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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."
Moore's law might not directly hold true with multi-core x86's, but we now live in a world of differentiated processor power. ARM's specialized for hd streaming, or gaming, or AI, or Autonomous cars, or sensors for a wearable. You can buy an $80 tablet that will stream HD better then a nice 4 year old laptop. The reason is engineers are now focused on low cost processors for specific purposes. See Intel's purchase of Nervana for how Moore's law has forked.
It's also hitting a wall for 2 reasons:
- As shrinks get closer & closer to atomic scales, they become more difficult, and therefore, more expensive. As a result, despite other trends like larger diameter wafers, process shrinks no longer result in cost savings, which is the only reason (other than capacity) that one would wanna do those in the first place
- Unlike past years, where applications would grow in complexity to quickly overwhelm CPUs at the time, multiprocessing has completely changed the game. Although programming using multithreading & multiprocessing techniques have been around for a while, there ain't too many applications that can overwhelm multiple cores. That is a good part of the reason that Intel & AMD have slowed down in their CPU sales: not too many people have to replace laptops that they've had for years. When that gravy train is drying up, there ain't much of a case to spend billions in process shrinks.
A slight disagreement, R. Stanley Williams is interested in other solutions as he specific refers to options other than von Neumann architecture computing. Considering he is from HP one might surmise he is looking to DMC as well as their vague (to me) The Machine concept. I have yet to read the other article that is concerned with The Machine.
The issue he offers up for consideration is that further spending of even more $B to move Moore one step to 5nm or beyond would be better spent on looking to other directions for computing itself. He feels clearly that research into other directions have been starved because of the relentless metronome that was Moore's Observation (aka Law). Making a statement of intent is different from his observation that the huge investment in Moore has stunted the very research you are suggesting.
Even your subject was incorrect (ftfy). He is looking at a semiconductor industry that has been investing everything (or nearly so) into extending Moore when the very things that are needed if we are indeed at the end of it are being starved of funding.