10 ms·

I'm guessing these yearly conferences will fade away as Moore's Law falls apart and Intel and others will have a harder time coming up with something new to sho

by pkaye 10y ago

I'm guessing these yearly conferences will fade away as Moore's Law falls apart and Intel and others will have a harder time coming up with something new to showcase every year. No longer can you rely on process shrinks to innovate.

komali2 10y ago
People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. I mean, I didn't, I'm just a guy that reads a lot of scifi. But I always assumed whiz-bang mathematicians had already figured out, I dunno, the threshold at which a processor can be nanosized, or like how big a processor could become before the distances became too great that due to the speed of light further computational advancement wasn't possible. I mean, I know nothing about this stuff, like I said, I just read a lot of scifi and have a high opinion of all the smart folk researching this stuff. Would love to learn more.
- ghaff 10y ago
  >People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. First of all, let's be more precise. In this context, what people mean by the "end of Moore's Law" is the slowdown and, soon, probable end of CMOS process scaling. The issue is that CMOS process scaling has been such an incredible engine for performance that just getting those kinds of performance increases in other ways isn't easy. I wrote a bit about this a year ago. http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-in-servers.html http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-... To answer your question, people did see this coming. There were disagreements about how far down you could economically drive feature sizes so there has been debate about exact dates. But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small.
  - spb 10y ago
    > But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small. Pretty much no one qualified, maybe. There are lots of laymen (including many True Believers in The Singularity) who operate under the impression that it's a fixed law of nature.
- akuma73 10y ago
  Have a look at this photo: http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg That's a fin of a modern transistor (Intel 22nm). The dots in the photo are atoms. It's fair to say that Moore's law is nearing an end or has already ended.
  - Animats 10y ago
    Atoms are too big, photons are too big, electrons are too big, and the speed of light is too slow. There's no longer plenty of room at the bottom. Still, it's not like the physical size of semiconductors is the problem. A CPU today is maybe 100mm^2 of silicon. 4U of rack space can easily hold tens of thousands of CPUs, if you can power them, cool them, and connect them up in a useful way.
    - akuma73 10y ago
      if you can power them, cool them, and connect them up in a useful way. Good luck with that. Power costs go up linearly at best with cores if you don't have any more transistor scaling.
      - sbierwagen 10y ago
        Power will always scale linearly with cores, of course, but you could make cores less power-hungry with reversible computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing Actually useful reversible logic is, as they say, an open problem.
        akuma73 10y ago
        My point was that a new transistor shrink would give you lower power vs. the same transistor in previously larger node. You get more compute-per-watt with small transistors. If scaling stops, then all kinds of things get more difficult.
    - ZephyrP 10y ago
- wtallis 10y ago
  > "But I always assumed whiz-bang mathematicians had already figured out, I dunno, the threshold at which a processor can be nanosized, or like how big a processor could become before the distances became too great that due to the speed of light further computational advancement wasn't possible." We're nowhere near the absolute limits imposed by the fundamentals of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc. Those are relatively straightforward bounds to calculate but are completely useless for anything but extremely long-term projections. What we wish we could compute is what the limits are on current manufacturing techniques and incremental advances from that. But we don't know precisely how many incremental improvements we have left to discover before we need to abandon silicon entirely.
  - ansible 10y ago
    But we don't know precisely how many incremental improvements we have left to discover before we need to abandon silicon entirely. Well, it is not as if we will just suddenly stop using CMOS, but the end of improvements is in sight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer If we are willing to putter along with no process improvements whatsoever, then yes, we can keep using 5nm indefinitely. And no doubt there will be incremental improvements in performance and yield at that node. But we can't, and won't stop there to continue to drive down the cost of computing. It is just the end of the road for CMOS lithography.
    - akuma73 10y ago
      What are your thoughts on the drivers for reducing the cost of computing beyond CMOS?
    - kcorbitt 10y ago
      > But we can't, and won't stop there to continue to drive down the cost of computing. It is just the end of the road for CMOS lithography. I mean, is there any reason to believe this is actually true? There's no law that just because something is super useful its price will continue to drop forever. Just check out this chart: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/import/switchboard/blogs/mbaumhefner/Gas%20Elec%20Price%20History%20Comparison%20Final.jpg https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/import/switchboard/.... The blue line is the inflation-adjusted price of electricity by year. I think it's fair to say that electricity is even more vital to the modern economy than compute power, and that having more of it for cheaper would unquestionably raise the standard of living for everyone. There's also a functional and mostly-free market for its production. And yet its real cost has remained essentially stagnant over the last 40+ years. Now, there are obviously reasons why Moore's law has been a thing for so long (probably a lot to do with the exponentially increasing number of chips we use and the experience curve http://www.economist.com/node/14298944 http://www.economist.com/node/14298944), but the last 50 years in chips may have been more the exception than the rule.
