9 ms·

Moore’s Law Is About to Get Weird (2015)

101 points by sjayasinghe 10y ago

GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
One interesting avenue of research is embedded reconfigurable computing technologies like eMIPS [0]. Unlike other reconfigurable computing approaches that simply place a FPGA side-by-side with a CPU in the same package to act as a co-processor [1], eMIPS integrates reconfigurable logic directly into the processing pipeline, allowing the creation of custom processor instructions on the fly on a per app basis to accelerate apps. Pretty cool stuff. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/intel_xeon_fpga/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/intel_xeon_fpga/
amelius 10y ago
How 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/breakthrough-in-silicene-production-promises-a-future-of-silicenebased-electronics http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/...
- imtringued 10y ago
  That will only work for passive components like caches otherwise you will see higher power consumption and heat dissipation.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    That's true, but there are other options. For instance, clockless computing is one avenue worth pursuing.
NOSHSHNACKERS 10y ago
Nautil is clickbait. These articles are flimsy and not fact checked. Its like the National inquirer for Popular Science articles
ansible 10y ago
Well, 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.
- chii 10y ago
  if Intel has reasonable guesses as to what their competitor's level of R&D is at, they can stall the current gen tech for as long as possible, in order to milk the max profits off the capital investments. Chip design and manufacturing isn't something a garage tinkerer can do (at the level of cutting edge research to compete with existing silicon makers). Therefore, companies like Intel can afford to lax until their customers demand differently (in which case, they will probably put the gas on R&D).
- swalsh 10y ago
  "retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86." I wonder if today it's easier than people imagine, but the lessons of Itanium are used as a signal to not try. Sure there are plenty of apps which make low-level use of x86 features, and those probably aren't going to be updated. However a lot of modern software is written in languages that go through interrupters. Java, C#, Python.. if you can update the runtime, in theory the apps can be supported anywhere.
TheArcane 10y ago
What about Quantum computing?
- teamfrizz 10y ago
  I believe the point of this article was to discuss the possibilities outside of, and up until, that realm.
- adrianN 10y ago
  Quantum computing is still in the "researchers are playing with a handful of Qbits" stage, approximately where transistors where a hundred years ago. Scaling quantum computers is really hard. Even though Qbits can be encoded in single atoms, the machinery that keeps the quantum states stable and manipulates them is most definitely not easy to shrink. It's also completely unclear whether quantum computers would make your Javascript engine run any faster.
- swalsh 10y ago
  My understanding is Quantum computing isn't the next generation of computing, it's more of a new type of computing. It's an improvement on a certain class of problems (such as optimization algorithms).
- GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
  Quantum computing has nothing to do with what what we would consider "regular" computing. Even if it became practical, at most it would be a specialized accelerator for certain types of computation, like factoring numbers. A decent explanation can be found here: https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/quantum-computing-101 https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/quantum...
api 10y ago
One 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?)
- n00b101 10y ago
  >Make way for the 64-bit 128-core 1024gb RAM 8cm^2 SoC This is already happening? Intel Xeon Knights Landing already has an enormous 6.83cm^2 die size. It has 72 "cores," each of which has a 512-bit vector processor. In some sense, you could say that this chip has 9,216 "single precision cores." It also supports up to 384GB DDR4 RAM, which is not far from your 1024GB. The term "core" is becoming vague, as NVIDIA refers to thousands of "CUDA cores" on its GPUs which are really vector processor elements. China's Sunway SW26010 is also kind of a "SoC," 260 "cores" communicating via a Network-on-Chip interconnect. I think one could say that the Cell Broadband Engine processor had a similar design. > make it practical and economical to make larger chips I do wonder if die sizes can increase. I'm not a hardware engineer, but my understanding is that latency is the main barrier to larger chips. The time it takes for a signal to propagate across a chip limits the clock frequency. One possibility is to replace the global synchronous clock design with an asynchronous chip design. However, from what I understand, this would make things worse because some form of synchronization is always needed - you could send back an "acknolwedge" message, but that would double the signal traffic. On the other hand, supercomputers are regularly built with multi-socket systems and interconnects like QPI and PCIe between processors and nodes. It would seem logical to put multiple processors their interconnects on a single "SoC" and I don't know why that doesn't happen. Maybe it is because of error rates, as you say.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Asynchronous does not help you on latency at all - it's not the latency of the clock that matters. It's the data latency. This is already kind of crippling, as it takes hundreds of cycles to get anything from RAM if it's not in your cache. Only way to improve that is to make programming languages push either data locality or dataflow like designs, which may mean giving up or reimagining OO. Error rates (yield) are a serious problem, but if your design is uniform enough you can very well get away with just disabling bits. There's also a less obvious problem with on-chip variation (OCV) - some physical properties have a gradient across the chip. At runtime, there's a temperature gradient as well.
erdevs 10y ago
From 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.
- VT_Drew 10y ago
  >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.
  - km3k 10y ago
    Moore's Law has nothing to do with clock speed.
  - zerohp 10y ago
    Aside from the obvious problems in your comparison. Moore's Law says nothing about frequency. The "rule" that changed around 2006 was Dennard scaling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_Dennard_scaling_around_2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_D...
