8 ms·

End of Moore's Law: It's not just about physics

60 points by davidiach 12y ago

tedsanders 12y ago
It's always been economics. EUV already works. E-beam lithography already works. Carbon nanotube transistors already work. III-V transistors already work. It's just that none of these technologies work as cheaply as double patterned silicon.
- kev009 12y ago
  And it will be economics that breaks through the cost challenges. If you can do something that nobody else can, it's a nice spot to be, you can even license out the actual implementation. There are companies like IBM that take a more holistic approach to R&D. I'd expect someone like them to prevail in adaptation of new techniques or even paradigm shift.
- hershel 12y ago
  The fact the we can't manufacture transistors cheaper doesn't mean we won't see big jumps in compute value.We could seem improvements from fpga's(500x max),approximate computing(100x-1000x), packaging(3x-10x) or the radical option of analog computing(6-9 orders of magnitude for brain simulation etc). Also, there's still huge amount of value to unlock from software, interfaces and the rest.Just look at the iphone where most of the value comes from a great touch interface and an app store. Moore's law is just a bonus.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    500x performance improvement from using fpgas? Where do you get this number?
    - hershel 12y ago
      Asics can max out at about 1000x , and zvi orbach has a recent column talking about how to make an fpga with 50% efficiency of asic. http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1322021 http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1322021
      - sliverstorm 12y ago
        I must have misunderstood, I thought you were saying FPGA's will surpass CPU's 500-fold.
- mahyarm 12y ago
  Could these eventually be as cheap as double patterned silicon?
  - tedsanders 12y ago
    Yes, potentially. There are strong research efforts underway for all of them.
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
I think maybe we might have been mis-reading Moore's Law for years, or rather, Moore himself might have mis-stated it. The radical changing reality that it describes is the number of transistors a person could economically employ at any one time to perform work on their behalf. So yes, physics and economics might provide us with a limit (or increasing slope of difficulty) for the construction of single chips, the practical effects of the Law continue unabated, at least as far as I can see. The average person continues to be able to employ more and more electronics to perform work for them. This is increasing geometrically. I'm not trying to dismiss either this DARPA guy or Moore, just point out that the specific details of Moore's Law may not be as important as we make them out to be. In my mind, the big obstacle we have now to continued growth is small-system, imperative thinking. Systems of the future will be massively parallel. I have no idea how long it will take the IT industry to truly transition, but that's the next big hurdle, not counting atoms inside a switch.
- Detrus 12y ago
  Yea I remember reading that DWAVE could tackle classical computing problems at 20 petaflops. All of Google today is 20 petaflops, across many cartoon colored datacenters. If you can produce small numbers of expensive computers that are more efficient than millions of cheap computers cobbled together, you are still advancing how much computational power each person has access to. But a significant problem with this approach is most real time video games aren't practical when the computer is far away.
  - nullc 12y ago
    Latency isn't the only issue— do we want to be building a world where people are constantly trusting third parties to process their data privately and correctly? Certainly there are also cryptographic workarounds to those problems but their overheads are so high as to make the outsourced computation somewhat pointless.
- danmaz74 12y ago
  Except that, for most classes of problems, creating a software solutions that uses a massively-parallel system efficiently is much more difficult - and thus more expensive. This may be the real economic limit to using more transistors.
hershel 12y ago
For the talk by the DARPA guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g#t=15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g#t=15
tambourine_man 12y ago
I've been hearing about the end of Moore's Law ever since I was a kid. I remember smart people citing wave lengths and economics convincing me that there as no way we'd go beyond 300nm. Oh yes, and that would mean the end of x86 as well (since intel wouldn't have the process advantage to compensate for the less efficient CISC). Well, maybe they are right this time, who knows, but I'm way more skeptical.
