4 ms·

I guess I'm skeptical. This sounds more like an optimization of current technology than something along the lines of vacuum tubes -> transistors.

djexjms 4y ago
Yeah. After reading the article, I have to agree. But I'm no expert in this area. It seems like it could certainly help. If I had to guess, things like ECRAM and reconfigurable analog computing chips will have more of an effect than this (assuming they can be made to work).
xadhominemx 4y ago
Yes, that’s how Moore’s law has worked for 60 years: incremental advancements. The past 15 years have actually involved far more radical step changes than the 45 years prior.
- ilaksh 4y ago
  This seems false to me. For example, electromechanical to relays, to tubes,transistors, integrated circuits, highly parallel ICs are all paradigm shifts rather than incremental, and yielded multiple orders of magnitude rather than incremental improvements in price/performance. The next really significant boost is likely something like optical transistors, memristors, analog computing, bio-electrical computing, or anything that is highly divergent from the current base concept. I mean, if the organization of the current basic idea of silicon and the software can align with a compute-in-memory paradigm, I guess that would be more than incremental in a way. But the lady seems to be talking about doing that in still kind of a half-assed way as far as that part.
  - xadhominemx 4y ago
    Moore’s Law (formulated 57 years ago) by definition applies to dense ICs. It’s true, there were a bunch of advancements before the invention of ICs, but those were 60-80 years ago.
  - sroussey 4y ago
    Memristors are finding interesting application in AI specific chip design. Will be interesting to see these tape out in a couple of years.
  - timerol 4y ago
    The Apollo Guidance Computer was a 16 bit computer operating at 2 MHz in 1966, costing $200,000 per unit. It was made out of many individual ICs, based on fab limitations at the time. A single IC today with the same functionality costs under $2 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electronics-america-inc/R5F1006DASP-30/10060949 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electroni... That's 5 orders of magnitude in cost over 56 years, with the only "paradigm shift" being "we can now fit the whole functionality on 1 IC".
smoldesu 4y ago
That's honestly what we need right now. There is a plethora of new optimizations available (big.LITTLE, chiplets, 3D stacking, et. al) and neither Intel, AMD or Apple are using them all. There are also ISA optimizations still on the table for both x86 and aarch64, so the real race over the next 5 years will be seeing which company is able to compile these optimizations in a meaningful way.
ilaksh 4y ago
Correct. These are relatively incremental improvements. And I would argue that recently they are more relevant in GPUs anyway due to the scalability. To resume "Moore's Law" at the pace it once was, we need some of the truly new paradigms to mature. Ideas like memristors or optical transistors. You could even imagine something like a ubiquitous transparent P2P background computing grid as a big shift in software that could matter. But for hardware, the next paradigm that brings a few orders of magnitude boost to the baseline is going to actually be a.. different paradigm.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > You could even imagine something like a ubiquitous transparent P2P background computing grid as a big shift in software that could matter. That's not really Moore's law, though; it's changing how you use the transistors rather than how many you get.

djexjms 4y ago

Yeah. After reading the article, I have to agree. But I'm no expert in this area. It seems like it could certainly help. If I had to guess, things like ECRAM and reconfigurable analog computing chips will have more of an effect than this (assuming they can be made to work).

xadhominemx 4y ago

Yes, that’s how Moore’s law has worked for 60 years: incremental advancements. The past 15 years have actually involved far more radical step changes than the 45 years prior.

ilaksh 4y ago
This seems false to me. For example, electromechanical to relays, to tubes,transistors, integrated circuits, highly parallel ICs are all paradigm shifts rather than incremental, and yielded multiple orders of magnitude rather than incremental improvements in price/performance. The next really significant boost is likely something like optical transistors, memristors, analog computing, bio-electrical computing, or anything that is highly divergent from the current base concept. I mean, if the organization of the current basic idea of silicon and the software can align with a compute-in-memory paradigm, I guess that would be more than incremental in a way. But the lady seems to be talking about doing that in still kind of a half-assed way as far as that part.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  Moore’s Law (formulated 57 years ago) by definition applies to dense ICs. It’s true, there were a bunch of advancements before the invention of ICs, but those were 60-80 years ago.
- sroussey 4y ago
  Memristors are finding interesting application in AI specific chip design. Will be interesting to see these tape out in a couple of years.
- timerol 4y ago
  The Apollo Guidance Computer was a 16 bit computer operating at 2 MHz in 1966, costing $200,000 per unit. It was made out of many individual ICs, based on fab limitations at the time. A single IC today with the same functionality costs under $2 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electronics-america-inc/R5F1006DASP-30/10060949 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electroni... That's 5 orders of magnitude in cost over 56 years, with the only "paradigm shift" being "we can now fit the whole functionality on 1 IC".

smoldesu 4y ago

That's honestly what we need right now. There is a plethora of new optimizations available (big.LITTLE, chiplets, 3D stacking, et. al) and neither Intel, AMD or Apple are using them all. There are also ISA optimizations still on the table for both x86 and aarch64, so the real race over the next 5 years will be seeing which company is able to compile these optimizations in a meaningful way.

ilaksh 4y ago

Correct. These are relatively incremental improvements. And I would argue that recently they are more relevant in GPUs anyway due to the scalability. To resume "Moore's Law" at the pace it once was, we need some of the truly new paradigms to mature. Ideas like memristors or optical transistors. You could even imagine something like a ubiquitous transparent P2P background computing grid as a big shift in software that could matter. But for hardware, the next paradigm that brings a few orders of magnitude boost to the baseline is going to actually be a.. different paradigm.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> You could even imagine something like a ubiquitous transparent P2P background computing grid as a big shift in software that could matter. That's not really Moore's law, though; it's changing how you use the transistors rather than how many you get.