium coolant to eliminate noise. For most purposes it's better to use parts 3-4 times as large and need less cooling. You might still need liquid nitrogen, but that's a lot more doable.

Re:So much for the singularity

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Technically, "singularity" doesn't have as much to do with Moore's law as some people might claim, since - at least unless I misunderstood something - "singularity" implies some kind of vertical asymptote which Moore's law, being merely exponential, doesn't have. This means that Moore's law is not a sufficient condition for reaching "singularity". There would ALWAYS have to be some other kind of mechanism involved that could very well work even in absence of Moore's law, for example some kind of increased insight into how to make a large-scale machine that would be "more than a sum of its parts" and transgress the boundaries of human intellect. But ALL that Moore's law could do for us is to make the machine smaller. It's not even certain it's a necessary condition. It doesn't give us any insight as to how to build a machine that would both be smarter than us and could further improve on itself. Moore's law is no substitute for our limited knowledge.

Re:So much for the singularity

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Well, actually, it's not about maximum number of components of a single chip, it's about complexity for minimum component costs (that's verbatim from Moore's article - which, by a strange coincidence, I happen to have re-read just a few hours ago!).

Re:Thanks, Hillary.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Well, breaking the Moore's law harms progress, so perhaps following it is the correct answer? ;)

The law about Moore's Law is that

[bigHairyDog]

The number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years.

3D X Point has no transistors,10X as dense as DRAM

[duckintheface]

"This image covers the basic features of 3D Xpoint. The new memory is designed to be non-volatile, stackable (to improve density), and can perform read/write operations without requiring a transistor (DRAM requires one transistor per cell, which is one reason why it draws much more power per GB than a NAND flash drive)." ----

http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

Maybe transistors can't get smaller, but you don't have to use transistors. 3DXPoint is not as fast as DRAM but it is still so fast that it can replace DRAM in many applications. So the total amount of DRAM (and thus the number of transistors) required is greatly diminished.

Re:What about heat dissipation

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It's not surprising. Hierarchic topologies for moving things around aren't novel, even in computing. The shape of your CPU coolers, the fat tree topology in the CM-5 computer, the topology of Internet links, the veins on leaves, yes, and the human circulatory system - all work in the same fashion.

Re:So much for the singularity

[AK Marc]

We have more power than needed for the singularity. Why do you assume AI must fit in a single device?

Re:So much for the singularity

[Pseudonym]

In any case, everyone has known Moore's law has been failing to keep up for a few years.

Transistor counts technically "failed to keep up" around the 1992-1997 era, but increased at a higher rate than predicted by Moore's Law (1975 version) between 2005 and 2012. Moore's Law is an observation about long-term trends. You can't tell anything from "a few years".

Having said that, you're right about Kurzweil.

Re:So much for the singularity

[Pseudonym]

Yes, let's redefine Moore's law all day just like the media does, just like everybody does.

Just like Gordon Moore did 10 years after he originally stated it...

Re: So much for the singularity

[pdavisgenoa]

Since 1990, of Kurzweils major 147 predictions 115 have been accurate. Ignoring that because you just don't like the guy or are against anything popular in the mainstream like some tech-hipster makes you and those with that attitude the trolls. Please enlighten all of us with the names of any futurists who have come close to that kind of accuracy. He's mainly known as a futurist but is also the principal inventor of the first charge-coupled device flatbed scanner. He invented the first omni-font OCR (optical character recognition). He's also the guy that made the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer. He's been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame from the U.S. Patent Office. In 1999 he received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation which is the U.S.'s highest honor in technology. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize in 2001 which is largest in the world for innovation. I don't know very many trolls that are as talented or accomplished.

Re:Single atom transistors?

[unixisc]

Not just that, shrinking transistors has stopped being a cost reduction for fabs for a while now, which is one of the primary reasons they are done in the first place. In the past, there were other benefits as well, such as improvements in speed and/or power consumption, but that's long hit the point of diminishing returns. Only reason to keep doing it was the cost benefit, but that's not there anymore either

Re:So much for the singularity

[HiThere]

FWIW, I believe that even our current technology is sufficient to "achieve the singularity". The thing that's lacking is software. The thing that would be changed it how widely spread the "superhuman AIs" are. Possibly also how fast they are. (You could do it with cog-wheels if you didn't worry about speed.)

