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The Collapse of Moore's Law: Physicist Says It's Already Happening
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- karolist 14y agoI don't know but I've always found it odd to be called a "law", that gives too much scientific credit for something that was clearly derived by simple observation and guesswork and has no underlying science to prove it except that the statement held for some time.
- panacea 14y agoThey acknowlege in the article it isn't a real scientific law.
- okamiueru 14y agoIn danger of being a bit too pedantic, there is no such thing as a 'real scientific law' either. Though I admit there is general understanding of what is implied by 'a scientific law', and I assume that's what you and the article is referring to.
- 6ren 14y agoProbably caught on because it rhymes.
- melloclello 14y agoRhyming words are very stable memes, they carry their own error correction.
- tokenizer 14y agoI subscribe to Kurzweil's camp in that I think the halting of Moore's law will pressure a paradigm shift in computing, like the electromechanical, relay-based, vacuum tube, transistor paradigms, the integrated circuit paradigm will cease to be relevant when something like memristors or three-dimensional molecular computing comes into play.
- anamax 14y ago> the integrated circuit paradigm will cease to be relevant when something like memristors or three-dimensional molecular computing comes into play. What part of "integrated circuit paradigm" doesn't apply to memristors or three-dimensional molecular computing? I ask because HP's Williams seems to say that memristors are firmly in the "integrated circuit paradigm", but maybe he means something different than you do.
- spot 14y agoMoore's law is very much rooted in photolithography which is a 2D process. And memristors do fit in this. So does the 3d computing that intel is doing now, actually, since it still has a flat product. but if ever there were truly solid 3d computers then they might scale on a different curve, presumably sharper due to the cubic.
- Retric 14y agophotolithography is already limited by heat density's. Going 3D sounds great but it's far less helpful than you might hope and clock speeds are dominated more by how long it takes a transistor to switch than how long it takes electricity to travel though those tiny wires.
- anamax 14y ago> Moore's law is very much rooted in photolithography which is a 2D process. I don't see that "root". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law It states a doubling time. (That page is about number of circuits, but there's another "law" about fab costs.) It doesn't specify a technology or geometry. That doubling-time changed about 2005. Maybe 3D would change it, maybe it wouldn't. Note that cubes of active elements are harder to cool than planes.
- dsr_ 14y agoSince it isn't a physical law, but an observation of average rate of advance of technology, saying that it is 'collapsing' is pretty silly. Then the article undermines itself by talking about 3d transistors and molecular valves and other possibly ways forward. In the end, computational density is likely to be limited by heat transfer rates. Having your CPU melt itself is rarely desirable.
- DennisP 14y agoIf someone figures out how to make reversible computing practical, heat won't be an issue either.
- nodata 14y agoI thought the increases in efficiency counted in place of the increases in clockspeed.
- ktosiek 14y agoMoore's Law was about the amount of transistors you can put in a chip cheaply, so it may be coming to an end. But I don't think it will stop machines from getting faster - we are seeing lots of progress in multi-core usage even on desktop and in mobile computing (multicore smartphones), and using dedicated hardware outside the CPU socket/package (GPGPU) is getting normal too - those look like new ways of making faster personal machines.
- toemetoch 14y agoOn the x86 front I'm a bit pessimistic. In 2006, Intel promised 80-cores by 2012 but I haven't seen them anywhere yet [0]. [0] http://news.cnet.com/2100-1006_3-6119618.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1006_3-6119618.html (Disclaimer: don't know how the crowd here reacts to CNET articles)
- gaius 14y agoWell, there was this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/15/larrabee_32_cores/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/15/larrabee_32_cores/
- toemetoch 14y agoIt was cancelled in 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larrabee_(microarchitecture)
- DanBC 14y agoPeople have been predicting the end of Moore's[1] law for years - since at least mid 90s. Luckily today most people are at the point where they just don't need more power. Most people need enough to run a web browser and do a bit of word processing. They might need enough to open a spreadsheet or a presentation. Most people would be happy with something like a good tablet and a monitor / keyboard dock. It would be nice if the churn of "more power" could switch focus to "power efficient" or "better optimisations" or "better architecture" or even "future technology with advanced architectures". Sure, there are people who need media streaming; or gaming; or compiling; or multicore crunching; or rendering farms; or etc. They'll always have machines. I guess parallelisation needs to improve a bit and clustering needs to get better. [1] some of these people were using less formal definition of "double the 'power' / 'speed'" rather than more formal "double the number of transistors per IC".
