5 ms·

Moore's law is not over. It's not about density. It's about quantity of transistors on a chip.

by diydsp 4y ago

r3013 4y ago
It depends how literally one wants to take the law. The "law" is doubling density every two years. So strictly speaking it is done because it has taken longer than two years. But if you choose the looser interpretation and simple read it as, transistor density increases with time, then it's not dead. Probably the bigger deal is cost per transistor is actually going up with the new nodes. https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/the-rising-tide-of-semiconductor?triedSigningIn=true https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/the-rising-tide-of-sem... and https://www.eetimes.com/moores-law-dead-by-2022-expert-says/ https://www.eetimes.com/moores-law-dead-by-2022-expert-says/
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Koomey’s Law is where it's at - performance per watt growth is slowing - but it's still doubling every ~2.6 years.
- diydsp 4y ago
  People often misinterpret this because they think Moore was only talking about technology. However the number of transistors is more interesting than the technology alone because it represents what people actually do with chips. e.g. GPUs added to CPUs, and later AI added to the M1. These additions may not have been much more dense technologically, but the needs and desires of users increase as well as the technology. The tech doesn't have to improve 2x to reach 2x, because peoples' needs for AI, games, etc. is also increasing. And that's more useful in anticipating and predicting markets than the mere tech process. So if you still think you're right, kindly post your citations. Here are mine: "Moore's law is a term used to refer to the observation made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. "[0] "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years"[1] "Moore's Law refers to Gordon Moore's perception that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years..."[2] [0] https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-moores-law.html https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-moores-law.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp
  - docfort 4y ago
    Perhaps the bigger deal here is the loss of Dennard scaling in the 2000s. This is due to heat density at any given point on the chip. After all, increased transistor density could lead you to using all those transistors, but the thermal conductivity of all the materials involved isn't changing much, so there's a natural limit to the electrically active transistor density. You're welcome to increase transistor density, so long as you keep the number of active transistors roughly constant (not quite true since smaller transistors produce less heat). You could keep transistor density fixed, but still double the number of transistors in a chip ... by using bigger chips. And that is naturally more expensive because they are more likely to be defective and require more sophisticated packaging. 3D stacking of smaller chips is another approach, since we usually only talk about the 2D area of a chip. This requires more advanced packaging, but substantially increases the likelihood of building a functional device. The loss of Dennard scaling makes it more interesting to investigate ASICs because CPUs won't necessarily eat your lunch in two years. And circuit cleverness is one contributor to Moore's Law that Moore talked about in his 1975 address. So Moore's Law is in some ways dead (number of instantaneously useful transistors is NOT doubling every two years) and other ways alive (useful work is improving rapidly so long as you can decompose your workload into leaning on the accelerators like YouTube did), depending on how you measure it.
  - diydsp 4y ago
    Everyone downvoting, please post your disputatious citations.
    - ksec 4y ago
      Because even if you measure it by doubling the transistor and ignoring die size, aka density, the straight line graph is still broke.
    - sdvsa 4y ago
      The original paper clearly states one is supposed to keep the size of the piece of semiconductor and package constant. This is important for the cost argument which is featured predominately in the paper and is really the heart of the thing. https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/Technology_overview/gordon_moore_1965_article.pdf https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/Technology_ov...
- _hypx 4y ago
  Even for transistor density, it isn’t quite true. The transistors aren’t getting any smaller like they use to. A lot of growth now involves stacking transistors on top of each other. 3D transistors lets you pack more of them closer together. While this allows for further increases in transistor density, you can argue that it is no longer an exponential function anymore.
  - wtallis 4y ago
    > A lot of growth now involves stacking transistors on top of each other. Approximately none of the growth thus far involves stacking transistors on top of each other, unless you count 3D NAND flash memory. FinFETs and upcoming GAAFETs are less planar than traditional transistor designs, but still don't get you two or more separate transistors stacked on top of each other. Actual 3D stacking of transistors on a single wafer is still nothing more than a hot topic for R&D, and stacking multiple dies full of transistors is pretty much only done with memory so far.
