15 ms·
Another Step Toward the End of Moore’s Law
- moflome 7y agoAnyone care to confirm that Intel Custom Foundry is still up & running?
- blu42 7y agoDo you mean at 14nm? I guess once they successfully migrate their actual production line to 10/7nm, whenever that might be..
- chr1 7y agoWhat ways to get faster cpu remain after this? Nanoscale vacuum-channel transistors [1] seem promising as they can work at terahertz frequencies but they do not look anywhere close to production. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoscale_vacuum-channel_transistor https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanoscale_vacuum-channel_tra...
- falcrist 7y agoI remember hearing about research into germanium as a replacement to silicon or compound III-V semiconductors [1] Nanoscale devices seem like an interesting development, but all of these technologies seem like they're a decade or more away from mainstream use. [1] http://www.sandia.gov/%7Ejytsao/WCS.pdf http://www.sandia.gov/%7Ejytsao/WCS.pdf
- holy_city 7y agoI think you may mean gallium based compounds, not germanium. Germanium semiconductors are only good for sounding like Hendrix. The RF biz debated sticking with Si or moving to "wide bandgap" materials like Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) or Gallium Nitride (GaN), because the wider bandgap means the devices have much higher breakdown voltages and better power density. That means you can run them at a higher baseband and lower power without a die shrink. It's my understanding they're important for 5G devices, and they've been in the wild for awhile. But the kinds of circuit they implement are like demodulators and filters, not so much something with the transistor density of a microprocessor. I think the fab processes are well more than a decade away from reaching the die sizes of contemporary Si, even if hypothetically they could run at ridiculous clock rates and low TDP.
- benj111 7y ago"Germanium semiconductors are only good for sounding like Hendrix" You say that like its a bad thing.
- Junk_Collector 7y agoSiGe is a serious competitor to GaAs and InP. It doesn't typically have the power density of Ga derived microcircuits, but has good channel noise performance plus linearity and can operate at higher frequencies than GaAs as long as you don't need high power density. GaN has amazing power characteristics but has all kinds of issues with signal purity that are still being worked out. Eventually, I believe GaN will eat everything's RF lunch just out of sheer power efficiency gains with the last hold out being cell tower base stations, where spectral purity trumps efficiency by a mile. InP gets used into the 100GHz+ territory. These processes are mostly larger like you say, but they are also used in high end data converters (ADCs and DACs) and some processes are in the mid to low 10's of nanometers now. Which is almost exactly where silicon was a decade ago. Silicon of course isn't used because of it's performance, but rather, because silicon is the easiest of the semi-conductors to manufacture and get good yields out of. It is also comparatively very low cost. These factors have led to the lion's share of research dollars being spent there as well.
- deepnotderp 7y agoDirect S/D tunneling becomes a problem with high carrier mobility semiconductors like III-V group materials and germanium.
- sanxiyn 7y ago"After all, there aren’t many numbers left between 5 and 0." For some reasons, I found this sentence very funny.
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- 0xffff2 7y agoProbably because it's both patently untrue and still informative in a way. It would be more precisely stated as "there aren't many atoms left between 5(nm) and 0". If my math is right, 5nm is only a width of about 25 silicon atoms.
- patrick5415 7y agoYes you would think ieee would know there are uncountably many numbers between 0 and 5.
- not2b 7y agoNo, there aren't uncountably many relevant numbers between 0 and 5, because you have to make your chip out of atoms.
- dougmwne 7y agoIEEE surely does know. I'm sure the point is to imply the marketing ridiculousness. After 1nm they'll need a new vanity metric.
- tim333 7y ago1nm is about 5 atoms so I guess the next metric would be the number of atoms. Single atom features would be kind of cool but not buildable with present technology.
- p1esk 7y agoIt is also patently untrue because "5nm" label has nothing to do with reality.
- trimbo 7y agoI recommend watching the Turing Award speech by Patterson and Hennessey which covers this topic. Spoiler: the way out is "Domain Specific Architectures". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LVeEjsn8Ts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LVeEjsn8Ts
- tambourine_man 7y agoWhich is sad, in a way. There was something amazing about a general purpose computer that next generations may not be able to appreciate.
- kec 7y agoThat's a bit like saying it's sad that cpus added media instructions, or that the gpu was invented. Dedicating silicon to fixed tasks or task specific designs can lead to massive performance increases and in no way means the death of general purpose compute.
- tambourine_man 7y agoAnd it is, in a way. At least to me. Would you rather have a burnt on silicon algorithm for video/encryption decoding or a 10X faster general purpose CPU that can do that and everything else?
- kec 7y agoI think you underestimate just how much faster and more energy efficient hardware acceleration can make certain tasks, the savings can be far in excess of 10x.
- tambourine_man 7y agoYou may underestimate the exponential function :) We where doubling our performance every year or two. For decades.