- bsder 12y ago
  Moore's Law broke a while ago. Note the past tense. nVidia couldn't get their economics at 28nm. RAM cells are now more expensive in 20nm than 28nm. There are lots of other examples. Remember: the strong form of Moore's law was that transistors get cheaper ever 12-18 months. The original formulation of Moore's law was always about economics, not technology. The problem is: nobody knows what to do. You now need clever circuit design and humans who can squeeze another 15-20% out of existing technologies. Unfortunately, all the humans who knew how to do custom VLSI design are dead, retired, or doing something else since custom VLSI was fool's errand for so long (see DEC, IBM, Silicon Graphics, etc.).
  - williadc 12y ago
    > You now need clever circuit design and humans who can squeeze another 15-20% out of existing technologies. Unfortunately, all the humans who knew how to do custom VLSI design are dead, retired, or doing something else since custom VLSI was fool's errand for so long (see DEC, IBM, Silicon Graphics, etc.). Broadwell is a custom-designed part, and it's scaled extremely well from 22nm to 14nm. There have been yield issues going to 14nm, but the biggest hurdles have been solved, with a lot of help from the design team. I guess Intel must have hired all the people you think are dead or retired.
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      It really helps to specify what you mean by custom. There is hand-built vs. tool-built, there is full-custom vs. semi-custom, etc... I for one doubt Broadwell is hand-built, hand-routed, full-custom. Which is what your parent was probably talking about, as they mention DEC.
anigbrowl 12y ago
Worst formatting I've ever seen. Anyway: Colwell said that for the Defense Department, he uses the year 2020 and 7 nanometers as the "last process technology node." But he adds, "In reality, I expect the industry to do whatever heavy lifting is needed to push to 5nm, even if 5nm doesn't offer much advantage over 7, and that moves the earliest end to 2022. I think the end comes right around those nodes." Let's assume that in 10 years time everyone agrees we have hit the wall on how small we can go. What then? Is there any reason to believe that popular architectures of today are necessarily optimal? I'm curious to hear people's ideas about what we do instead of shrinking dies. My personal guess is that we move towards massively parallel systems with large numbers of low-power cores, but bare-metal programming completely and work on developing smarter and smarter compilers to take advantage of parallelism. My personal hope is that we find some sort of cold optical switching technology that lets us build ridiculously fast computers that look like glowing crystal cubes. Of course, I have no idea how that would work, or I'd be out pitching it XD
- 2muchcoffeeman 12y ago
  Have you heard of photonics crystals? http://optoelectronics.eecs.berkeley.edu/eliy_SCIAM.pdf http://optoelectronics.eecs.berkeley.edu/eliy_SCIAM.pdf But I think that since the features of the materials are on the same order of magnitude as the wave lengths of light you are trying to switch, this actually makes things bigger. But still really cool.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    I had heard of it and I know that has been some progress with optoelectronics recently, but hadn't looked into it in this detail - thanks. Most of his recent work seems focused (groan) on things like solar cell efficiency and suchlike rather than my fanciful goal of a completely optical processor, but I need to read more. Maybe I should ask him to lunch, since I live within walking distance of UC Berkeley and don't really take advantage of it :-/
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  There are several other structures that behave like transistors, there is no reason to believe that silicon is the optimum computer building material.
