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Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
61–65 of 65 posts
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#62Well, none of those listed technologies is practical. Ternary logic is really cool, but it only gets you about a 10% efficiency improvement. I think it would be awesome to go in this direction, but retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86. The only thing that will really make progress is molecular nanotechnology. I had always believed that reaching the end of silicon process…
I tried to fix that by submitting this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12227555 What do you think about that advancement? Think the quantom dot circuits can get practical enough to go anywhere? Or even good potentially for low-volume, high-price applications we see with some S-ASIC's or ASIC's?
I think it will be difficult to bring some of these technologies into mass production with subtractive manufacturing like lithography. We really need additive manufacturing techniques instead.
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything this necessitates advances in parallel computing. We can keep up with Moores law for a bit longer if we add more cores too.
Moore's law is about transistor density.
Traditionally the term has been mostly about speed rather than density. Well, a lot of people say it's about transistors per chip since Moore wrote a paper on that doubling and that was the first time people noticed periodic doubling in the semiconductor industry. But it took almost 10 years for "Moore's Law" to come into currency and in the mean time Moore had made lots of speeches about lots of different doubling. And the term "Moore's Law" has never really referred to one aspect of semiconductor technology in particular since during the era of Dennard scaling they all improved together.
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#64From the article: > "...Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a semiconductor chip of a given size doubles roughly every two years, has held true since the mid 1960s..." I thought it was the case that Moore's "Law" hasn't held up since ~2012. I believe Intel and others have stated that as of 2012 or so, with 22nm processes, transistor density now doubles every ~2.5 years a…
>I thought it was the case that Moore's "Law" hasn't held up since ~2012. I thought it was before that, like 1999. I pretty sure I had an Intel Pentium III 2 GHz processor in 99. The computer I am using to type this comment is 2.5 GHz. More's law is long dead, we aren't going to see 12 GHz machines in the next 6 years.
And the 2.5GHz chip you are using now n years later has (very) approximately 2^n more transistors - think about the increase in the number of cores, the large number of different execution units, the increased width of the data busses, that vast amount of on-die cache and so on. These all increase the transistor count, but feature size is also getting smaller, allowing the total transistor density to increase in line with Moore's law.
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#65As usual, memristor based computing architecture is left out. Intel's 3DXPoint has already brought memristor memory units to market. The beauty of memristor architectures is that they can be used for logic and storage, so you can create some radical new architectures with them. I'm too lazy to link the talk by Stan Williams of HP, but if you google it it's the ~45min one. This is the next architecture because it's al…
From the article: "However, ternary computing may be spurred on by a new device called the memristor. [...] Memristors might become one of the industry’s hopes for extending Moore’s Law beyond the age of the silicon transistor."