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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.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Hypothesis is a bit strong - it's more like an observation. An observation that have pushed the silicon industry forward by having that continuous improvement as a goal. But nobody thought it was some natural law.
We still have many ways to continue Moore's law. Going 3D with either monolitic (several logic layers per chip) or die stacking (or of course die stacking of multiple monolitic 3D dies). Increasing the size of chips is another way. Most chips aren't near the reticle limit and one can actually make chips larger than the reticle limit even though it gets harder.
Sounds like HP is about to make an itanic breakthrough
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
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.
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.
Because higher frequencies mean higher temperatures.
That is nonsense. Modern CPUs need more power, hence they produce more heat.
Remember when CPUs didn't need active cooling?
Yes, my 6502, got about 110C hot. But the transistors still worked at that temperature. Modern CPUs have so small transistors that they can not work at that temperature anymore as the electrons would simply jump several transistors far through the substrate.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...
Registry settings that can be modified to improve operating system performance
This section provides a description of recommended values for several registry entries that impact operating system performance. These registry entries can be applied manually or can be applied via the operating system optimization PowerShell script included in Windows PowerShell Scripts.
Increase available worker threads
At system startup, Windows creates several server threads that operate as part of the System process. These are called system worker threads. They exist with the sole purpose of performing work on the behalf of other threads generated by the kernel, system device drivers, the system executive and other components. When one of these components puts a work item in a queue, a thread is assigned to process it.
The number of system worker threads should ideally be high enough to accept work tasks as soon as they become assigned. The trade off, of course, is that worker threads sitting idle consume system resources unnecessarily. Modify and/or create the following REG_DWORD values in the registry and then set to the recommended values listed below.
The AdditionalDelayedWorkerThreads value increases the number of delayed worker threads created for the specified work queue. Delayed worker threads process work items that are not considered time-critical and can have their memory stack paged out while waiting for work items. An insufficient number of threads will reduce the rate at which work items are serviced; a value that is too high will consume system resources unnecessarily.
AdditionalDelayedWorkerThreads
Key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Executive
Value: AdditionalDelayedWorkerThreads
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Range: 0x0 (default) to 0x10 (16)
Recommended value: 0x10 (16)
Value exists by default? Yes
The AdditionalCriticalWorkerThreads value increases the number of critical worker threads created for a specified work queue. Critical worker threads process time-critical work items and have their stack present in physical memory at all times. An insufficient number of threads will reduce the rate at which time-critical work items are serviced; a value that is too high will consume system resources unnecessarily.
AdditionalCriticalWorkerThreads
Key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SessionManager\Executive
Value: AdditionalCriticalWorkerThreads
Data Type: REG_DWORD
Range: 0x0 (default) to 0x10 (16)
Recommended value: 0x10 (16)
Value exists by default? Yes
For starters, I've been reading "the sky is about to fall" articles for at least 20 years about how: "In 2-3 more years Moore's Law is going to slam into a barrier imposed by the laws of physics.". The entire world of computing will come crashing down and burn, the beast will rise from the pit, the keymaster and gatekeeper will find each other, the dead will dig themselves up from their graves, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. The doom and gloom crowd have been wrong every time so far. Every time, some clever person at IBM or Intel has figured a way to cross the streams and save the world. So why should I trust the chicken littles that we're living in the end times now?
And even if Moore's Law slows down or pauses, there's plenty of room in the hardware we have today for continued improvement on the software side. Developers will just have to rely less on "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" languages and frameworks and go back to optimizing their code for performance... like they used to before crap like Java, .Net, and Rails encouraged everyone to be lazy and rely on ever-improving CPUs to make their apps not suck. Why should the hardware guys do all the work, after all? Hell, they can start by writing their code to be properly multi-threaded. My desktop, for example, has a core i7 with 4 physical cores and 8 virtual ones via hyper-threading. I couldn't begin to count the number of times I've watched some program or another run a single core up to 100%, stop there, and ignore the 7 other threads it could be running simultaneously to improve its performance nearly 8-fold, no new or faster hardware needed.
Imagine all the people...
Negative. You won't get "much faster", certainly not by Moore's Law standards. Face it, the digital age is flattening out. You have been spoiled. We would need some other sort of leap to get back to the progress we enjoyed with Moore's Law.
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.