reitzensteinm 12y ago
For a nice dose of doom and gloom, I quite like the dark silicon paper[1], which explores the limited use we'll get out of Moore's Law, even if it manages to continue (and as far as I understand it, transistors/$ has already flat lined so it's at least temporarily over). Since we're no longer getting good power scaling out of shrinking, if Moore's Law keeps up, we're just essentially getting price discounts. A nice thought exercise for me is what would computing look like if you could fab wafers for free, today. Sort of the ad absurdum take on Moore's Law continuing. We'd have more memory, and a ridiculous amount of flash storage, and high end graphics cards would become cheaper (but not faster). Desktop CPUs might look more like server CPUs, but single core performance wouldn't change one bit. We'd probably see heterogeneous computing a whole lot more. Xeon Phi like processors on package next to Haswell cores at the very least. Probably computers would start to have FPGAs in them, as well as large amounts of niche circuitry to compute hashes, encode videos. We might see computation embedded inside memory (I think Hynix did this recently but I couldn't find a link). Maybe memory that accelerates garbage collection in order to accelerate modern workloads. So there are some interesting places to go, especially from a Hacker News perspective, but even if transistors became free, we still wouldn't see the rate of progress we did in the 80s or 90s (in terms of speed up to the tasks we're doing). Of course, this is all near to medium term stuff. I personally believe we'll see that rate of progress again when we move off of silicon, to a different computing paradigm, or (most likely) both - I can't believe we'll inch our way to science fiction computing, or that science fiction computing won't be possible at all. [1] Dark Silicon and the End of Multicore Scaling (ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/dburger/papers/ISCA11.pdf)
- gizmo686 12y ago
  I wouldn't underestimate our ability to through raw power at a problem. Imagine if we can give each process its own cpu/ram (with some mechanism of accessing a segment of another process's ram if given permision). Not only would this be good for security, responsiveness, general parallelism, but it would also reduce a lot of the complexity we have in emulating concurrency in software. Of course this also assumes that power is free.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
williadc 12y ago
One thing that seems to be glossed over in his argument is the impending move to 450mm wafer technology. That should allow Intel and others to continue shrinking at reasonable cost.
skywhopper 12y ago
One thing I can predict with complete confidence is that we have no clue what the path forward for improving computer processing power will be from 2022. It's fun to speculate but that's a long time for new technologies, approaches, and architectures to take hold. Intel isn't the only company with an interest in improving the state of the art here.
transfire 12y ago
For decades I have heard that 11nm would be the end of Moore's law as we know it. This is proving to be true. CPUs have been frozen at 1 to 4GHz for nearly a decade, with the latest advances going to power savings. Currently at 22nm, the next step is 14, and then 11. Perhaps they can eek out one more jump to 7nm or 5nm, but I expect that will barely be worth the effort and thus will drag out for at least decade itself. But Moore fans need not worry. There is a clear next step, and I am wondering why no one is talking about it: Optical Interconnects. Connecting chips and circuits within chips with optical channels should allow plenty of room for speeding up processors and reducing power requirements well into the mid-21st century.
- dippyskoodlez 12y ago
  Clock Speed is not relevant. In that "decade" our single thread performance has increased a fair amount, but we now have an additional 4-8 CPUs in the same amount of space. An Ivybridge will very handily beat a Northwood based system even in single threaded performance.
  - autokad 12y ago
    Dont get me wrong, I love having all of my 12 cores, but I dont really count that as improved speed. More (no pun intended) importantly the rule was every 18 months if I'm not mistaken, not 10 years. Lets double it and add a little bit, 3 years ago you pretty much could have bought the same machine. in the last 3 years, processors have been about 3.4ghz, 3 years before that it was still around 3.1ish. I personally haven't noticed any improved performance on single threads. they pretty much do things at the same completion time. I have a 12 core 4.5 ghz machine (3.4 overclocked), and I ran a compute intensive process on a 2010 machine that was 8 cores 3.4ghz and they finished about 5 minutes later at about the exact same time. i'm not saying all things are equal and that things havent improved, just that i would have expected a lot more from something that was supposed to double (and get cheaper) every 18 months after 4 years
kstenerud 12y ago
Yeah, I'm sure someone had similar doom and gloom to say about vacuum tubes. The thing is, you just don't know where the next technological revolution will come from. Yes, we've about hit the limit for silicon, and we may very well stagnate for another decade because of it, but there's always going to be someone scrappy enough to try what the big slow incumbents won't.
gugol 12y ago
One thing that makes me think of Intel having planned obsolesence processors is that they seem to have figured out the future (I can't find the chart but it looked like this: http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2013/10/intelbroadwell.jpg http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2013/10/intelbroadwell.... ). They seem to be sure they will have 5 nm processors (or they already have them but have to get there slowly (22, 14...) because if they sell them now then they will have a very hard time making them better?) instead of making the announcement when they supposedly have them ready.