    - _hypx 4y ago
      Well I was counting on NAND flash. That's how are getting more transistors per chip with them. The memory cells have basically stopped shrinking in NAND and actually got bigger when we first started to stack them. FinFETs effectively lets us pack transistors closer. This is because much of the structure of a transistor is in a 3D fin that sticks out of the wafer. By making the fin taller, you can pack the transistors even closer. But it can be argued that by volume, transistors are basically the same size. GAAFETs lets us go even further with this idea.
IshKebab 4y ago
Moore's law is definitely over. Chips are still getting faster, but that's not the same thing.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  It doesn't seem dead quite yet. https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Moores-Law-Graph.jpg https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...
  - yaantc 4y ago
    This is the number of transistors per device only. There is no notion of "minimum cost point" as in Moore's 1965 paper, where the "law" comes from. See my other post in this thread on this and why the economic part of Moore's law is as important as the tech part (density).
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      But that these chips don’t cost a million dollars shows that the cost per transistor has plunged commensurately, no?
      - yaantc 4y ago
        It shows that the difference in efficiency of doing a custom ASIC at Youtube scale saves more money that what's required to design and manufacture their custom chip. But this is different from the trend cost per transistor (particularly for smaller players!). And actually, this is the case because new processes efficiency gains are lower than in the past. It's something that's been said before (and I read about it on HN, it was just years back and I don't have the reference at hand now ;), but when process improvements were fast making a custom ASIC didn't really make sense: by the time the ASIC was designed and debugged and deployed, a few years were spent and a recent CPU was nearly as good as the custom ASIC for no risk and less effort. Doing an ASIC is hard and takes time, and having a slower pace of improvement for new nodes efficiency makes it easier to justify the long deployment. There is now time to use such an ASIC with a noticeable gain, and absorb the cost and gain. Still, this is for a Youtube or Google (TPU) or Amazon (Graviton) or Apple. You need this scale still to absorb the development cost.
yaantc 4y ago
Moore's 1965 paper was literally about "the complexity for minimum component costs" [1]. So you're right that transistors on a chip is more applicable then just die density. But as too often nowadays you left out the "minimum cost" aspect. Moore's law is not only about tech performance, it's about economics. Everybody knew the "minimum cost" part would fall the first, and it did. When the least cost offering improves, when things get better and cheaper, everyone follows. The lowering cost per function increases the addressable market, which can then sustain increasing investments. This is the virtuous cycle that moved the industry forward for a long time. When the economic part stops, when you can get more transistors but only at a higher cost, then the virtuous cycle stops. Technical progress do continue, but you will have less players at each new step: only those who can absorb the increasing costs will keep on playing at the leading edge. And production costs will still rise. If the market gets smaller due to increasing prices, and the production cost keep on raising, you will see a slow down as it will take more time to amortize investments. The big players are worried about this: slow down has in itself the specter of followers catching up (eventually...), leading to commoditization. We're definitely not there yet, but it's not a good perspective. Definitely bad for their stock. So the cost has been taken out. At first the NRE part was dropped of the equation, to consider only the cost per transistor. For this one can also be creative: considering the fabs amortization, or after? Makes a big difference (see the issue car makers have in getting new investments at "old" nodes: message from the big guys is move to smaller nodes, even if it's not always convenient). But in the end it's been simpler to just drop the least cost aspect completely. The industry PR had good results on this ;) For small to medium fabless players, Moore's law has been over for a while. For the biggest players it's also over now: there's still technical progress on transistors per device, but at an increasing cost. It's not always a smooth process: if you're an Apple, you can gain on the cost by going vertical (good-bye Intel margin). But it's a bold move not for all, and it's a one off gain. Moore's law is over. Tech progress is not. For HN readers who can afford the increasing cost of the devices and are reading regularly from the big silicon vendors that "Moore's law is still going strong yoo-hoo", when it's been neutered to transistors count only, it may be easy to miss. [1] https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/moores-law-electronics.pdf https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/...

