5 ms·
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 t
by akuma73 9y 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 9y agoAtoms 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 9y agoif 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 9y agoPower 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 9y agoMy 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 9y agoI have heard that Electrons move about a millimeter second (although electromagnetic emanations propagate at the speed of light). This is allegedly the benefit of 'optical' computing.
- Animats 9y agoNot quite.[1] Propagation in most interconnects is about half the speed of light, because real-world wires have capacitance. (As low as 25% for CAT 5 cable, as high as 90% for open-wire antenna feeds.) Optical fiber runs about 70% of the speed of light. On-chip interconnects run 30%-60% of the speed of light. So there's some propagation delay improvement with optical interconnects, but it's a factor of about 2, not some huge improvement. [1] http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/all-aboard-/4426188/Rule-of-Thumb--3-Signal-speed-on-an-interconnect http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/all-aboard-/4426188/Rul...
- kccqzy 9y agoPeople said similar things when we reached the wavelength of visible light.
- ghaff 9y agoYes but that was a cost and engineering issue. The size of atoms is a lot more fundamental. EUV buys you a little more but you still bump into the size of atoms and quantum effects pretty quickly.
- AlfonsoP 9y agoThink outside the box. Current chips have gates on a dozen metal layers measuring ~1µm, but you could scale to 10,000 layers at ~1mm. Sure there are many unsolved challenge to build 10,000 layers, but there is still PLENTY of space for Moore's law to continue in this 3rd dimension...