3 ms·

At most this looks to provide a linear performance improvement on each iteration (if it's not a one off improvement - which it looks to be). Moors law implies

by tomxor 7y ago

At most this looks to provide a linear performance improvement on each iteration (if it's not a one off improvement - which it looks to be). Moors law implies exponential improvement up to the the physical limits we hit over the last decade on each process shrinkage (this is also explicitly defined in Moore's paper) i.e Dennard scaling, this is possible because roughly speaking when you shrink the process, you reduce latency (allowing faster clock with the same design or new larger design i.e double transistors with same max straight line latency) without increasing power consumption or absolute heat dissipation requirements - it's almost "free" if you can keep shrinking it which is why you get exponential improvement if you can keep halving. Media have completely watered down the term into a flowery synonym for "somehow improve".

drcross 7y ago
Let's not split hairs, Moore's law is the doubling of transistor count in the same size every 18 months.
- Filligree 7y ago
  Which we recently have only managed by shrinking the wires, packing the transistors tighter, increasing the die size, changing transistor shape or doing anything but actually shrink the transistors.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    You don't want to shrink the transistors because that increases static leakage, other things being equal. With dark silicon becoming more important, you actually want bigger devices that can minimize that, and use charge-recovery logic to conserve dynamic power as well. Only stuff that's very infrequently powered up can be built naïvely, the way it would be absent dark silicon constraints.
    - baybal2 7y ago
      You can shrink it even further, no questions, and we possibly go there once HfO process will advance to the point when you can bury everything in it. There are many ways forward, I'd say even too much of them. Too many people are trumpeting "the death of silicon" or CMOS, and too many people are focusing on "revolutionary" solutions
btilly 7y ago
Moore's Law and its many relatives is the result of two phenomena working in parallel. 1. Improvements tend to be of the form "X% better by the way we are measuring it." 2. Improvements tend to come at a consistent rate. This means that the overall trend includes many one-off improvements which do not look related to anything else. And indeed are not except that business pressures say, "We have to figure out how to do X by time Y because that is what we expect our competitors to do" and therefore create an environment where people are constantly looking at the next barrier to improving at the expected rate and are finding improvements at about that same rate. The Innovator's Dilemma has a good deal to say about the ubiquity of exponential improvements in various fields of technology. Moore's Law is by far the most famous, but is also not unique. Whenever an industry has agreed on a clear metric for "better" and is in a race to deliver it, they tend to get exponential rates of improvement until they either hit a physical limit, or sufficiently overdeliver customer needs that nobody cares any more. Historically at different times we have had exponential improvement on everything from producing batteries more cheaply, being able to scoop more dirt with a backhoe, or increasing the range of steamships.
hinkley 7y ago
The article it refers to as prior art, https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/devices/buried-power-lines-make-memory-faster https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/devices/b... claims that moving the rails to the back side saves about 15% of the surface area of the chip. That's nothing to sneeze at.

by tomxor 7y ago

drcross 7y ago

Let's not split hairs, Moore's law is the doubling of transistor count in the same size every 18 months.

Filligree 7y ago
Which we recently have only managed by shrinking the wires, packing the transistors tighter, increasing the die size, changing transistor shape or doing anything but actually shrink the transistors.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  You don't want to shrink the transistors because that increases static leakage, other things being equal. With dark silicon becoming more important, you actually want bigger devices that can minimize that, and use charge-recovery logic to conserve dynamic power as well. Only stuff that's very infrequently powered up can be built naïvely, the way it would be absent dark silicon constraints.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    You can shrink it even further, no questions, and we possibly go there once HfO process will advance to the point when you can bury everything in it. There are many ways forward, I'd say even too much of them. Too many people are trumpeting "the death of silicon" or CMOS, and too many people are focusing on "revolutionary" solutions

btilly 7y ago

Moore's Law and its many relatives is the result of two phenomena working in parallel. 1. Improvements tend to be of the form "X% better by the way we are measuring it." 2. Improvements tend to come at a consistent rate. This means that the overall trend includes many one-off improvements which do not look related to anything else. And indeed are not except that business pressures say, "We have to figure out how to do X by time Y because that is what we expect our competitors to do" and therefore create an environment where people are constantly looking at the next barrier to improving at the expected rate and are finding improvements at about that same rate. The Innovator's Dilemma has a good deal to say about the ubiquity of exponential improvements in various fields of technology. Moore's Law is by far the most famous, but is also not unique. Whenever an industry has agreed on a clear metric for "better" and is in a race to deliver it, they tend to get exponential rates of improvement until they either hit a physical limit, or sufficiently overdeliver customer needs that nobody cares any more. Historically at different times we have had exponential improvement on everything from producing batteries more cheaply, being able to scoop more dirt with a backhoe, or increasing the range of steamships.

hinkley 7y ago

The article it refers to as prior art, https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/devices/buried-power-lines-make-memory-faster https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/devices/b... claims that moving the rails to the back side saves about 15% of the surface area of the chip. That's nothing to sneeze at.