Moore's law is not over. It's not about density. It's about quantity of transistors on a chip.

by diydsp 4y ago

Moore's law is not over. It's not about density. It's about quantity of transistors on a chip.

It depends how literally one wants to take the law. The "law" is doubling density every two years. So strictly speaking it is done because it has taken longer than two years. But if you choose the looser interpretation and simple read it as, transistor density increases with time, then it's not dead. Probably the bigger deal is cost per transistor is actually going up with the new nodes. https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/the-rising-tide-of-semiconductor?triedSigningIn=true https://www.fabricatedknowledge.com/p/the-rising-tide-of-sem... and https://www.eetimes.com/moores-law-dead-by-2022-expert-says/ https://www.eetimes.com/moores-law-dead-by-2022-expert-says/

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Koomey’s Law is where it's at - performance per watt growth is slowing - but it's still doubling every ~2.6 years.
diydsp 4y ago
People often misinterpret this because they think Moore was only talking about technology. However the number of transistors is more interesting than the technology alone because it represents what people actually do with chips. e.g. GPUs added to CPUs, and later AI added to the M1. These additions may not have been much more dense technologically, but the needs and desires of users increase as well as the technology. The tech doesn't have to improve 2x to reach 2x, because peoples' needs for AI, games, etc. is also increasing. And that's more useful in anticipating and predicting markets than the mere tech process. So if you still think you're right, kindly post your citations. Here are mine: "Moore's law is a term used to refer to the observation made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. "[0] "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years"[1] "Moore's Law refers to Gordon Moore's perception that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years..."[2] [0] https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-moores-law.html https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-moores-law.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law [2] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp
- docfort 4y ago
  Perhaps the bigger deal here is the loss of Dennard scaling in the 2000s. This is due to heat density at any given point on the chip. After all, increased transistor density could lead you to using all those transistors, but the thermal conductivity of all the materials involved isn't changing much, so there's a natural limit to the electrically active transistor density. You're welcome to increase transistor density, so long as you keep the number of active transistors roughly constant (not quite true since smaller transistors produce less heat). You could keep transistor density fixed, but still double the number of transistors in a chip ... by using bigger chips. And that is naturally more expensive because they are more likely to be defective and require more sophisticated packaging. 3D stacking of smaller chips is another approach, since we usually only talk about the 2D area of a chip. This requires more advanced packaging, but substantially increases the likelihood of building a functional device. The loss of Dennard scaling makes it more interesting to investigate ASICs because CPUs won't necessarily eat your lunch in two years. And circuit cleverness is one contributor to Moore's Law that Moore talked about in his 1975 address. So Moore's Law is in some ways dead (number of instantaneously useful transistors is NOT doubling every two years) and other ways alive (useful work is improving rapidly so long as you can decompose your workload into leaning on the accelerators like YouTube did), depending on how you measure it.
- diydsp 4y ago
  Everyone downvoting, please post your disputatious citations.
  - ksec 4y ago
    Because even if you measure it by doubling the transistor and ignoring die size, aka density, the straight line graph is still broke.
  - sdvsa 4y ago
    The original paper clearly states one is supposed to keep the size of the piece of semiconductor and package constant. This is important for the cost argument which is featured predominately in the paper and is really the heart of the thing. https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/Technology_overview/gordon_moore_1965_article.pdf https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/Technology_ov...
_hypx 4y ago
Even for transistor density, it isn’t quite true. The transistors aren’t getting any smaller like they use to. A lot of growth now involves stacking transistors on top of each other. 3D transistors lets you pack more of them closer together. While this allows for further increases in transistor density, you can argue that it is no longer an exponential function anymore.
- wtallis 4y ago
  > A lot of growth now involves stacking transistors on top of each other. Approximately none of the growth thus far involves stacking transistors on top of each other, unless you count 3D NAND flash memory. FinFETs and upcoming GAAFETs are less planar than traditional transistor designs, but still don't get you two or more separate transistors stacked on top of each other. Actual 3D stacking of transistors on a single wafer is still nothing more than a hot topic for R&D, and stacking multiple dies full of transistors is pretty much only done with memory so far.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    Well I was counting on NAND flash. That's how are getting more transistors per chip with them. The memory cells have basically stopped shrinking in NAND and actually got bigger when we first started to stack them. FinFETs effectively lets us pack transistors closer. This is because much of the structure of a transistor is in a 3D fin that sticks out of the wafer. By making the fin taller, you can pack the transistors even closer. But it can be argued that by volume, transistors are basically the same size. GAAFETs lets us go even further with this idea.

