Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
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Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#2How about the breakthrough in silicene production? [1]
Could we use this to start stacking transistors in the vertical direction?
[1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/...
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#3Nautil is clickbait. These articles are flimsy and not fact checked. Its like the National inquirer for Popular Science articles
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#4How about the breakthrough in silicene production? [1] Could we use this to start stacking transistors in the vertical direction? [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/...
That will only work for passive components like caches otherwise you will see higher power consumption and heat dissipation.
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#5Well, 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 technology would necessitate the research into MNT.
What's funny is that we have arguably already reached the end on the silicon process technology, if Intel's desktop product offerings are used as a guide. There are gamers who are building new rigs using chips that are 2 or 3 generations old, because there isn't really anything better available. What's really hilarious are the guys building systems with used Xeon CPUs from retired servers!
So I don't know what's going on any more. You would think that the profits and stock prices of all the silicon companies would collapse if they weren't able to continue producing improvements on their existing products. Intel is spending massively on R&D, but the gains are nowhere close to what we saw 15 years ago.
Note that keep referencing Intel, because they've been at the leading edge. AMD doesn't have 14nm in production, for example.
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#6What about Quantum computing?
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#7One thought that isn't on here:
Once the process is "mature" and isn't changing every few years, the error rate could be squeezed way down. That would make it practical and economical to make larger chips. There are cooling and power issues too but I'm sure those are solvable.
Make way for the 64-bit 128-core 1024gb RAM 12cm^2 SoC?
Call it More's Law? Or a BFC? (for Big F'ing Chip?)
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#8From 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 and is likely to slow further within 5 years without more fundamental breakthroughs.
The related trend that processor clock speeds doubled every 1.5-2 years-- which is commonly mistaken as Moore's Law in lay press but is actually more related to Dennard Scaling, Koomey's Law and historical statements by Intel-- had ceased to hold as of the late Aughts as well, I believe.
Memsistors have been a promise for some time. I wonder how we will make the leap from current dense-transistor IC tech and processes to anything new, given the huge infrastructure investments in fabs, quality control processes, etc. It seems it will be difficult to scale out a new technology, whatever it is, and get it price-competitive with existing transistor-dense IC technology. Perhaps I misunderstand here though, and would be interested in thoughts from those with greater expertise in the field.
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#9How about the breakthrough in silicene production? [1] Could we use this to start stacking transistors in the vertical direction? [1] http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/...
That will only work for passive components like caches otherwise you will see higher power consumption and heat dissipation.
That's true, but there are other options. For instance, clockless computing is one avenue worth pursuing.
Re: Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)
#10What about Quantum computing?
I believe the point of this article was to discuss the possibilities outside of, and up until, that realm.