4 ms·
I think silicon still has a bit longer to go before we will run into the end of Moore's Law on it(not even counting other substrates for transistors or logic ga
by tcoppi 11y ago
I think silicon still has a bit longer to go before we will run into the end of Moore's Law on it(not even counting other substrates for transistors or logic gates), beyond simply scaling there are a bunch of other techniques to squeeze performance and lower power usage that will be economically attractive if you can't shrink anymore, we've already seen some of them like clock gating and voltage scaling, but they can go a lot further. Once we get to the terminal node(probably 5nm with our current understanding) I think we will also see a lot of architecture innovation as well. Not x86 vs ARM or MIPS etc, but fundamentally different ways of thinking about processing units. I think FPGAs, GPUs, and other currently specialized architectures will become even more important, it is possible that everything in a "PC" could be as configurable as an FPGA is today. A lot of things open up once we hit the scaling wall and are forced to make better use of the given resources.
I also think die sizes will grow, including the possibility of "3D" wafers, but that will bring its own manufacturing and design challenges as well.
Anyway I think the end of classic Moore's Law scaling is still far enough away on the horizon that nobody can really predict what will happen, but if it does indeed happen as soon as the 2020s we will be in for a treat no matter what happens I think.