IshKebab 4y ago

Moore's law is definitely over. Chips are still getting faster, but that's not the same thing.

CharlesW 4y ago
It doesn't seem dead quite yet. https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Moores-Law-Graph.jpg https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...
- yaantc 4y ago
  This is the number of transistors per device only. There is no notion of "minimum cost point" as in Moore's 1965 paper, where the "law" comes from. See my other post in this thread on this and why the economic part of Moore's law is as important as the tech part (density).
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    But that these chips don’t cost a million dollars shows that the cost per transistor has plunged commensurately, no?
    - yaantc 4y ago
      It shows that the difference in efficiency of doing a custom ASIC at Youtube scale saves more money that what's required to design and manufacture their custom chip. But this is different from the trend cost per transistor (particularly for smaller players!). And actually, this is the case because new processes efficiency gains are lower than in the past. It's something that's been said before (and I read about it on HN, it was just years back and I don't have the reference at hand now ;), but when process improvements were fast making a custom ASIC didn't really make sense: by the time the ASIC was designed and debugged and deployed, a few years were spent and a recent CPU was nearly as good as the custom ASIC for no risk and less effort. Doing an ASIC is hard and takes time, and having a slower pace of improvement for new nodes efficiency makes it easier to justify the long deployment. There is now time to use such an ASIC with a noticeable gain, and absorb the cost and gain. Still, this is for a Youtube or Google (TPU) or Amazon (Graviton) or Apple. You need this scale still to absorb the development cost.

yaantc 4y ago

Moore's 1965 paper was literally about "the complexity for minimum component costs" [1]. So you're right that transistors on a chip is more applicable then just die density. But as too often nowadays you left out the "minimum cost" aspect. Moore's law is not only about tech performance, it's about economics. Everybody knew the "minimum cost" part would fall the first, and it did. When the least cost offering improves, when things get better and cheaper, everyone follows. The lowering cost per function increases the addressable market, which can then sustain increasing investments. This is the virtuous cycle that moved the industry forward for a long time. When the economic part stops, when you can get more transistors but only at a higher cost, then the virtuous cycle stops. Technical progress do continue, but you will have less players at each new step: only those who can absorb the increasing costs will keep on playing at the leading edge. And production costs will still rise. If the market gets smaller due to increasing prices, and the production cost keep on raising, you will see a slow down as it will take more time to amortize investments. The big players are worried about this: slow down has in itself the specter of followers catching up (eventually...), leading to commoditization. We're definitely not there yet, but it's not a good perspective. Definitely bad for their stock. So the cost has been taken out. At first the NRE part was dropped of the equation, to consider only the cost per transistor. For this one can also be creative: considering the fabs amortization, or after? Makes a big difference (see the issue car makers have in getting new investments at "old" nodes: message from the big guys is move to smaller nodes, even if it's not always convenient). But in the end it's been simpler to just drop the least cost aspect completely. The industry PR had good results on this ;) For small to medium fabless players, Moore's law has been over for a while. For the biggest players it's also over now: there's still technical progress on transistors per device, but at an increasing cost. It's not always a smooth process: if you're an Apple, you can gain on the cost by going vertical (good-bye Intel margin). But it's a bold move not for all, and it's a one off gain. Moore's law is over. Tech progress is not. For HN readers who can afford the increasing cost of the devices and are reading regularly from the big silicon vendors that "Moore's law is still going strong yoo-hoo", when it's been neutered to transistors count only, it may be easy to miss. [1] https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/05/moores-law-electronics.pdf https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/...