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The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

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Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#31

Post by Joeboy »

archangel_one wrote: post #26
Joeboy wrote: post #25

Can somebody explain how and why this will hurt consumers like me? As long as I can still buy some general purpose computing device with 2013 desktop performance that I can plug a screen and keyboard into and run/write software the end of the upgrade treadmill seems pretty welcome. Am I missing something?

Yes - that the progress so far has allowed other form factors like smartphones. If it continues, it may open up new possibilities as well that wouldn't be feasible with the current level of chip technology.

So my loss is that I won't be able to buy hypothetical new devices that I don't currently know I need. This seems more like a problem for manufacturers than for me.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#33

Post by yaantc »

tedsanders wrote: post #19

Here's my impression of the future of CMOS: (1) Scaling will be technically feasible for many more years. (Intel's roadmap goes to 5 nm, and researchers have already made transistors as small as 3 nm.) (2) However, even if scaling is technically feasible, it may not be financially feasible. Quadruple patterning may get you smaller feature sizes, but at a very high cost. The alternative to quadruple patterning, x-ray…

I fully agree. A lot of people say Moore's law is the transistors density doubling every 18 months (or 2 years, it varied). But this misses the economic angle that was present from the start: Moore talked about the density of the least cost process.

So Moore's law stops either when we cannot cram more transistors in a given area, or when we cannot increase density without raising the cost per transistor. From what I've read I agree it's the economics variant that will end Moore's law. We'll have ways to shrink / increase performance, but not sure if there will be enough market to justify the rising costs.

A lot is riding on the continuation or end of Moore's law, so we should expect a lot of spin on this issue. I note that Intel claims they will decrease the cost per transistor until 10 nm at least, which is not the case for other fabs. But those other fabs are more transparent on costs than Intel, and Intel said they will produce a low cast modem+AP chip at... TSMC. Mmmm...

We have very interesting times ahead of us. Not only in silicon: a lot of progress in all areas was fueled by cheap computing power. A halt in silicon progress would be felt everywhere. Case in point: I'm in telecommunications. Every big steps was enabled by more computation per watt. That's what enabled to move from single channel TDM to CDMA to OFDMA with wider bands. If we can't increase exponentially the amount of computation per watt, then don't expect an exponential increase in wireless throughput either. It will progress, as everything, but at a slower pace.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#34

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

pushedx wrote: post #27

"You can't build a transistor with one atom." Actually, you can, it's called a single electron transistor (SET), and is a hot research area right now.

http://luciano.stanford.edu/~shimbo/set.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coulomb_blockade#Single_electro...

Looking at the pictures, these devices are not made from single atoms. They consist of multiple atoms but only require a few electrons to function.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#35

Post by wycx »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #13
walid wrote: post #7

I don't see this as a major problem since my nearly 4 year old computer is still working fine for most of my computing needs. Computer chips are so powerful now that they don't use a lot more than older computers didn't use.

Hmm, consider that you haven't spent any money on a computer in 4 years. Look at the 'health' of the computer companies like HP, Dell, Acer, etc. The problem here is a bit more insidious than you might assume at first glance. The reason you can buy a motherboard for $100 which has close to a thousand individual components soldered to a 16 layer board is because a manufacturer invested tens of millions of dollars in a…

However, look at the direction desktop hardware is going. Integration of more and more functionality into SoCs is the future for non-high performance desktop computing.

The more components that are integrated into the chip, the less there needs to be on the motherboard. Even better, all the high speed stuff can move onto the chip, making motherboard design easier. How long until SoCs come with RAM on die? Could you get away with a 4 layer motherboard in that case? So whilst you may lose economy of scale on the motherboard side, I think you will gain it back via integration, however, you will lose the ability to customise.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#36

Post by ghshephard »

fiatmoney wrote: post #9
ghshephard wrote: post #5

Whenever I'm wondering if Moore's law is still prevailing as a trailing indicator, I check out: http://www.top500.org/statistics/perfdevel/ If that (logarithmic) chart starts to flatten - particularly for device #500 (more price sensitive than the first part of the list) on the list, then we're running into real obstacles. Let's check back in 2020 and see if Device #500 is running at 10 Petaflops.

Most (all?) of those machines are clusters that scale mostly by throwing in nodes. Even if you have completely static technology, you'll see an exponential trend as long as you're scaling with economic growth by adding nodes.

Completely agree with you, which is why system #500 is more interesting than the "Nation State" systems in the first hundred positions or so. System #500 is going to be more closely aligned to the growth in technology.

Also - Economic growth [1] since 2001 has averaged 3.78% /year, for a total of 61% growth in 12 years - if computers had progressed in accordance with economic growth, than I would expect, all else equal, for systems to be .61x more powerful.

In that same period, system #500 went from 100 gigaflops to 100 teraflops, resulting in systems approx 1000x more powerful.

So - I agree that we'll see an exponential trend, regardless of whether technology improves, it's just that the curve is going to flatten (particularly on a log10 scale).

[1] http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#37

Post by alephnil »

beloch wrote: post #3

The end of Moore's law will probably come at about the same time true human-like AI appears. i.e. It seems like it will always be just a few decades in the future. e.g. Here's an economist article (sadly, paywalled) predicting that the end was nigh in 1995! http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-17272668.html If you extrapolate current designs out then, yes, a size barrier is approaching. So, we should expect new designs to…

Moores law is not a physical law. In fact the laws of physics dictates that it can't possibly be going on forever, as there is theoretical limits for how small and fast you can go. Then you can go some more years playing the "cheap" card but even that have to end eventually. The question is when. What is amazing is that it have been allowed to be in effect for nearly 70 years, and still no signs that it have stopped.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#38

Post by Sambdala »

Joeboy wrote: post #31
archangel_one wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - that the progress so far has allowed other form factors like smartphones. If it continues, it may open up new possibilities as well that wouldn't be feasible with the current level of chip technology.

So my loss is that I won't be able to buy hypothetical new devices that I don't currently know I need. This seems more like a problem for manufacturers than for me.

This hypothetical new device was the Internet not too long ago, and the PC not too long before that.

Re: The Moore's Law blowout sale is ending

#40

Post by bluedino »

ekianjo wrote: post #16
aquaroris wrote: post #2

I wonder what the post-Moore's law world will look like. The past couple centuries has been dominated by consumers and businesses automating and digitizing increasing parts of their lives as computers become more capable to handle them at the same low cost. (And the power the Internet gives us for being able to share information) As creating faster chips becomes harder, institutions will start to invest more in other…

> The past couple centuries ?? Centuries? You mean twenty/thirty years, probably? We don't really have computers until about 50 years ago, and even then it was not widespread. You don't have to wonder what post-Moore's law will look like. Look at other industries when they become mature. The car industry is one example: there's not that much innovation that goes into making a car better in terms of performance. I mea…

Cars are miles ahead of where they were in 1983 (pardon the pun). Compare everything from a family sedan to a sports car of the current era to then. Tires, creature comforts, horsepower, emissions, fuel economy, safety...
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