- noobiemcfoob 7y agoI, for one, welcome the end of our Moore's Law overlords. This race to increase various aspects of performance has long let the fields of architecture and the software on top of it be lazy in their optimizations. When there's no more juice in that fruit to squeeze, I know there is much more to be found elsewhere. /I can't wait for my non-von neumann SoC FPGA hybrid to use for...I'll figure it out then I'm sure.
- gameswithgo 7y agoIt would at least be nice to freeze the hardware for 10 years and give software time to learn how to fully extract what we have. Most large scale software ends up a factor of 10x to 1000x slower than it needs to be.
- eloff 7y agoMost software isn't about performance. And when it does become a problem, then the goal is just to fix that quickly to the point of being good enough, even if it's a hack, like caching a very inefficient operation. I don't see anything wrong with that. Software is written to solve a problem, not to run as efficiently as possible.
- notme77 7y agoOften people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, "By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something." They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves. --Yukihiro Matsumoto I'm very mean to my slaves. I have absolutely no issue leaving a rack of machines to slave away all weekend while I enjoy myself as opposed to spending that same weekend myself making it more efficient. (e.g. training models) I don't care if a CPU is running at 80% consuming more electricity when I could work for a week and make it do the same job at idle. It's an inefficient use of my time. That same week's worth of effort could be spent delivering more value than the $10k server + $500/year operating cost. (I'm paid less than that, but I deliver more value to my company than my paycheck.) Also, risk. If it works now, it may not after I spend a week mucking with it.
- est31 7y agoMoore's law itself may be dead but there is still additional potential to explore. Right now, CPUs are mostly two dimensional with only a few layers stacked on top compared to the extent in the other two dimensions. Compare this to a human brain which too, has a sulcated layering system for the grey matter but the white matter connectome turns it into a fully three dimensional object. We can't produce such a thing with technological means yet. The CPUs we produce have to be deployed in datacenters and computers within distance to each other, mostly for heat dissipation reasons. We can't just stack $N CPUs onto and next to each other until we reach an object of the size of a brain. It would not be practical to cool that thing. Compare this to human brains which require much less energy (20 Watts on average). Moore's law is dead but it's about size of transistors. Human axons have diameters of hundreds of nanometers, even the gap of intracellular space of a synapse is approximately 20 nanometers. Compare this to the 5 nanometers we got now. We don't need size improvements to model brains, we need power consumption/heat dissipation/electric loss improvements. Also, CPUs are still very expensive. We also need improvements in manufacturing them more cheaply. Both isn't really requiring node sizes to shrink further. Sadly, there's a different law called Dennard's Scaling which was precisely about power consumption, but it has been dead for about 13 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
- Retric 7y agoHeat is already a limitation for going more 3D. At best you can slightly reduce latency, but with real tradeoffs.
- agumonkey 7y agomaybe in-silicon micro-vias for heat exchange ?
- 781 7y agoThe brain architecture is not the end-all of computing. For example weather prediction is just about fast math, a brain like architecture is useless here.
- est31 7y ago
- Causality1 7y agoThe end of Moore's law doesn't bother me too much from a practical point of view. My phone and computer are about as fast as I need them to be. Why it does bother me, though, is how it's an inescapable reminder that there are hard limits to everything, and sooner or later we're going to hit them. The fact we're hitting this limit so fast is damaging my hope for a whiz-bang sci-fi future. I didn't expect to be alive when we invented strong AI and perfect 3D projection systems and retinal display screens and all the rest, but I did hope we eventually would. Slamming into the end of per-volume and per-watt performance before the year 2100 makes me think maybe those things will never happen at all.
- mdorazio 7y agoIt's worth noting that we hit the wall only with respect to silicon-based transistor-packing wafer technology. There are other alternatives (ex. SiGe instead of just Si, memristors, photon instead of electron circuits, etc.) that could allow significant increases in compute capacity. They just haven't been explored or invested in to a large extent because it's been relatively cheap with proven ROI to follow traditional manufacturing paths to their maximum. Other technologies like Li-ion batteries are in the same boat - there are big advancements yet to be made in the broader space in general, but the specific processes, chemistries, etc. being used today are nearing their physical limits. I'm personally still hopeful for a sci-fi future, just based on a series of ramps and plateaus as we progress through the limits of each specific technology.
- kleer001 7y agoDon't despair. We still have economic, energy, and material science boundaries to smash. Just imagine your current phone costing pennies, compostable, and easily chargeable anywhere. Imagine never again worrying about file size or storage capacity. We've got a long way to go and I'm very excited about what the future holds.
- Causality1 7y agoYeah, but the ways I want my devices to improve are more "cultural" than technological. I want easily-rooted phones with expandable storage, 3.5mm jacks, and screens that aren't five times taller than they are wide. I want laptops with non-chiclet keyboards and real mouse buttons instead of clickpads where I can't tell where the right click starts.