aj7 10y ago
Crappy article.
aj7 10y ago
Crappy article.
carlob 10y ago
Adamatzky seems to be churning out cookie cutter articles on slime molds and highways https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Adamatzky+highways&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Adamatzky+highways&btnG...
steego 10y ago
For all the interesting things happening today, this is an incredibly dull article. I'm convinced I read this same article in the 90's. If we're going to see any developments in alternative architectures and hardware, it's going to happen in the cloud computing space. From my perspective, this is the only sector that is in the unique position to sell specialized computing services to customers on a mass scale and make great margins in the process. There are many interesting and useful things you can do outside of Von Neumann architectures and Turing Complete systems that were never practical on PCs. Simple services like Reddis could probably be implemented with alternative memory architectures like content-addressable memory. Many useful algorithms in the data analytic and machine learning space can be compiled down the specialized hardware using using a combination of transistors and memristors. For companies like Amazon, Microsoft + Google, there's actually a financial incentive to harmonize hardware and software much in the same way Seymour Cray harmonized the software and hardware of Cray's supercomputers. These cloud companies don't want to be constrained to selling commodity virtual machines. They want to sell you the next generation PaaS solution like DynamoDB, SQL Azure or Firebase so they can lock you into their cloud platform. If there's a future where developers are writing code in special DSLs that's compiled to gates on an FPGA, the cloud computing guys will be exploring it because they have a huge incentive to get their customer's into the walled garden that yields better margins. If you can create one platform service that developers love and runs on cheaper specialized hardware, you'll be able to destroy your competitors and signal an alternative hardware arms race.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Maybe the cloud computer guys will go there, but the high performance computing people are already well settled. Anton [1], a machine running custom ASICs for molecular dynamics, has already produced some very interesting biomolecular simulations. MDGRAPE3 was even earlier (completed in 2006). There was also a (sadly failed) initiative about ten years back in Germany to build a custom ASIC for multigrid Poisson equation solvers. I'm sure there are more examples outside of my interests. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)
- steego 10y ago
rm999 10y ago
This is one of the most insightful things about Moore's Law I've read: https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-Moores-Law-continue-to-apply/answers/605270 https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-Moores-Law-continue-to-a... Moore's Law is a limit that ultimately arises from economics. The costs to keep Moore's Law going are exponential (just like the gain), and fewer and fewer companies are willing to pay the increasingly high price. I was always primed to believe the exponential gains were essentially "free" and came with a fixed amount of investment into the industry. Understanding that this isn't true explains why Moore's Law will end unless demand is exponentially increasing.
james-watson 10y ago
As 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 already here. All that other stuff is vaporware.
- jsprogrammer 10y ago
  Where can I buy one?
- grkvlt 10y ago
  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."
tkinom 10y ago
Moore's Law seems to reach its limit only for CPU clock. But it still moving very fast for GPU, FPGA, DDR, SSD, etc, right? Or even in term of Network connection speed - 100mbps, 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G (at lease in data center where it matters a lot.) The simple usb connection speed also continue to increase at a fast rate.
protomok 10y ago
The chemical, wetware, fluid and ternary computing concepts mentioned in the article I guess make for a good headline but seem highly unlikely. In the short term I really think we are entering the era of accelerators. Accelerators like Micron's Automata Processor (1) for graph analysis, accelerators for compute intensive applications like Convolutional Neural Nets, continued innovation in DSPs, GPUs, etc. Accelerators that can either outperform traditional processors or use significantly less power I think represent one of the major next steps after Moore's law. What comes next may well be a slime mold computer but I think at this point is pure speculation. (1) - http://www.micronautomata.com http://www.micronautomata.com - actually I heard about this on HN!
- erdevs 10y ago
  Yes, almost certainly the next phase for performance-intensive computing is more specialized chips, systems-on-a-chip, and whole specialized rigs. The TensorFlow Processing Unit is a good recent example of this, as are ASICs in bitcoin mining, specialized hardware in molecular biology simulation, and more examples. This is just the beginning. I think the interesting question is what happens after that. Not too long from now, specialized systems will run up against the same physical limits that general purpose processors have begun to hit the past few years as well, as specialized fabs increase in capability and sophistication. We see this already with GPUs.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Specialization is essentially trading off additional hardware design work--and additional software complexity--for performance. When Moore's Law was going strong, it usually didn't make sense; just wait a couple years and the next x86 generation will probably more or less catch up to whatever performance gains your specialization was going to buy you. I think it's pretty clear that we're going to see the introduction of all sorts of specialized hardware that we already more or less know how to do but it just hasn't been worth the trouble before. But you're also right that, so long as we're still talking CMOS, this is probably a more or less one-time boost that's maybe worth a few CMOS generations depending on the specific case.
worik 10y ago
"Nautilus uses cookies to manage your digital subscription and show you your reading progress. It's just not the same without them" Well, no thanks. No, it is not the same.

