Moore’s Law Running Out of Room, Tech Looks for a Successor

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/technology/moores-law-running-out-of-room-tech-looks-for-a-successor.html

by ingve • 10 years ago

54 54 10 years ago

GavinB• 10 years ago

The end of Moore's law is like commercial fusion power--always just around the corner but it never seems to get here.

It does seem like we should stop counting how many transistors fit in how much space. At this point, size isn't the limiting factor. Tracking either the cost of a unit of processing power or the total processing power of the planet would be more meaningful in benchmarking technological progress.

pedrocr• 10 years ago

Apparently by processing efficiency standards we've already peaked:

28nm: The Last Node of Moore's Law http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1321536

thoughtsimple3• 10 years ago

The end of exponential growth is inevitable. We've reached the end of Moore's law as it applies to silicon wafers. We may be able to get to 5nm but no one really has an idea on how to do it and make a profit. Alternate technologies are just theoretical ideas that have no timeline for commercialization.

The main point of the decline of Moore's law is that it is about economics as much as it is about the size of the features on a chip. Even if someone does figure out how to get to 5nm it may not be cost effective to mass produce chips at that size. Already we see that Intel can't afford to keep up with shrinking scale as they've moved away from their tick-tock cadence to tick-tock-tock. Intel has the most advanced materials research in the world and they can't make it work cost effectively. That indicates pretty clearly that the exponential scaling of transistors is over. Smaller transistors may still be possible or new materials may emerge but the future scaling isn't going to happen on Dr. Moore's timetable which is the basis for Moore's law.

bluetomcat2• 10 years ago

Even if someone does figure out how to get to 5nm it may not be cost effective to mass produce chips at that size.

On top of that, it is not quite clear what would the hardware designers achieve with an increased transistor budget. CPU cores are becoming increasingly small in comparison to the surrounding circuitry (graphics, caches, control logic). We are bumped on clock speeds, too.

gene-h• 10 years ago

Applied Materials presented a roadmap on how we might get to 3 nm using disappointingly conventional semiconductor processing techniques[0]. In short, you make the transistors tall and thin.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130810001315/http://www.semico...

heathjohns2• 10 years ago

Moore's law (as it is generally talked about) is actually a pretty good indication of how much computational power we can get from a single processor core.

That, combined with Amdahl's law, means that the unmistakable levelling off that we're seeing now will place some pretty firm limits on what we can compute until we move off of silicon.

bluetomcat2• 10 years ago

Moore's law (as it is generally talked about) is actually a pretty good indication of how much computational power we can get from a single processor core.

Imagine that we have the technology in place to manufacture silicon chips at 2nm. How would we design CPU cores with a substantially better single-thread performance, when clock speed is limited? Optimization techniques like OoO execution and register renaming have already been pushed to their extremes. Increasing caches beyond a certain point has been shown to deliver diminishing returns.

We just don't know fundamentally how to design a substantially faster CPU core.

jbpetersen• 10 years ago

I agree.

Going by a more general version of Moore's Law (cost of equivalent processing power being halved about every 18 months) then I don't see any end in sight, though we might need to change paradigms on what processing power means every now and then.

xiphias2• 10 years ago

''After the 28nm node, we can continue to make transistors smaller, but not cheaper.'' As computer vision and reinforcement learning improved dramatically in the last few years, robots will take over a lot of manufacturing jobs of humans, so as long as there's enough demand to finance robot developments and there's no serious material shortage, I don't see why the cost could not go down to the cost of the material itself + development cost + robot cost in the following years.

throwaway_xx9• 10 years ago

Semiconductor mfg. is a chemical process, not a digital process. So robots won't help.

mjevans• 10 years ago

Robots, and better robotics will help...

The more that can be automated, automatically repaired / etc, the cheaper things get and the less humans will be potentially exposed to hazardous chemicals.

It won't improve single core performance, but it will go a long way towards making devices cost less.

petra3• 10 years ago

The fabrication plants are highly automated. The cost is mostly capital costs for equipment.

xiphias2• 10 years ago

What is the biggest cost in the equipment? I'm sure a big part of it is engineering but there must be expensive hand craft part as well.

randommodnar• 10 years ago

Can we quit with the Moore's law bullshit? It's not a law! It's just an observation about the direction a graph seems to be moving.