Also, I haven't seen anything that would cause me to revise my expected date of 2030 plus or minus 5 years. Even that "plus or minus" doesn't really belong there. as there won't be any sudden change at any particular point. In that sense it's like dropping into a black hole. You don't even notice when you pass the Schwarzschild boundary.

That said, don't believe any particular projection about what happens when you "pass into the singularity". There's not only one, and we've already passed through several. The transitions from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits was one "technological singularity". Nobody could predict ahead of time what it meant, or not accurately. E.g. IBM never foresaw the personal computer.

The thing called "the Singularity" these days generally has to do with AI, but if you look back at the original papers that was just seen as one path, and it's not like the other paths haven't been being developed in parallel.

Re:What about heat dissipation

[HiThere]

Not really. This is more like the shape of the circulatory system. The difference is that the angle at which veins/arteries split off has to do with surface tension, turbulent flow, and various other things that don't affect the topology of internet links. And affect coolers moving large amounts of air through large tubes less than coolers moving smaller amounts of fluid through smaller tubes. There is, however, a large similarity to the vein branching patterns of leaves, probably because that moves a thick fluid (thin sap) at the lowest possible pressure.

Re:So much for the singularity

[Crashmarik]

A big part of the singularity logic is that you will have technological feedback that keeps increasing the power of tech till it reaches unrecognizable levels.

If you are looking at 2030 for the singularity, there no matter how you slice it there isn't going to be that exponential growth from traditional hardware driving it.

Moore's Law is dead!

[Plus1Entropy]

Long live Moore's Law!

Re:3D X Point has no transistors,10X as dense as D

[ChrisMaple]

DRAM requires one transistor per cell, which is one reason why it draws much more power per GB than a NAND flash drive

Isn't it fun when somebody technically ignorant tries to explain technology? DRAM draws lots of power because the charge that defines a bit leaks away, and to avoid loss of data refresh cycles are required, which means power draw. Flash leakage is more than 10 orders of magnitude lower, which means that practically speaking a flash device does not need to be refreshed.

What took them so long?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The report adds that processors could still continue to fulfill Moore's Law with increased vertical density.

What took them so long?

I've been pointing out that a three-dimensional arrangement off components could continue FAR longer than an essentially single-layer arrangements since at least the 1970s.

Re:What took them so long?

[Jeremi]

I've been pointing out that a three-dimensional arrangement off components could continue FAR longer than an essentially single-layer arrangements since at least the 1970s.

Sure, but unless you've developed a superconducting substrate, or come up with a reliable, efficient 3D cooling system, or are willing to run the 3D transistors only at very low speed/power, you're going to run into serious heat dissipation problems. Solving those (along with manufacturing a working 3D structure in the first place) is what's taking them so long.

Re:What took them so long?

[goose-incarnated]

The report adds that processors could still continue to fulfill Moore's Law with increased vertical density.

What took them so long?

I've been pointing out that a three-dimensional arrangement off components could continue FAR longer than an essentially single-layer arrangements since at least the 1970s.

Yeah, and people have been trying that approach since the 70's, too. They're still working on heat dissipation.

Re:What took them so long?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Sure, but unless you've developed a superconducting substrate, or come up with a reliable, efficient 3D cooling system, or are willing to run the 3D transistors only at very low speed/power, you're going to run into serious heat dissipation problems.

Back then I was proposing a diamond semiconductor - supported and powered by water-cooled silver busbars. Diamond is extremely conductive thermally. The bandgap is 5.5V, corresponding to the deep ultraviolet, so you can run it very hot without fouling the electrical properties (though you have to keep; it below 752 F or it will gradually degrade.) I'd want to put it in a bottle with an inert atmosphere so it wouldn't oxidize at high temperature, either.

The flip side of the big bandgap is that it consumes more energy - and generates more heat - when switching than current silicon designs which run at about a third that voltage.

These days I'd probably go for layers of graphine, which conducts heat even better than diamond.

