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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.
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.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
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.
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.
https://xkcd.com/605/
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
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!).
Ezekiel 23:20
"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."
Ezekiel 23:20
The number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years.
foo mane padme hum
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.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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)...
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?