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HP Answers The Question: Moore's Law Is Ending. Now What? (hpe.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Paul Fernhout writes:
R. Stanley Williams, of Hewlett Packard Labs, wrote a report exploring the end of Moore's Law, saying it "could be the best thing that has happened in computing since the beginning of Moore's law. Confronting the end of an epoch should enable a new era of creativity by encouraging computer scientists to invent biologically inspired devices, circuits, and architectures implemented using recently emerging technologies." This idea is also looked at in a broader shorter article by Curt Hopkins also with HP Labs.
Williams argues that "The effort to scale silicon CMOS overwhelmingly dominated the intellectual and financial capital investments of industry, government, and academia, starving investigations across broad segments of computer science and locking in one dominant model for computers, the von Neumann architecture." And Hopkins points to three alternatives already being developed at Hewlett Packard Enterprise -- neuromorphic computing, photonic computing, and Memory-Driven Computing. "All three technologies have been successfully tested in prototype devices, but MDC is at center stage."
Williams argues that "The effort to scale silicon CMOS overwhelmingly dominated the intellectual and financial capital investments of industry, government, and academia, starving investigations across broad segments of computer science and locking in one dominant model for computers, the von Neumann architecture." And Hopkins points to three alternatives already being developed at Hewlett Packard Enterprise -- neuromorphic computing, photonic computing, and Memory-Driven Computing. "All three technologies have been successfully tested in prototype devices, but MDC is at center stage."
Yes, I know "Moore's Law" isn't a law but an observation.
When I RTFA, it seems the author is looking at different technologies to continue growth of computing capability for a given unit of space. I also get the impression that Mr. Williams is looking to fund projects that he has an eye on by saying that Si based chips will soon no longer be economically improved and VC/Investment Money should be looking at alternative technologies rather than continued shrinking of Si chip features.
Unfortunately, I don't see a fundamental shift in what Mr. Williams is looking for the resulting devices to do. I would think that if he was really planning on dealing with the end of Moore's Law, he would be looking at new paradigms in how to perform the required tasks, not new ways of doing the same things we do now.
Regardless, the physical end of our ability to grow the number of devices on a slab of Si has been forecasted for more than forty years now - Don't forget that as the devices have gotten smaller in size, the overall wafer and chip size has grown as have yields which mean a continuing drop in cost per Si capacitor/transistor along with an increase in capability per chip. I would be hesitant to invest in technologies that depend on the end of Si chips' trend of becoming increasingly cheaper with increased capabilities over the next few years.
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I think even P2 could address 64 GB of RAM, but with a maximum of 4 GB per process. It is something a lot of people don't realize because Microsoft disabled that on consumer OS versions.