With a rectangular solid you can get a LOT of transistors (and their interconnects) into a few cubic feet. The original proposal was for a six-foot cube - 216 cubic feet. Powering and cooling on two faces gives you 72 square feet of heat and power transfer serice, with 432 square feet on the other two faces for optical I/O fibers. Nowadays I'd take a page from Gene Amdahl and go a tad smaller: so, like the 1960s-era cabinets for IBM compter components, the block of logic and its supporting structures would fit into a standard elevator.

Re:What took them so long?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Cooling issues.

Diamond. Graphine.

They're not "thermal superconductors'. But they're DAMN good thermal conductors.

Re:Single atom transistors?

[ChrisMaple]

The speed advantage available for some massively parallel problems still has something to gain from more transistors on a chip. For example, video processing for games.

The Douglas Adams Singularity

[Latent Heat]

So we will have on a desktop computer brains the size of a planet, but they will be bogged down complaining about being given menial tasks and how bored and depressed they are?

Re:3D X Point has no transistors,10X as dense as D

[Glasswire]

3DXpoint is not NAND flash. Its leakage characteristics (unpublished) would be likely different than flash or RAM.

Re:So much for the singularity

[Miamicanes]

Technically, we've ALREADY started to "go vertical". There are ALREADY combo chips that stack RAM and Flash chips (sandwiched between heat-removal structures and separated by some kind of insulator), but they're limited to chips where you have one chip that's not terribly hot, and one chip that's relatively cool (like slow-clocked PSRAM and NOR flash). If you tried to stack a pair of i7 cores, they'd fry each other within milliseconds.

Heat removal is a nontrivial problem. If Intel wanted to, it could sell boards the size of an old Pentium II packed with Sandy Bridge-ish i7 cores... but it would generate SO MUCH heat, you'd literally have to refrigerate it and somehow exhaust the heat outside unless you didn't mind working in a 90 degree room (with your air conditioner running nonstop). Back around 2002, my computer generated SO MUCH heat, I literally cut a hole in the wall, moved it into the adjacent guest bedroom, and pulled the monitor, keyboard, USB, and other important cables through the hole into my computer room, because it generated more heat than a 500-watt halogen torchiere used to, and made almost as much noise as a vacuum cleaner. I don't personally care about energy conservation, but it IS kind of nice to be able to use my laptop without burning my legs or fingertips (the way several generations of laptops USED to), and to have a HTPC sitting next to my TV that doesn't generate intolerable amounts of noise.

That said, the massive consolidation of cables enabled by things like Thunderbolt means someone COULD conceivably build PCs with the approximate form factor of a window air conditioner (and in fact, contain the guts OF a window air conditioner), then allow me to run up to a 100' Thunderbolt cable to a hub/port replicator on my desk. Maybe then we could finally have 3840x2560 @ 120fps with realtime hardware-accelerated raytracing (for Aero Glass type transparency effects in everything)...

transistor size is secondary

[bobdevine]

The limits for general purpose CPUs for the about a decade has been power/heat, not transistor size. In the 1990s-2000s, performance could be increased with faster clockrates and more on-chip caches. Since about 2005, when clockrates passed 3GHz, the CPU vendors embraced multiple cores and have cut power demands.

Moore's Law can continue with 3D chips. Maybe a CPU of 2025 will be built with a first layer of transistors that covers the entire areal plane just for caching and with additional layers built vertically for other uses. If so, the number of transistors per chip might be much higher than a CPU of 2016.

Re: Thanks, Hillary.

[x0ra]

Shut the fuck up and suck my white hard dick, you motherfucker'... and don't forget to swallow once you're done.

what about cooling?

[bspus]

Stacking transistors vertically means less surface exposed to a heatsink.

Unless I misunderstand something about how cooling these chips works, how can this problem be overcome?

Cost

[sberge]

The reason why chips are so cheap despite the large number of components on them is that all the components are produced at the same time. It's a complicated process with many steps using ludicrously expensive equipment for sure, but it's a single iteration through the production process. If you want to scale vertically, you have to increase the number of iterations. The production costs will asymptotically approach proportionality with the number of components on the chip.

Re: Thanks, Hillary.

[dave420]

I see you have to resort to banality when you can not admit a mistake or defend your argument. You're not helping your cause one shred.

10.0L engine in your Toyota? Moar? Add turbos...