- samfisher83 10y ago
  The problem is at some point the gates start getting to the size of an atom. How do you get smaller than an atom? I don't think you can.
  - komali2 10y ago
    Well uh, can you squeeze the atoms closer together? I didn't think they were solid objects, but clouds of electrons? I guess eventually the nuclear power or whatever it is that pushes atoms apart becomes too strong?
- RandomOpinion 10y ago
  > "People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming." EEs in the semiconductor industry have been talking about it for the past 20 years; they didn't know exactly when it would occur but they knew it was coming. It's only software developers who were blissfully unaware. EDIT: The interesting thing about the end of Moore's Law from AMD's (and everybody who isn't Intel) perspective is that finally the playing field is moving closer to even. Before, Intel always had the most advanced fab processes because of the vast amounts of money they funneled into it, which meant that everybody else had to have a better architecture than Intel chips just to get equal performance. Now that Intel is losing that process advantage, it should become possible for everyone to compete purely on the basis of architecture again.
- bsder 10y ago
  > People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. People didn't WANT to see it coming. The data that it broke were back at 65nm but very much at 40nm and 28nm. RAM hasn't scaled in years. However, the history of technology is littered with the corpses of those who bet against Moore's Law. Combine this with the fact that your job basically depends upon Moore's Law continuing, and you have something similar to the Wall Street collapse. I can bet against it, but I lose my job if I'm wrong, and I lose my job if I'm right. Better to just close my eyes and cash my paycheck. For consumer evidence simply look at embedded microcontrollers. Note that RAM and flash haven't been scaling every 18 months for a while.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    There's some truth in that. And there are also various approaches that can probably mitigate the end of CMOS process scaling for a while (special-purpose hardware, photonics, 3D stacking, etc.) Some of these will cause some pain in other areas like software development. That said, there's absolutely no guarantee that there's a true CMOS 2.0 on the horizon that will provides anything like the approximately 3500X performance gains we've seen from CMOS process scaling. There are huge macro implications if computing basically stops getting faster/cheaper/smaller from year to year.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    I see this as a good thing. Now we can finally get down to what we should have been doing in the first place: better software, rather than just more of it and of mediocre quality. Moore's law has bailed out many producers of inferior quality software and now that that free run has come to an end we're going to have to take a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      But do you really believe that by taking "a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up" software engineers can double performance (in the sense of effective work) every 18 months? We can absolutely turn the dial toward more effort on software such as algorithms/compiled languages/etc. but color me unconvinced that there's exponential growth possibilities there.
dep_b 10y ago
I see Intel falling apart, ARM-based chipmakers are still ramping up the curve as usual.
- kodfodrasz 10y ago
  Because they are not there yet...
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon. There is no magic - computation has a minimum energy cost. What can happen is to make chips simpler in that less computation is spent in instruction decoding, tracking, scheduling and more is spent on actual execution.
    - kodfodrasz 10y ago
      Yes, I implied this.
    - anodin3 10y ago
      >When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon. There is absolutely no reason to reach that conclusion.
      - bsder 10y ago
        Power goes as C v^2 f. At best. That doesn't change. If you look at a particular technology node, one of the best correlations of power consumption is chip area. It's pretty much a straight line. Now, that has probably changed a bit with how aggressively we turn chip areas off nowadays. So, we probably have to alter that to power consumption vs active chip area--but it's still a fixed line for a technology node.
        rbanffy 10y ago
        Speaking of chip area, one possible path is designing ISAs that require less silicon to efficiently decode, reorder and retire. It'd be, of course, totally incompatible with what we have now.
ocschwar 10y ago
If Intel can't offer more compelling improvements in watts per operation, I would be very disappointed. We know fab sizing is going to stop being worth it. But bigger dies, with better heat dissipation, and processors that better fit today's use cases, all that should be within Intel's capabilities.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > If Intel can't offer more compelling improvements in watts per operation, I would be very disappointed. There are some pretty hard physical boundaries. Businesses write off their hardware in 3 or 5 years, it's rare to see a machine older than that. But there may come a time when a 10 year old computer is just as powerful as one you buy today. The replacement market is what's driving Intel's revenues for a very large part and if that should ever stop then it probably wouldn't be a great idea to hold a lot of intel stock.
  - niklasrde 10y ago
    > it's rare to see a machine older than that Oh I wish. Oh I wish..
  - asah 10y ago
    > there may come a time when a 10 year old computer is just as powerful as one you buy today You mean like my 2012 laptop, upgraded to 16GB RAM, which is perfectly good at web browsing, Google docs and html/python/postgres dev ?
    - ocschwar 10y ago
      Or my BeagleBone card, which is now my home data server.
ganfortran 10y ago
Moore's law has long lost its initial indicative power, that implies the actual computing performance goes linearly with the number transistors we have on the chip, and became merely a marketing strategy. Now it is time that marketing value is also fading.