Yeah, we hope processors keep getting more powerful. Calling this "Moore's law" is idiotic. And probably confuses poor journalists and undergrads.

bravo222• 10 years ago

In all fairness the article says:

"Despite its official sound, it is not actually a scientific rule like Newton’s laws of motion. Instead, it describes the pace of change in a manufacturing process that has made computers exponentially more affordable."

monk_e_boy2• 10 years ago

It is amazingly interesting and coincidental that the 'law' seems to hold true, year after year.

akeck• 10 years ago

What ever happened to processors made with synthetic diamond? If I recall correctly, diamond has incredible heat transmission capability, so diamond processors made at the same density as current silicon processors could run at higher (and hotter) clock rates.

DasIch4• 10 years ago

Given that both diamond and graphene are both just carbon, what's the difference between the two approaches?

gilleain• 10 years ago

What does sharing a common element have to do with anything? They are allotropes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_carbon) - diamond, graphite, fullerenes, SWNT, etc all have very different properties.

arxpoetica• 10 years ago

The article also mentions graphene. Carbon in different forms has different properties, so, in theory there could be something valuable about using synthetic diamond.

forgotpwagain• 10 years ago

I think one of the difficulties with diamond was that n-type doping was very difficult in the past. However, there have been a huge number of improvements in fabricating various diamond-based devices (driven primarily by the development of various color center in diamond for applications in quantum optics, quantum computing), so it's likely to become more plausible in the future.

I don't know much about the relative performance of diamond transistors versus silicon transistors, so I can't say anything concretely about that. I could maybe see some sort of diamond solution being used as an add-on to current silicon technologies whereby the diamond helps enhance heat transport/cooling of the silicon device.

weatherlight• 10 years ago

So there's two obvious ways for faster machines, one of which we can do today: 1) Move off of silicon. 2) Write better code.

tachyonbeam• 10 years ago

I'm kind of skeptical we'll move off of silicon any time soon, but fortunately, I think there's still a lot we can do with silicon. We aren't nearly done optimizing hardware. Then there's the promise of 3D stacking, optical interconnects, more cores and more memory bandwidth.

monk_e_boy2• 10 years ago

optical interconnects

This leads on to less heat which means you can stack the layers more. 3D chips. Cram more cores in, layer memory into the mix.

fudged71• 10 years ago

From an article a while ago, I was convinced that the next generation of computers would be built on memristors... Allowing you to dynamically allocate memory and computation resources in a 3D framework. And photonics would be used to connect multiple computing units.

Is any of this feasible or realistic?

jeffreyrogers3• 10 years ago

I don't think moving off of silicon will help all that much. What would you move to? Germanium I guess, but I don't think you'll get a factor of 10 from that. We're already down to a scale where the feature size isn't much larger than the atoms themselves.

dharma1• 10 years ago

I think some types of computation can be done with optical processors orders of magnitude faster. It's still early days but I think really interesting

http://www.optalysys.com http://www.lighton.io

marcosdumay3• 10 years ago

A big obvious candidate is organics. It is not clear what kinds of short term gains are possible, nor what kinds of designs it would allow. But it looks very likely that the theoretical optimum substrate will turn out to be some kind of organic compost.

If not them, there are all kinds of III-V crystals. They come with their own share of problems, but they might be good for something beyond LEDs.

I think the greatest help from any non-silicon design will be from better heat dissipation and lower leakage. Those still have a lot of room to improve.

fintuple• 10 years ago

Moore's law is as much about economics as it is about shrinking. For all you code types, switching to a new device is not just as simple as fabricating a new chip in a research lab. Thousands of experimental devices and chips have been made in many research labs. Moore's law is about being able to consistently manufacture more and more millions (and now at billions) of very small transistors every generation (for silicon, this used to be about 1-1.5 years in the late 90's early 2000's).

johngalt• 10 years ago

The next step is specialization. Developing an ASIC makes more sense if there isn't going to be a general purpose x86 that eats your lunch in 5 years just by brute clock speed.

jeffreyrogers3• 10 years ago

The upside of the end of Moore's law is that hardware should stabilize as the focus goes from making things faster to making things easier to work with. I think there are already trends in this direction with projects like RISC-V.

gogopuppygogo• 10 years ago

I think the focus will go toward making hardware more power efficient instead of faster.

bravo222• 10 years ago

Power efficiency and size reduction go hand in hand. The gate capacitance is reduced at lower geometry, and you can also reduce the core voltage. Both of which directly contribute to power.

The only other way to reduce power is by clock gating, which pretty much happens these days on any decent SoC design targeted at mobile.

Moore’s Law Running Out of Room, Tech Looks for a Successor

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