- TimGebhardt 14y agoI can't stand when I see people making this argument. What if people said that we had "enough" computing power back in 1999? Would you be happy with your Nokia candy-bar phone today? You'd never know because that's all you'd know! We never have enough. The march of technology should be relentless. I for one can't wait to see how the guys at Intel/AMD/ARM or someone out of left field comes up with a way to get around this.
- spot 14y agopeople have been saying that for years too. and they are always wrong. there are two things you are not considering: 1) that web browser or tablet still has to connect to a server that does the real work of the application and 2) the CPU needs of speech recognition, computer vision, and search are limitless. you seem to admit that when you say "they'll always have machines" but it's not "they" it's everyone. and FYI the chip industry has focused on efficiency since around 2000. the Atom line and ARM are not accidents.
- gaius 14y agoThere was enough power on the desktop for commercial-grade word processing and spreadsheets, at an affordable price, 30 years ago. Ignoring all the bells and whistles, there's actually not much you can do on a 2Ghz quad-core PC with 8G of RAM that you couldn't do on a 2Mhz 6502 machine with 32k or 64k of RAM. The failure of the industry is, we have thousands of times more power - and we can't think of anything to do with it. And the keyboard of a Beeb or a C64 was much nicer than most modern keyboards too...
- nextparadigms 14y agoI don't think we have to worry too much about it until 2030 or so. At least until 2020 it should be a smooth ride, and then they'll probably stacks chips on each other or find some work-around for the next decade or so, until something else comes out.
- _quasimodo 14y agoThank god! Finally companies will start optimizing their software again.
- redwood 14y agoIn terms of comparing clock speed with, say, the brain: isn't it more the parallelization that we're lacking, rather than the speed? In other words lets say we could parallelize a computer network as complicated as the brain... with current processor speeds, couldn't we already re-create effective human intelligence? I guess I mean to suggest it's the parallelization/inter-connectiviy and algorithmic challenge rather than the speed challenge that has so far avoided the singularity. Curious if others agree?
- toemetoch 14y agoSomething you're probably going to be interested in: Whole Brain Emulation. [0] Human intelligence is IMO something that is referred to in pop culture as "emergent behavior" [1]. Problem is that you risk building the electronic equivalent of a cargo cult [2]. After all, on a cellular level of a nervous system, what's the difference between what happens in the brain of a chimp and that of a human? How detailed do you have to go to build a platform that can house intelligence? On a philosophical level you kinda end up with a contradiction: is the human brain complex enough to understand/build the complexity of a human brain? Personally I'd be happier if research in this field was a bit more modest. I once read (somewhere in the 90s) that there was a researcher in the U.S. who was mapping every cell's behavior in the fly's "brain". With current tech, it would be feasible to implement that into a simulator and see what pops out. But doing the same for a human brain? Let's first try to come up with a definition for fuzzy meta-sensations such as intelligence and emotions that would translate to computer lingo. [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRB6Qzx9oXs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRB6Qzx9oXs [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
- redwood 14y agoThanks for this great comment. I'd suggest it's not a contradiction in so far as... we're not talking about one human brain creating another. We're talking about the collaborative work of countless human brains adding on to each other's work. E.g. parallelization of brains is what enables great human strides, and so far seems quite limitless :)
- wpietri 14y agoTwo things that really interest me about this: For a couple of decades we've been trading computational resources for programmer convenience. That worked very well when cores were rocketing up in speed year on year. But since we can't count on that, I think we'll be taking a harder look at our tools. But I think we're going to have to take an even harder look at how we work. As processors stop getting faster, software won't become obsolete as quickly. We've all left a lot of mistakes behind in code killed in platform shifts. But now there may be no escape. I don't know what will come of that, but I'm sure interested to see.
