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First 3D Nanotube and RRAM ICs Come Out of Foundry

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Re: First 3D Nanotube and RRAM ICs Come Out of Foundry

#11
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moore's law is about the number of transistors on a chip, not about performance. People talking about Moore's law talk about the "more transistors means more performance" aspect. That part hasn't held for a while now. No one cares if you have ten times as many transistors if it doesn't improve performance.

Performance of GPUs has increased quite well over the last 10 years. Number of Cores on CPUs have also increased. Even if performance didn't improve, that wouldn't make moore's law dead. You might say that Dennard scaling is dead. But Dennard scaling isn't Moore's law even thought is gets conflated a lot. Edit: Compare a GTX 285 to a RTX 2080 ti, the performance has increases more than 9 times over the last decade.

> Number of Cores on CPUs have also increased.

Correct, though number of cores is far harder to use in software than the higher Mhz/Ghz we enjoyed before. Same for GPUs. If you can use them you still enjoy a noticable increase in performance, but not all programs (or rather algorithms) can be changed to benefit from more cores and even less commercial ones.

> You might say that Dennard scaling is dead. But Dennard scaling isn't Moore's law even thought is gets conflated a lot.

Fair enough. I looked this up and the combination of Dennard scaling and Moore's law seems to be called Koomey's law - I've never heard that term before, but it fits the definition of what people usually attribute to Moore's law:

> Jonathan Koomey articulated the trend as follows: "at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law

Re: First 3D Nanotube and RRAM ICs Come Out of Foundry

#12

3D circuits make a lot of sense. I'd be interested to know how they plan to cool this though. My understand was that the in current chips, the 3rd dimension is largely used for heat dissipation, and that heat is the primary constraint on faster processors.

time for volumetric cooling vias

IBM did some work in microfluidics to move heat out of the hottest parts of a chip to the surface. After that you can use more conventional cooling tech to carry the heat away.

Re: First 3D Nanotube and RRAM ICs Come Out of Foundry

#13
post #3

Does this mean that the news of Moore's law demise are greatly exaggerated?

Will just go in a different direction. Gordon Moore himself alludes to advanced packaging / 3D configurations in his original 1965 paper:

"It may prove economical to build large systems out of smaller functions, which are separately packaged and interconnected."

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