101 points by sjayasinghe 10y ago

One interesting avenue of research is embedded reconfigurable computing technologies like eMIPS [0]. Unlike other reconfigurable computing approaches that simply place a FPGA side-by-side with a CPU in the same package to act as a co-processor [1], eMIPS integrates reconfigurable logic directly into the processing pipeline, allowing the creation of custom processor instructions on the fly on a per app basis to accelerate apps. Pretty cool stuff. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/emips/ [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/intel_xeon_fpga/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/intel_xeon_fpga/

amelius 10y ago

How 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/breakthrough-in-silicene-production-promises-a-future-of-silicenebased-electronics http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/...

imtringued 10y ago
That will only work for passive components like caches otherwise you will see higher power consumption and heat dissipation.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  That's true, but there are other options. For instance, clockless computing is one avenue worth pursuing.

NOSHSHNACKERS 10y ago

Nautil is clickbait. These articles are flimsy and not fact checked. Its like the National inquirer for Popular Science articles

ansible 10y ago

Well, 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.

chii 10y ago
if Intel has reasonable guesses as to what their competitor's level of R&D is at, they can stall the current gen tech for as long as possible, in order to milk the max profits off the capital investments. Chip design and manufacturing isn't something a garage tinkerer can do (at the level of cutting edge research to compete with existing silicon makers). Therefore, companies like Intel can afford to lax until their customers demand differently (in which case, they will probably put the gas on R&D).
swalsh 10y ago
"retooling our entire tech stack for that isn't going to happen. I mean, look at x86." I wonder if today it's easier than people imagine, but the lessons of Itanium are used as a signal to not try. Sure there are plenty of apps which make low-level use of x86 features, and those probably aren't going to be updated. However a lot of modern software is written in languages that go through interrupters. Java, C#, Python.. if you can update the runtime, in theory the apps can be supported anywhere.

