5 ms·

What if computer technology now is like space technology in the late 70s? After 40 years of continuous progress, suddenly the rate of improvement in technology

What if computer technology now is like space technology in the late 70s? After 40 years of continuous progress, suddenly the rate of improvement in technology completely flatlines and all the future predictions of going to the outer planets and such don't come true. How will the future be different?

supergarfield 10y ago
Interesting idea. One major difference though is that there is considerable economic incentive to keep making better chips, whereas the flatlining rocket technology was probably due in large part to lack of economic pressure to make it better (very high cost of entry for potential competitors and low volume).
- discodave 10y ago
  Indeed. Moore's law is about economics rather than technology.
GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
There currently doesn't appear to be a Richard Nixon to say 'shut it down.'
gozur88 10y ago
I suspect that's exactly what's going to happen unless we transition to a completely new architecture, like neural nets or The Diamond Age style nanomachinery.
mjevans 10y ago
The difference here is that we're much more likely to see moderately short term adoption of the technology as we already have 'downscale' companies using much older, cheaper to buy second hand equipment. If a wall is hit, the companies that /make/ the equipment will still need to sell units to someone, so the market equilibrium will push them closer and closer to the source cost for the (very often small batch/one off) parts. The race then between the rate they need/want to produce units to stay in business, and how long those in the market can defer purchasing new units.
- Animats 10y ago
  The wall has been hit in some areas. CPU clock speeds maxed out around 3-4 GHz years ago. Getting rid of heat now dominates chip design. This is why 3D chips are limited to mostly-inactive structures such as flash memory. Feature density is already approaching the size of atoms, which is why ICs now fail over time from electromigration. There's no longer plenty of room at the bottom. Atoms are too big and the speed of light is too slow.
  - smaddox 10y ago
    The speed of light is not really an issue in VLSI chip design. RC delay, on the other hand...
rayiner 10y ago
Most technology follows that curve. In the last century, coal power plants have gotten only a factor of two more efficient. Almost all the progress in the field happened from 1880 to 1940. Physics is a harsh mistress.
peller 10y ago
The semiconductor manufacturing processes might be flatlining a bit, but that's not entirely synonymous with "computer technology". One recent example we've already witnessed was in the GPU sector. They (nVidia and AMD) were stuck on 28nm for at least 5 years, and instead of just being able to rely on the "standard improvements" (by way of Moore's law) to get better performance at lower power, they had to rely on architectural improvements. nVidia fared significantly better, managing to double performance-per-watt on the same manufacturing node with Maxwell (GTX 980). Is such a feat easily repeatable? Very unlikely. But it also goes to show that when these companies can rely on improvements in the manufacturing process for their speed/efficiency boosts, they don't necessarily put as much effort into architectural improvements as they otherwise might. If you haven't heard of the Mill CPU, it's one example of completely rethinking things: http://millcomputing.com/docs/belt/ http://millcomputing.com/docs/belt/ Of course, the problem there is the missing software/OS toolchain. But it also points towards there being some huge inefficiencies present in "classic" von Neumann architectures, and to me, the possibility that there's still room for things to improve.
- XorNot 10y ago
  The Mill is far from proven. It's a big idea, but big ideas always look good initially - it's when you get down to the implementation details that most of your revolution in something tends to dry up and just become an evolutionary improvement in performance.
- paulmd 10y ago
  The next "total rethink" of GPUs is multiple dies on a single package. Not just for HBM, there's no reason you can't have the dies "hanging off" the interposer (supported by an inactive substrate), only overlapping the interposer on the regions necessary for chip bumps. Essentially each die becomes a large SMX Engine or other hierarchal unit that is marshalled by some central memory controller or other controller that presents the illusion of a single GPU rather than SLI/Crossfire. This is actually the direction AMD is going with Navi, not because of the performance gains per se but because it helps yields big time. You can pre-bin your chips, then stitch a bunch of small chips into medium chips while keeping your yields high. In theory you can scale up for quite a while. At the long term, you will eventually be limited by clock degradation/signal propagation time however. The short-term problem is heat and power. This doesn't help efficiency gains per se. If you are stitching together four 600mm^2 dies then you are going to be pulling 1000-1200W and dumping that back out into your cooling system. For US consumers, their circuit breakers are a much more immediate limit. Most household circuits are 15A @ 120V, and that's an instantaneous limit. You are not supposed to continuously pull more than 80% of a circuit's instantaneous rating, so that's 12A (1440W at the wall). Factor in the losses from the PSU's 80% efficiency and you are now talking 1152W continuously. Again, that works out to about four 600mm^2 GPU dies, plus some power budget for the CPU and so on. And you'd probably need to take drastic measures to keep that cool - that's a lot of heat in a small surface area.

supergarfield 10y ago

Interesting idea. One major difference though is that there is considerable economic incentive to keep making better chips, whereas the flatlining rocket technology was probably due in large part to lack of economic pressure to make it better (very high cost of entry for potential competitors and low volume).

discodave 10y ago
Indeed. Moore's law is about economics rather than technology.