by pkaye 10y ago

komali2 10y ago

People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. I mean, I didn't, I'm just a guy that reads a lot of scifi. But I always assumed whiz-bang mathematicians had already figured out, I dunno, the threshold at which a processor can be nanosized, or like how big a processor could become before the distances became too great that due to the speed of light further computational advancement wasn't possible. I mean, I know nothing about this stuff, like I said, I just read a lot of scifi and have a high opinion of all the smart folk researching this stuff. Would love to learn more.

ghaff 10y ago
>People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. First of all, let's be more precise. In this context, what people mean by the "end of Moore's Law" is the slowdown and, soon, probable end of CMOS process scaling. The issue is that CMOS process scaling has been such an incredible engine for performance that just getting those kinds of performance increases in other ways isn't easy. I wrote a bit about this a year ago. http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-in-servers.html http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-... To answer your question, people did see this coming. There were disagreements about how far down you could economically drive feature sizes so there has been debate about exact dates. But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small.
- spb 10y ago
  > But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small. Pretty much no one qualified, maybe. There are lots of laymen (including many True Believers in The Singularity) who operate under the impression that it's a fixed law of nature.
akuma73 10y ago
Have a look at this photo: http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg That's a fin of a modern transistor (Intel 22nm). The dots in the photo are atoms. It's fair to say that Moore's law is nearing an end or has already ended.
- Animats 10y ago
  Atoms are too big, photons are too big, electrons are too big, and the speed of light is too slow. There's no longer plenty of room at the bottom. Still, it's not like the physical size of semiconductors is the problem. A CPU today is maybe 100mm^2 of silicon. 4U of rack space can easily hold tens of thousands of CPUs, if you can power them, cool them, and connect them up in a useful way.
  - akuma73 10y ago
    if you can power them, cool them, and connect them up in a useful way. Good luck with that. Power costs go up linearly at best with cores if you don't have any more transistor scaling.
    - sbierwagen 10y ago
      Power will always scale linearly with cores, of course, but you could make cores less power-hungry with reversible computing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing Actually useful reversible logic is, as they say, an open problem.
      - akuma73 10y ago
        My point was that a new transistor shrink would give you lower power vs. the same transistor in previously larger node. You get more compute-per-watt with small transistors. If scaling stops, then all kinds of things get more difficult.
  - ZephyrP 10y ago
wtallis 10y ago
> "But I always assumed whiz-bang mathematicians had already figured out, I dunno, the threshold at which a processor can be nanosized, or like how big a processor could become before the distances became too great that due to the speed of light further computational advancement wasn't possible." We're nowhere near the absolute limits imposed by the fundamentals of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc. Those are relatively straightforward bounds to calculate but are completely useless for anything but extremely long-term projections. What we wish we could compute is what the limits are on current manufacturing techniques and incremental advances from that. But we don't know precisely how many incremental improvements we have left to discover before we need to abandon silicon entirely.
- ansible 10y ago
  But we don't know precisely how many incremental improvements we have left to discover before we need to abandon silicon entirely. Well, it is not as if we will just suddenly stop using CMOS, but the end of improvements is in sight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer If we are willing to putter along with no process improvements whatsoever, then yes, we can keep using 5nm indefinitely. And no doubt there will be incremental improvements in performance and yield at that node. But we can't, and won't stop there to continue to drive down the cost of computing. It is just the end of the road for CMOS lithography.
  - akuma73 10y ago
    What are your thoughts on the drivers for reducing the cost of computing beyond CMOS?
  - kcorbitt 10y ago
    > But we can't, and won't stop there to continue to drive down the cost of computing. It is just the end of the road for CMOS lithography. I mean, is there any reason to believe this is actually true? There's no law that just because something is super useful its price will continue to drop forever. Just check out this chart: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/import/switchboard/blogs/mbaumhefner/Gas%20Elec%20Price%20History%20Comparison%20Final.jpg https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/import/switchboard/.... The blue line is the inflation-adjusted price of electricity by year. I think it's fair to say that electricity is even more vital to the modern economy than compute power, and that having more of it for cheaper would unquestionably raise the standard of living for everyone. There's also a functional and mostly-free market for its production. And yet its real cost has remained essentially stagnant over the last 40+ years. Now, there are obviously reasons why Moore's law has been a thing for so long (probably a lot to do with the exponentially increasing number of chips we use and the experience curve http://www.economist.com/node/14298944 http://www.economist.com/node/14298944), but the last 50 years in chips may have been more the exception than the rule.
samfisher83 10y ago
The problem is at some point the gates start getting to the size of an atom. How do you get smaller than an atom? I don't think you can.
- komali2 10y ago
  Well uh, can you squeeze the atoms closer together? I didn't think they were solid objects, but clouds of electrons? I guess eventually the nuclear power or whatever it is that pushes atoms apart becomes too strong?
RandomOpinion 10y ago
> "People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming." EEs in the semiconductor industry have been talking about it for the past 20 years; they didn't know exactly when it would occur but they knew it was coming. It's only software developers who were blissfully unaware. EDIT: The interesting thing about the end of Moore's Law from AMD's (and everybody who isn't Intel) perspective is that finally the playing field is moving closer to even. Before, Intel always had the most advanced fab processes because of the vast amounts of money they funneled into it, which meant that everybody else had to have a better architecture than Intel chips just to get equal performance. Now that Intel is losing that process advantage, it should become possible for everyone to compete purely on the basis of architecture again.
bsder 10y ago
> People always talk about Moore's Law falling apart, and it seems like people didn't see it coming. People didn't WANT to see it coming. The data that it broke were back at 65nm but very much at 40nm and 28nm. RAM hasn't scaled in years. However, the history of technology is littered with the corpses of those who bet against Moore's Law. Combine this with the fact that your job basically depends upon Moore's Law continuing, and you have something similar to the Wall Street collapse. I can bet against it, but I lose my job if I'm wrong, and I lose my job if I'm right. Better to just close my eyes and cash my paycheck. For consumer evidence simply look at embedded microcontrollers. Note that RAM and flash haven't been scaling every 18 months for a while.
- ghaff 10y ago
  There's some truth in that. And there are also various approaches that can probably mitigate the end of CMOS process scaling for a while (special-purpose hardware, photonics, 3D stacking, etc.) Some of these will cause some pain in other areas like software development. That said, there's absolutely no guarantee that there's a true CMOS 2.0 on the horizon that will provides anything like the approximately 3500X performance gains we've seen from CMOS process scaling. There are huge macro implications if computing basically stops getting faster/cheaper/smaller from year to year.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  I see this as a good thing. Now we can finally get down to what we should have been doing in the first place: better software, rather than just more of it and of mediocre quality. Moore's law has bailed out many producers of inferior quality software and now that that free run has come to an end we're going to have to take a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    But do you really believe that by taking "a really hard look at how we cook this stuff up" software engineers can double performance (in the sense of effective work) every 18 months? We can absolutely turn the dial toward more effort on software such as algorithms/compiled languages/etc. but color me unconvinced that there's exponential growth possibilities there.

