3 ms·

What will replace Moore's law as the engine of exponential growth? The progress in the last 30 years in computing will not be replicated in the next 30 years f

• pacificmint 10y ago
  Right now chips are mostly two dimensional. Some of the structures might have three dimensions, but the general layout of the chip is two dimensional. Going into the third dimension would allow you to cram way more transistors into a small volume of space. Once we run out of improvements along the first two dimensions, up might be the only way to go to keep transistor growth going for the future.
  • akuma73 10y ago
    There are thermal issues with die stacking. Where does the heat go? This is a general problem in solid state physics. Power density is already a huge problem.
    • p1esk 10y ago
      Getting the heat out is an engineering problem. If nature could solve it (brain is 3D), we will find a way too.
      • dkarapetyan 10y ago
        But we haven't yet and saying keep doing the thing that increases power density when we know that currently doesn't work doesn't really address the main complaint. No one knows how the brain computes and the current hardware models are very poor approximations as the article outlines. Stacking more silicon is probably not the way to do it.
        • p1esk 10y ago
          What does not work? Flash is already 3D. DRAM is rapidly becoming 3D. High end FPGA chips have been 3D for a couple of years. Going vertical is the obvious way to extend Moore's Law, and the main reason why we don't see more of it today is that until recently it was easier to shrink transistors, so that's what people did. Now that's changing, and people will solve engineering problems related to 3D just like they solved engineering problems related to transistor shrinking. We might not know how exactly brain performs some of the tasks, but we are pretty sure neurons are arranged in 3D structures, and heat dissipation is not a problem.
          • bsder 10y ago
            > we are pretty sure neurons are arranged in 3D structures, and heat dissipation is not a problem. Actually, heat dissipation is a HUGE problem for biological structures. Heat exhaustion is a really easy thing to have happen to you. Biological organisms operate well only in a very narrow temperature range. The brain is a gigantic heat producing organ coupled to an enormous heat dissipating organ--skin.
          • akuma73 10y ago
            Flash and DRAM only have localized activity so heat isn't so much an issue - yet. There is actually a limit study using fundamental physics that shows that the amount of heat you can remove from a solid per unit time has a limit. Overheating is unavoidable below a certain volume. We're very close to that limit.
• hyperpallium 10y ago
  Could be biological: actual neurons; or using protein folding to do computation. Meanwhile 28nm remains the cheapest per transistor process - the first time smaller nodes got more expensive (due to heat, mainly). In the short-term, we might go for larger dies, clocked lower, to get more computation for less power. Perhaps all that wasted hardware will get used more efficiently (eg Metal and Vulkan).