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

There currently doesn't appear to be a Richard Nixon to say 'shut it down.'

gozur88 10y ago

I suspect that's exactly what's going to happen unless we transition to a completely new architecture, like neural nets or The Diamond Age style nanomachinery.

mjevans 10y ago

The difference here is that we're much more likely to see moderately short term adoption of the technology as we already have 'downscale' companies using much older, cheaper to buy second hand equipment. If a wall is hit, the companies that /make/ the equipment will still need to sell units to someone, so the market equilibrium will push them closer and closer to the source cost for the (very often small batch/one off) parts. The race then between the rate they need/want to produce units to stay in business, and how long those in the market can defer purchasing new units.

Animats 10y ago
The wall has been hit in some areas. CPU clock speeds maxed out around 3-4 GHz years ago. Getting rid of heat now dominates chip design. This is why 3D chips are limited to mostly-inactive structures such as flash memory. Feature density is already approaching the size of atoms, which is why ICs now fail over time from electromigration. There's no longer plenty of room at the bottom. Atoms are too big and the speed of light is too slow.
- smaddox 10y ago
  The speed of light is not really an issue in VLSI chip design. RC delay, on the other hand...

rayiner 10y ago

Most technology follows that curve. In the last century, coal power plants have gotten only a factor of two more efficient. Almost all the progress in the field happened from 1880 to 1940. Physics is a harsh mistress.

peller 10y ago

The semiconductor manufacturing processes might be flatlining a bit, but that's not entirely synonymous with "computer technology". One recent example we've already witnessed was in the GPU sector. They (nVidia and AMD) were stuck on 28nm for at least 5 years, and instead of just being able to rely on the "standard improvements" (by way of Moore's law) to get better performance at lower power, they had to rely on architectural improvements. nVidia fared significantly better, managing to double performance-per-watt on the same manufacturing node with Maxwell (GTX 980). Is such a feat easily repeatable? Very unlikely. But it also goes to show that when these companies can rely on improvements in the manufacturing process for their speed/efficiency boosts, they don't necessarily put as much effort into architectural improvements as they otherwise might. If you haven't heard of the Mill CPU, it's one example of completely rethinking things: http://millcomputing.com/docs/belt/ http://millcomputing.com/docs/belt/ Of course, the problem there is the missing software/OS toolchain. But it also points towards there being some huge inefficiencies present in "classic" von Neumann architectures, and to me, the possibility that there's still room for things to improve.

XorNot 10y ago
The Mill is far from proven. It's a big idea, but big ideas always look good initially - it's when you get down to the implementation details that most of your revolution in something tends to dry up and just become an evolutionary improvement in performance.
paulmd 10y ago
The next "total rethink" of GPUs is multiple dies on a single package. Not just for HBM, there's no reason you can't have the dies "hanging off" the interposer (supported by an inactive substrate), only overlapping the interposer on the regions necessary for chip bumps. Essentially each die becomes a large SMX Engine or other hierarchal unit that is marshalled by some central memory controller or other controller that presents the illusion of a single GPU rather than SLI/Crossfire. This is actually the direction AMD is going with Navi, not because of the performance gains per se but because it helps yields big time. You can pre-bin your chips, then stitch a bunch of small chips into medium chips while keeping your yields high. In theory you can scale up for quite a while. At the long term, you will eventually be limited by clock degradation/signal propagation time however. The short-term problem is heat and power. This doesn't help efficiency gains per se. If you are stitching together four 600mm^2 dies then you are going to be pulling 1000-1200W and dumping that back out into your cooling system. For US consumers, their circuit breakers are a much more immediate limit. Most household circuits are 15A @ 120V, and that's an instantaneous limit. You are not supposed to continuously pull more than 80% of a circuit's instantaneous rating, so that's 12A (1440W at the wall). Factor in the losses from the PSU's 80% efficiency and you are now talking 1152W continuously. Again, that works out to about four 600mm^2 GPU dies, plus some power budget for the CPU and so on. And you'd probably need to take drastic measures to keep that cool - that's a lot of heat in a small surface area.