- wtvanhest 14y ago2 years ago I worked at Intel and they talked about Moore's law and how people always said it would end, but it never does due to continued innovation. I think everyone knows they have a lot of people working on a lot of possible solutions to these physics problems. Intel is like a supercharged academia where hitting objectives matters. They don’t want engineers/physicists that say it cannot be done, those people are stuck on the outside writing posts like this one. Those posts come up continually, (do a search for “end of moore’s law 200X) and you will see articles written every year. Here is a recent quote from an interview with Mark Bohr, Intel's senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration. “"The end of Moore's law has always been 10 years away, and it will always be 10 years away," he said. He's been hearing predictions about the end of scaling since he joined the industry 30 years ago, so he isn't worried. He said 14nm is in full development and on track for manufacturing readiness in the second half of next year.” http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/show-reports/297801-intel-the-end-of-moore-s-law-is-still-10-years-away http://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/show-reports/297801-intel-t...
- Retric 14y agoFor a while transistor density's doubled every 12 months. That stopped happening, then for a while they doubled every 18 months until that stopped happening. Now, if your willing to accept transistors doubling every 50,000 years as the same exponential growth as doubling every 12 months then sure it will continue for a long time. But, that's not what 'Moore's law' as originally stated.
- wtvanhest 14y agoSince 1975 it has been every 24 months. I have never heard the 12 month number until reading it on HN today. Someone at Intel at some point said 18 months, but it was most likely a 1 off conversation/presentation rather than a restatement of the law and occured well after 1975.
- Retric 14y ago12 months is what he actually said in 1965. The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who described the trend in his 1965 paper.[2][3][4] The paper noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year from the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 until 1965 and predicted that the trend would continue "for at least ten years".[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law
- bryanlarsen 14y agoMoore's law has been redefined several times already. At the beginning it was every 12 months, then 18, and now it's 24. What's being measured has also changed. It used to be frequency scaling that we measured, but that changed after the debacle of the Pentium 4. But the essence of Moore's law has always remained: the exponential growth in the capability of ICs. The other relatively constant aspect of Moore's law is that people have always predicted it to last another 10 years. When Moore first formulated the law, that's approximately what he believed. So when somebody says that they expect Moore's law to end within 5-10 years, I take that with a big grain of salt. What will kill Moore's law will be an unwillingness to continue to spend more money to build semiconductor plants. It used to cost only a few hundred thousand dollars to build an IC plant. This cost has increased exponentially to the point where a plant today costs $10 billion dollars. It's reasonable to suppose that a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers could invest $100 billion in a plant, but on current trajectories, a $1 trillion plant may be necessary to continue Moore's law in 10 years. Do you think that will happen?
- carsongross 14y agoYes. The cost of the exotic silicon and post silicon alternatives are dramatically higher than todays costs, which are dramatically higher than yesterdays. Couple that with the fact that the majority of people have far more computing power than is necessary for their day-to-day existence (e.g. emailing, posting on FB and looking at cat pictures and/or pornography.) So costs continue to increase by some super-linear function but benefits follow a sigmoid curve. The disconnect between marginal cost and marginal demand for computational power is what's going to knock Moore's Law off it's curve IMO, not some hard technical barrier. The futurists are always spending someone else's imaginary money, so they don't have to worry about stuff like that.
- ericb 14y ago> The futurists are always spending someone else's imaginary money. A $35 raspberry pi can outrun what used to be multi-million dollar mainframes. Are you sure that cost factors are relevant when the trend is so strongely toward lower costs? If prices drop, then lower utility uses become feasible.