dep_b 10y ago

I see Intel falling apart, ARM-based chipmakers are still ramping up the curve as usual.

kodfodrasz 10y ago
Because they are not there yet...
- rbanffy 10y ago
  When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon. There is no magic - computation has a minimum energy cost. What can happen is to make chips simpler in that less computation is spent in instruction decoding, tracking, scheduling and more is spent on actual execution.
  - kodfodrasz 10y ago
    Yes, I implied this.
  - anodin3 10y ago
    >When an ARM chip reaches the performance of a Xeon, it'll draw about as much power as a Xeon. There is absolutely no reason to reach that conclusion.
    - bsder 10y ago
      Power goes as C v^2 f. At best. That doesn't change. If you look at a particular technology node, one of the best correlations of power consumption is chip area. It's pretty much a straight line. Now, that has probably changed a bit with how aggressively we turn chip areas off nowadays. So, we probably have to alter that to power consumption vs active chip area--but it's still a fixed line for a technology node.
      - rbanffy 10y ago
        Speaking of chip area, one possible path is designing ISAs that require less silicon to efficiently decode, reorder and retire. It'd be, of course, totally incompatible with what we have now.

ocschwar 10y ago

If Intel can't offer more compelling improvements in watts per operation, I would be very disappointed. We know fab sizing is going to stop being worth it. But bigger dies, with better heat dissipation, and processors that better fit today's use cases, all that should be within Intel's capabilities.

jacquesm 10y ago
> If Intel can't offer more compelling improvements in watts per operation, I would be very disappointed. There are some pretty hard physical boundaries. Businesses write off their hardware in 3 or 5 years, it's rare to see a machine older than that. But there may come a time when a 10 year old computer is just as powerful as one you buy today. The replacement market is what's driving Intel's revenues for a very large part and if that should ever stop then it probably wouldn't be a great idea to hold a lot of intel stock.
- niklasrde 10y ago
  > it's rare to see a machine older than that Oh I wish. Oh I wish..
- asah 10y ago
  > there may come a time when a 10 year old computer is just as powerful as one you buy today You mean like my 2012 laptop, upgraded to 16GB RAM, which is perfectly good at web browsing, Google docs and html/python/postgres dev ?
  - ocschwar 10y ago
    Or my BeagleBone card, which is now my home data server.

ganfortran 10y ago

Moore's law has long lost its initial indicative power, that implies the actual computing performance goes linearly with the number transistors we have on the chip, and became merely a marketing strategy. Now it is time that marketing value is also fading.