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>raw computing power grows by 10^6 every ~25 years That is really not true anymore unless there will be a new technology that can do much better than silicon e
by ahartmetz 2y ago
>raw computing power grows by 10^6 every ~25 years
That is really not true anymore unless there will be a new technology that can do much better than silicon electronics. Doesn't mean that were safe, but it's not that clear.
Edit: to expand, a single transistor is made of a pretty pedestrian number of atoms these days. The gate pitch of TSMC "3 nm" is about 40 nm (not all of which is transistor) and silicon atoms are about 0.2 nm apart. So you have, let's say, 30^3 / 0.2^3 ~= 3 million atoms in a transistor. There is no room for another 10^6 improvement because a transistor with just a few atoms probably wouldn't work, the thermal noise would dominate it. Paraphrasing the famous Feynman quote, there isn't much room at the botton anymore, now.
- shalabajser 2y agoYour point is true but it is too narrow. A similar argument was bandied about regarding the CPU clock which hit a wall which was defeated with multi-cores and parallelization. The atom wall you are talking about is crushed with 3D semiconductors (hybrid bonding, wafer to wafer..., HBM), wafer scale CPUs like Cerebras, larger clusters, faster networking... Incidentally, massive parallelization suits AI just fine. Do you seriously think that computing power will stop growing? Ever?
- ahartmetz 2y agoI do think so. Every exponential growth is a sigmoid curve on a long enough timescale. The end of Moore's Law is here (for now) even with multicores and everything else, by the way. That you can get more compute by throwing more resources at the problem doesn't really count. The big deal about Moore's Law was that it was free. The 3D stuff, clusters, etc, can increase the number of transistors... but it's gonna cost proportionally more in fabrication and energy when running.