Slashdot Mirror
The End of Moore's Law?
Lucius Lucanius writes "A recurrent theme of late, the NY Times describes an Intel researcher's paper on the possible end of Moore's law. Soon, 'transistors will be
composed of fewer than 100 atoms,
and statistical variations in this
Lilliputian world are beyond the ability of semiconductor engineers to
control.' Is it for real this time?
"
I'm not particularly concerned about hitting a theoretical limit to hardware power. At the moment, I'm typing on a system that has unimaginable 20 years ago.
Yet it crashes often enough to be noticeable.
It runs so slowly (a "mere" Pentium 400) that I can actually see my windows redraw.
Booting takes 5 minutes (NT 4.0)
Shutting down takes several minutes, too.
Maybe hitting a limit to processor power will encourage programmers to reintroduce the concept of "knowing how to write good code." Lord knows processor speed and cheap memory have made it possible for even the best programmers to stop thinking about code quality.
- Stever
that the number of times the End of Moore's Law is predicted doubles every sixteen months?
Remember back in the 80's when they said 20 Mhz computers were pushing the outer limits of semiconductors. They thought increasing prevalence of electron tunneling at subatomic levels would doom computers to stay below 25Mhz forever.
Then in the early 90's they said the cost of developing faster chips was becoming a vertical line. Computers would never get far beyond 200Mhz because of the brick wall of development costs.
Well electron tunneling became our friend. Design tools outpaced their costs. Maybe we'll find a way to turn the physical limits to our advantage.
Even if the Intel folk were right, and we couldn't make out gates any smaller (I bet we can, with bucky-tubes and those neato single-molecule gates), it wouldn't be the end of Moore's law.
FIrst of all, there is the whole bandwidth problem- We programmers have to worry about cache coherency, cache misses, time to load from disk, time to load from RAM... etc.
These things are the major bottleneck for many applications.
Furthermore, This "limit" would only limit single-processor designs..
There is still a large world on parallel-processing to consider.. What if the CPU could execute EVERY non-dependant, non-aliased branch at concurrently?
(We'd obviously need better compilers, and probably better languages..)
In any case to rehash: Even if the Intel engineers are right about the "gate limit", Plenty of other advances to discover..
Sure they did. Most of them are still alive.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Username: slashdoted
Password: slashdot
Enjoy!
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
You're forgetting Microsoft's propensity to throw everything including the kitchen sink into their products. When Windows 2010 requires a 1.5GHz CPU /w 2GB RAM just to boot (come now this is not too unrealistic) your point about the general consumer vs state of the art does not hold up. Sure, there will be some small "appliances" that would do fine with today's high end CPU's, but if MS and Intel has their way then ppl will be in an ever continuing cycle up upgrades -- needing to upgrade their hardware (which contains some "new" features) in order to handle the latest monstrosity from MS, which upgrades their software to handle the few new features in the new hardware (along with a lot of useless bloat), which demands a new hardware upgrade in order to run acceptably, etc....
I don't think the need for faster and more capable hardware will cease until computers advance to our "dream" computers. For each person what this means is different.
What I see most likely is the current manufacturers following their current practices of concentrating their R&D on faster and faster generic purpose CPUs until they reach some sort of "wall." When this happens, they will probably branch out in two separate directions. One focused on R&D into totally new methods of producing generic purpose CPUs that break through this wall and the other on application specific designs. They will most likely need to get the bulk of their revenue from application specific designs, taking a larger and larger percentage from the generic purpose CPUs as they get cheaper and cheaper (because other companies will reach the same barrier and the competition will reflect lower prices).