TheArcane 10y ago

What about Quantum computing?

teamfrizz 10y ago
I believe the point of this article was to discuss the possibilities outside of, and up until, that realm.
adrianN 10y ago
Quantum computing is still in the "researchers are playing with a handful of Qbits" stage, approximately where transistors where a hundred years ago. Scaling quantum computers is really hard. Even though Qbits can be encoded in single atoms, the machinery that keeps the quantum states stable and manipulates them is most definitely not easy to shrink. It's also completely unclear whether quantum computers would make your Javascript engine run any faster.
swalsh 10y ago
My understanding is Quantum computing isn't the next generation of computing, it's more of a new type of computing. It's an improvement on a certain class of problems (such as optimization algorithms).
GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
Quantum computing has nothing to do with what what we would consider "regular" computing. Even if it became practical, at most it would be a specialized accelerator for certain types of computation, like factoring numbers. A decent explanation can be found here: https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/quantum-computing-101 https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/quantum...

api 10y ago

One 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?)

n00b101 10y ago
>Make way for the 64-bit 128-core 1024gb RAM 8cm^2 SoC This is already happening? Intel Xeon Knights Landing already has an enormous 6.83cm^2 die size. It has 72 "cores," each of which has a 512-bit vector processor. In some sense, you could say that this chip has 9,216 "single precision cores." It also supports up to 384GB DDR4 RAM, which is not far from your 1024GB. The term "core" is becoming vague, as NVIDIA refers to thousands of "CUDA cores" on its GPUs which are really vector processor elements. China's Sunway SW26010 is also kind of a "SoC," 260 "cores" communicating via a Network-on-Chip interconnect. I think one could say that the Cell Broadband Engine processor had a similar design. > make it practical and economical to make larger chips I do wonder if die sizes can increase. I'm not a hardware engineer, but my understanding is that latency is the main barrier to larger chips. The time it takes for a signal to propagate across a chip limits the clock frequency. One possibility is to replace the global synchronous clock design with an asynchronous chip design. However, from what I understand, this would make things worse because some form of synchronization is always needed - you could send back an "acknolwedge" message, but that would double the signal traffic. On the other hand, supercomputers are regularly built with multi-socket systems and interconnects like QPI and PCIe between processors and nodes. It would seem logical to put multiple processors their interconnects on a single "SoC" and I don't know why that doesn't happen. Maybe it is because of error rates, as you say.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Asynchronous does not help you on latency at all - it's not the latency of the clock that matters. It's the data latency. This is already kind of crippling, as it takes hundreds of cycles to get anything from RAM if it's not in your cache. Only way to improve that is to make programming languages push either data locality or dataflow like designs, which may mean giving up or reimagining OO. Error rates (yield) are a serious problem, but if your design is uniform enough you can very well get away with just disabling bits. There's also a less obvious problem with on-chip variation (OCV) - some physical properties have a gradient across the chip. At runtime, there's a temperature gradient as well.

erdevs 10y ago

From 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.

VT_Drew 10y ago
>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.
- km3k 10y ago
  Moore's Law has nothing to do with clock speed.
- zerohp 10y ago
  Aside from the obvious problems in your comparison. Moore's Law says nothing about frequency. The "rule" that changed around 2006 was Dennard scaling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_Dennard_scaling_around_2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling#Breakdown_of_D...

aj7 10y ago

Crappy article.

aj7 10y ago

Crappy article.

carlob 10y ago

Adamatzky seems to be churning out cookie cutter articles on slime molds and highways https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Adamatzky+highways&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Adamatzky+highways&btnG...