- anusinha 14y agoMoore's Law in Silicon will eventually run out. This is true and is physically provable. And there are already a lot of smart minds (at Intel and at a few other companies and at many universities) developing post-silicon technologies. It is possible that we will one day shrink down to true molecular electronics using organic semiconductors or similar. As Feynman said, there's lots of room at the bottom. 3D molecular electronics are exciting for me---architectures will have to be redesigned from scratch, maybe RISCs too. It's an exciting time. (I omit talking about quantum computing because that's currently mostly theoretical. But back in the day, Turing, Church, et al were talking about computability, etc when a real computer (von neumann architecture) did not exist yet. So maybe (I would be confident enough to say probably) down the line, we'll have a quantum computer, but it may not be soon.)
- DennisP 14y ago"Using standard silicon"...in other news, Samsung just had a breakthrough making logic circuits in graphene, and hopes to commercialize 100x faster chips by 2020: http://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Science%2Band%2BTech/Story/A1Story20120519-346919.html http://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Science%2Band%2BTe... And it looks like memristors will hit the market around 2015, giving us much faster storage and nonvolatile RAM. According to HP, "We put the non-volatile memory right on top of the processor chip, and, because you’re not shipping data off-chip, that means we get the equivalent of 20 years of Moore’s Law performance improvement" http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/22/05/2012/53718/ucl-makes-memristors-manufacturable.htm http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/22/05/2012/53718/u... Down the road a bit further, memristors could be used for neural-network coprocessors, since they function a lot like synapses. The smooth progression of Moore's Law will probably get more jumpy, but the long-term trend goes back to mechanical adding machines.
- wmf 14y agoPlaying devil's advocate, if Moore's Law ends in, say, 2015 then Samsung and other chip makers may not even be in business in 2020.
- reitzensteinm 14y agoI think it would take a lot longer than 5 years, even if node shrinking stopped dead. You can always add more functionality to SoCs (eg better video decoding), tweak current cores (Intel gets more performance out of processor redesigns than node shrinks), and optimize your current node (power usage typically drops, and yield increases with time on the same node). You would also get way more focus on GPGPU computing, with initiates like Intel's QuickSync. Lots of performance/watt to gain there, if there's no alternative. Plus people making the hardware and software of phones and laptops need to sell units too, so they'll pick up some of the slack. Not every iPhone is a significant upgrade in terms of performance. And lastly, a whole bunch of chips are being bought for reasons other than the old one is too slow; people are getting multiple computers, more gadgets, and in developing countries people are getting their first computers. Devices are becoming disposable. Laptops die and get replaced, even though even a Pentium M stacks up relatively well these days. 20+ years, though, you may have a point. I have no idea what that would look like. Though with depreciation on fabs slowing way down, even if sales were lower, the margins would look pretty damn good with today's prices. Plus each node shrink wouldn't be a potential disaster; the fab companies still around may even be more financially stable.
- jbooth 14y agoI'm not an electrical or thermal engineer, but even if we hit a wall as far as process sizes, couldn't they make bigger dies with more cores? Like, if we can't get much smaller than a 12-nm process, couldn't we just make the die twice as big and put a big-ol heatsink on it to get to 128 cores or whatever? It seems like architecture is still a bigger barrier than process size when it comes to getting >16 or >32 cores on the chip. How big will the current ring bus architecture that intel has scale?
- bryanlarsen 14y agocosts for larger dies do not scale linearly. A chip with twice the area is at least 4x as expensive, if not more, depending on many factors like defect density and die packing. But you're right that this is the direction that the industry will move if process innovation stops. As a process matures, defect rates drop, making larger chips more feasible.
- jbooth 14y agoThanks, I appreciate that. So basically, larger dies == greater chance a given chip has a defect, bigger cost and % of the wafer for each defective chip, and presumably more waste silicon on the wafer as well?