This is not necessarily a "bad" thing. I think it makes much more sense to design a chip specifically for, say, speach recognition. Sure, there is a very important software part of this and there has been some recent work on neural net chips or systems that supposedly is in the right direction, but someone like Intel spending vast amounts of resources on a speach recognition chip (based on neural computing or not) using 5 micron casts would likely have great success in a short amount of time (2-3 years). Think of all the other application specific areas where Intel and the other manufacturers could branch out if they ever do get to a 5 micron technology. Perhaps "visual" recognition, handwriting recognition, Oh, here's a big one -- language translation. The possibilities are endless, with a matching revenue stream. I could see someone spending $1000 or more for a generic language translation unit to take with them on their vacation (I certainly would and there's a heck of a lot of people in this world).
More and more of the economy now assumes a sustained exponential growth of IC based products. When the growth rate begins to slow, it WILL create significant disruption. A number of points: First the rate of growth WILL slow sometime, maybe caused by fundamental process limits, maybe by increasing costs associated with the capital equipment to manufacture the stuff, or maybe because it becomes to large a percentage of the GNP (saturation).
IC manufacture is capital intensive. Someone told me that an Intel fab plant runs $5-8B today and doubles every generation. Wall Street is pumping money into Silicon because of growth. When growth slows or stops is will have an enormous impact on investment flow. Then the lack of investment will slow progress, slowing the need for development. It's all interrelated, coupled and highly amplified by the exponent of Moore's Law.
When it slows, the whole attitude about products will shift. Today, if you want a really good sewing machine or small lathe you get a good used one built 1930-1950. When Moore's law times out, the investment in plants will slow to a trickle. Fab equipment will wear out. Student will avoid the dying industry. (What's the Silicon version of rust belt?) People won't buy a new computer because it's not as good as the old one. Software development will begin to focus on quality and then crash as the market saturates (no need to buy new SW once it works and you have to run on the same old machine.
When today's Moore's law based economy crashes it will create massive dislocations. Imagine Silicon Valley with a New England mill town look, or Pittsburg/Buffalo/Cleveland circa 1970.
I think Richard Feynman said it best many years ago:
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom by R. Feynman
IMO, he basically started many people thinking about nanotech (and this was in the '50s). There are some remarkable things coming from nanotech (IIRC, there are some remarkable things coming out of U of Michigan in nanotech).
There is plenty of room. We just need the technology and sophisitication in order to harness it. Somebody will achieve this technology (who and when are the important questions, not if ). When it happens, Moore's Law will just chug along as usual (as it always has).
Justin
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
I don't think we'll be using molecular computing on our desktops any time soon, nor quantum computing any time in the next few decades (you try lugging around an MRI machine, I dare ya), but all this means is that we'll have to shift paradigms to something else that's massively parallel.
Current technology relies on only a handful of processing paths though a chip being active at any one time. Compare this to our brains which are massively parallel at the cost of having lots of neurons sitting around and doing nothing most of the time. ('Nope, still don't smell anything new; nope, still not smelling anything...') The payoff comes when you want to do lots of things simultaneously, which is what happens in our visual centers, for example, when doing pattern recognition.
The harder problem (than transistor size) to deal with here is that our programming paradigm is going to have to shift to something that can take advantage of a massively parallel machine, which is really difficult. Not all problems can be made parallel, and only a few of them can be made parallel well.
On the bright side, it's mostly the hard ones like pattern recognition that work well parallel, so maybe the future is brighter than we think.
("Computer? Commm-PUTE-errr?" "Scotty, try the keyboard.")
From the article:
"When you get to very, very small sizes, you are limited by relying on only a handful of electrons to describe the difference between on and off."A handful of electrons? Some analogies just don't work. :u)
The silicon chip business has been a bit like the gasoline/petroleum industry, in that many interesting ideas with plenty of potential have been pushed aside or starved for funding, as long as the prevailing product continues to deliver what we're used to.
Businesses are happiest growing and changing incrementally, and it usually takes outside factors to force major change. But when that happens, almost everyone's better off in the end, because we end up with more choices.
I look forward to looking back on the latter part of the 20th Century as the primitive Age of Silicon, and wondering how we ever survived without nano/optic/bio/quantum tech...