steego 10y ago

For all the interesting things happening today, this is an incredibly dull article. I'm convinced I read this same article in the 90's. If we're going to see any developments in alternative architectures and hardware, it's going to happen in the cloud computing space. From my perspective, this is the only sector that is in the unique position to sell specialized computing services to customers on a mass scale and make great margins in the process. There are many interesting and useful things you can do outside of Von Neumann architectures and Turing Complete systems that were never practical on PCs. Simple services like Reddis could probably be implemented with alternative memory architectures like content-addressable memory. Many useful algorithms in the data analytic and machine learning space can be compiled down the specialized hardware using using a combination of transistors and memristors. For companies like Amazon, Microsoft + Google, there's actually a financial incentive to harmonize hardware and software much in the same way Seymour Cray harmonized the software and hardware of Cray's supercomputers. These cloud companies don't want to be constrained to selling commodity virtual machines. They want to sell you the next generation PaaS solution like DynamoDB, SQL Azure or Firebase so they can lock you into their cloud platform. If there's a future where developers are writing code in special DSLs that's compiled to gates on an FPGA, the cloud computing guys will be exploring it because they have a huge incentive to get their customer's into the walled garden that yields better margins. If you can create one platform service that developers love and runs on cheaper specialized hardware, you'll be able to destroy your competitors and signal an alternative hardware arms race.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
Maybe the cloud computer guys will go there, but the high performance computing people are already well settled. Anton [1], a machine running custom ASICs for molecular dynamics, has already produced some very interesting biomolecular simulations. MDGRAPE3 was even earlier (completed in 2006). There was also a (sadly failed) initiative about ten years back in Germany to build a custom ASIC for multigrid Poisson equation solvers. I'm sure there are more examples outside of my interests. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer)
steego 10y ago

rm999 10y ago

This is one of the most insightful things about Moore's Law I've read: https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-Moores-Law-continue-to-apply/answers/605270 https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-Moores-Law-continue-to-a... Moore's Law is a limit that ultimately arises from economics. The costs to keep Moore's Law going are exponential (just like the gain), and fewer and fewer companies are willing to pay the increasingly high price. I was always primed to believe the exponential gains were essentially "free" and came with a fixed amount of investment into the industry. Understanding that this isn't true explains why Moore's Law will end unless demand is exponentially increasing.

james-watson 10y ago

As 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 already here. All that other stuff is vaporware.

jsprogrammer 10y ago
Where can I buy one?
grkvlt 10y ago
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."

tkinom 10y ago

Moore's Law seems to reach its limit only for CPU clock. But it still moving very fast for GPU, FPGA, DDR, SSD, etc, right? Or even in term of Network connection speed - 100mbps, 1G, 10G, 25G, 40G (at lease in data center where it matters a lot.) The simple usb connection speed also continue to increase at a fast rate.

protomok 10y ago

The chemical, wetware, fluid and ternary computing concepts mentioned in the article I guess make for a good headline but seem highly unlikely. In the short term I really think we are entering the era of accelerators. Accelerators like Micron's Automata Processor (1) for graph analysis, accelerators for compute intensive applications like Convolutional Neural Nets, continued innovation in DSPs, GPUs, etc. Accelerators that can either outperform traditional processors or use significantly less power I think represent one of the major next steps after Moore's law. What comes next may well be a slime mold computer but I think at this point is pure speculation. (1) - http://www.micronautomata.com http://www.micronautomata.com - actually I heard about this on HN!

erdevs 10y ago
Yes, almost certainly the next phase for performance-intensive computing is more specialized chips, systems-on-a-chip, and whole specialized rigs. The TensorFlow Processing Unit is a good recent example of this, as are ASICs in bitcoin mining, specialized hardware in molecular biology simulation, and more examples. This is just the beginning. I think the interesting question is what happens after that. Not too long from now, specialized systems will run up against the same physical limits that general purpose processors have begun to hit the past few years as well, as specialized fabs increase in capability and sophistication. We see this already with GPUs.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Specialization is essentially trading off additional hardware design work--and additional software complexity--for performance. When Moore's Law was going strong, it usually didn't make sense; just wait a couple years and the next x86 generation will probably more or less catch up to whatever performance gains your specialization was going to buy you. I think it's pretty clear that we're going to see the introduction of all sorts of specialized hardware that we already more or less know how to do but it just hasn't been worth the trouble before. But you're also right that, so long as we're still talking CMOS, this is probably a more or less one-time boost that's maybe worth a few CMOS generations depending on the specific case.

worik 10y ago

"Nautilus uses cookies to manage your digital subscription and show you your reading progress. It's just not the same without them" Well, no thanks. No, it is not the same.