- ars 7y ago$100million per lithography machine! A bit of a side topic, but can you imagine if there were fewer people in the world? Computing power would never improve because it would be too expensive. I wonder what other technology could be done, if only there were more people (i.e. larger market), but is too expensive right now. People always like to talk about the downsides of population, but the high tech world we live in now could not exist otherwise.
- dfrage 7y agoAnd there wouldn't be enough smart people. These lithography machines are completely wild: the part that fails the most spits out a tiny droplet of molten tin. That's hit with a laser, and the excited electrons emit what's called extreme ultraviolet (EUV) which is very close to the softest of X-rays. Most of the power released is wasted bouncing off a series of mirrors, and then wild stuff happens as these energetic photons hit the semi-optional mask cover (pellicle), mask, and then chip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUV_lithography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUV_lithography
- femto113 7y ago"After all, there aren’t many numbers left between 5 and 0." Math purists may roll their eyes at this statement and clearly even if you are obsessed with integers you can just switch to picometers, but I wonder if it is time to start counting atoms. The diameter of a silicon atom is about 0.21 nanometers, so a 5nm process is dealing with features only about 20-30 atoms wide. (edit: found more accurate diameter number)
- tombert 7y agoWow, this puts things in perspective for me. I knew 5nm was small but I didn't really realize how small until we started getting into "I-have-more-dollars-in-my -wallet-than-this-thing-is-atoms-wide" territory.
- tyleo 7y agoOne thing I’m always amazed with - and it’s partly due to my lack of understanding of physics at this scale - is that when a processor with components on this scale is dropped a few feet, they aren’t reduced to smithereens. It’s hard for me to contemplate that whatever is holding these few atoms together is so resilient.
- keldaris 7y agoIf you find that amazing, contemplate for a moment how nuclear fission and fusion work and the amounts of energy involved there. Apart from a few comparatively exotic things (black holes, neutron stars, etc.), some of the largest force densities that exist are all around us in atomic nuclei (of course, those forces also decay very quickly with distance, but that's a different matter).
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- tim333 7y agoThe "components on this scale" are pretty light so there's not much force when you accelerate them. If a drop doesn't crack the silicon wafer it's not going to shift the bits and bobs on it.
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- sytelus 7y agoNice article with a bit of low-level details. We are indeed encountering the problem that light wavelength is now small enough for us! So using 15nm EUV for multiple patterns to get 5nm. Only two foundries left in the entire world which can do such process (Intel and others are years behind).
- dfrage 7y ago> Intel and others are years behind Not clear anyone other than Intel is trying, but Intel's situation is much more complicated. They tried for a purely optical for its life "10nm" node more aggressive than TSMC's initial "7nm" node and catastrophically failed. There's clearly some top level management issues there, a big problem for Intel for decades, and it's extremely worrying they let them destroy a generation of their crown jewel. But that doesn't tell us much about their "7nm" node very roughly equivalent to Samsung and TSMC's "5nm" nodes, except those companies have a lot more real world EUV experience, but it's not always good to be a pioneer. Intel could conceivably get back in the game in about the same time frame as these two companies exit "5nm" risk production, we just don't know. All we know is that they're buying EUV machines and installing them in multiple fabs.
- dmix 7y agoAnyone know if there's a longer version of this chart which goes back farther in time? https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzMwNzU1Ng.jpeg https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzMwNzU1Ng.jpeg
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- tntn 7y agoI think moore's law has spoiled a generation on what technology can do. It is extremely ridiculous that lithography has gotten so much better in the last few decades, and IMO it has resulted in a lot of people thinking that exponentials are a) common, and b) automatic. Neither of these are true. There are few, if any, other exponentials in the history of humanity that worked as consistently for as long with as massive of impacts on technology, and TBH I'm doubtful that we will see anything like it again. Moore's law worked because loads of engineers and scientists made it their life's work, but everyone watching seems to think it just happened. There was one magical exponential that changed the world, and it's coming to an end. There's certainly a lot that can be done in architecture and software, but most applications probably aren't worth the effort.
- _Microft 7y agoPlotting the cost per compute power over time gives a different image: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teknologisk_singularitet#/media/File:Moore%27s_Law_over_120_Years.png https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teknologisk_singularitet#/medi... In this display, the show is far from over. It even start to look like over-exponential progress. The latest data points show GPUs instead of CPUs but this is most likly OK since it is the suitable technology for easy to parallelize workloads like machine learning applications.
- ahartmetz 7y agoBut think of all the interesting work ahead! :) I kind of welcome the death of the "just wait for hardware to improve" approach to optimization. I find computers interesting because the field is so fresh and you have to figure out so many things on your own and through communication with people that are still alive. Due to the death of Moore's Law, it's going to stay that way for some longer and the end result is going to be more varied.
- Darmody 7y agoStupid question. Could trinary processors play a role here? I keep hearing people talking about them and their benefits over que binary system.
- danaur 7y agoWhat operations do you perceive would be faster or more suitable for ternary processors
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago>I keep hearing people talking about them and their benefits over que binary system. Who are these people?