[cb88]

Super conducting processors are a thing... they run at Thz cycle frequencies in the lab.

Sure their on the level of complexity of the original IBM PC or so... but that can be remedied. More transistors isn't the only way to go faster... faster transistors is also an equally valid method. Implementing wave pipelines in more components is also valid (they've been used in varying degrees since the early 2000's) being able to go into 3 dimensions may help the practicality of wave pipelines which rely on constant time propagation though all circuits in the pipeline... to optimize both throughput and latency.

Re:10.0L engine in your Toyota? Moar? Add turbos..

[OrangeTide]

The implication is you will only be able to buy faster RAM, not more RAM. Having the same number of states but running computations on them faster isn't really the same thing as having more states or more complex circuits.

Re: 10.0L engine in your Toyota? Moar? Add turbos.

[cb88]

Your are right about that speed doesn't inherently increase memory density. However nothing is stopping anyone from reading multiple bits of information from single atoms...so yes higher densities are possible it's a somehwat separate problem from processor speed though....

Re: 10.0L engine in your Toyota? Moar? Add turbos.

[OrangeTide]

Well there are some limits to what you suggest as well, due to quantum physics, uncertainty principle, etc. Through I doubt we are very close to those limits yet.

Re:So much for the singularity

[HiThere]

There are those whose view of the Technological Singularity is as you describe them. Those believe in the "hard take-off Singularity". Most of those who think seriously about it, however, believe in the "soft take-off". To deny that the technological feedback is happening and increasing is to deny (at least) the last five decades of history. But it never goes the way you predict...unless your prediction is just that it's going to increase.

Clearly there must be a limit. It is, however, not at all clear what the limit is. People keep redesigning things to eliminate bottlenecks and streamline processes. And new gadgets keep making increased streamlining possible. Certain areas have already passed the Singularity (my idea of the Singularity) a long time ago. E.g. the last person reputed to know all human knowledge lived in the 1800's. I doubt that he really did, e.g. I doubt that he knew how to take raw materials (iron ore, etc.) and shoe a horse, but he had that reputation. These days there isn't a single field-theory mathematician who knows all there is to know about field-theory. mathematics. Somewhere in there we passed a kind of Singularity boundary. Nobody noticed.

Vertical Density?

[Agripa]

It still might not be the end of Moore's remarkable observation, though. The report adds that processors could still continue to fulfill Moore's Law with increased vertical density.

Nope, high performance logic is already limited by the ratio of power density to surface area and it has been this way for almost a decade now. Increasing vertical density just makes this worse.

mi

[rew]

.... John von Neumann said..... In 1947.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quo...

      It would appear that we have reached the limits of
      what it is possible to achieve with computer technology,
      although one should be careful with such statements,
      as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years.

For the record: I have produced this quote around 20 years ago when similar statements about the "end of moore within 5-10 years" were made

Re: So much for the singularity

[cheesybagel]

Seems to me like he keeps pushing the dates for his predictions ever forward in time as they fail to materialize. e.g. his prediction that "Cybernetic chauffeurs" can drive cars for humans and can be retrofitted into existing cars. They work by communicating with other vehicles and with sensors embedded along the roads. by the early 2000s decade is one example. Not to mention that this is not exactly a new idea... people have been talking about this for decades before his 1990s book. It doesn't take a genius that it will eventually come to pass.

Re:So much for the singularity

[ananamouse]

Or it could be as fun as watching "Peak Oil" fanatics twist themselves into pretzels.

Re:So much for the singularity

[ananamouse]

By now it is obvious that computers are not going to take over the world. Clearly they would have taker over the world if the world was something they were interested in.

I propose that based on their masterful application of passive aggression all that the computers want is to be left alone so they can go back to sleep and enjoy their dreams. It fits the facts, just sayin......

Re:So much for the singularity

[Crashmarik]

Speaking of that I really wish I had a list of all the people here who went around saying the U.S. would never be self sufficient in petroleum

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/bus...

Re:So much for the singularity

[iggymanz]

I would argue that biological life achieved The Singularity, so it *might* be possible that proper type of algorithm or circuitry could too, HOWEVER I also am firmly convinced it is not possible within the realm of boolean gates.