lsc 12y ago
I have, perhaps, a different perspective. I have been spending a lot of my income on computer hardware and power for the last decade or so; and being involved in spending other people's money on same for another half-decade back. My take? When Intel thinks they are ahead, compute doesn't get cheaper. In the DDR2 days, If you were on Intel, you had the choice between the stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram, or a stunningly shitty memory buss with (not very many) low-power ddr2 modules. At the time, the AMD HyperTransport system was absolutely beautiful. Even on cheap boards, you could get more than 2x the low-power ddr2 ram modules per CPU that intel could. (at the time, lower-density modules were dramatically cheaper, per gigabyte, than higher-density modules) It worked way better when you had multiple CPUs, too. Then ddr3 came, and Intel came up with their QPI systems, which were awesome. AMD came back with a competently built ddr3 platform, too; the G34 systems were a huge upgrade from the mcp55 chipset socket F platform. But the benchmarks came out in Intel's favor, even when AMD had twice the cores. I mean, you could argue that the AMD systems had advantages in some limited situations, but they had lost the dramatic advantage. As far as I can tell, intel has been largely resting on their laurels, price-wise. The E5-2620 is better than, but really not radically better than the E5520. Now, some of the higher-end E5s are pretty nice, but they are priced accordingly. Until Intel gets some real competition again, we have to pay for our performance gains. So yeah, really, until AMD gets their legs back under them, and I hope the A1100[1] will do it, I don't expect dramatic performance per dollar gains from Intel. [1]http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-accelerate-2014jan28.aspx http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-acceler...
- lplplplplp 12y ago
  I agree. HyperTransport was stunning when it came out. Revolutionary, even. Ditto for AMD64, still the standard as we speak. I'm not sure, however, if this is due to Intel resting on their laurels vs an entire Intel generation being shown the door because of epic (excuse the pun) fuckups. With the (largely wasted) effort expended on Itanium / Itanium 2 / EPIC / IXP / Netburst / etc, no wonder other vendors excelled. The MHz wars took a horrible toll on Intel for mainstream x86 with things like Prescott, with its 31 stage (!!) pipeline. Stalls on Prescott were horrific for performance. On IXP, microcode screwups (often due to explicit caching) were horrific for customers. On Itanium, everything was horrific. I doubt we will ever know exactly how much these escapades cost humanity. On the other hand, maybe we're all richer for lessons learned. It seems Intel is not interested in screwing up so badly anymore, so I think it's the competitors' turn to sweat. Intel still has a long way to go in recapturing territory it could have already had; ARM and MIPS have come a long way in the phone/server and NPU/packet processing space respectively, and they don't look as easily dislodged as AMD...
hyp0 12y ago
smaller devices will provide the economic drive, just as they did when 14" HDDs had enough performance.
deleted 12y ago
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PeterisP 12y ago
We still have a magnitude order or two of computing power that we can squeeze out iff the semiconductor density/price stops. We don't implement many optimization possibilities in each hw/sw layer because the "layer below" keeps changing all the time and we need to keep compatibility. Once we could say "this is it, this layer is as good as it will ever get", then (and not a day before) you can start to re-architecture everything above it to maximize performance by throwing away flexibility that won't be needed anymore. E.g., instead of transistors being spent on translating x86 to the underlying microcode and cycles being spent on translating JVM/CLR bytecode (or javascript) to x86, we'd be able to define a single standard and adapt both processors and compilers to that. You can't break compatibility at every technological change - but if you have a reason to believe that it will finally be stable (which hasn't ever happened yet) then it does make sense to make a single final switch that disregards all compatibility and legacy issues - even if the benefits are small, they accumulate for each such layer and you only have to do it once.
lucb1e 12y ago
> it's time to start planning for the end of Moore's Law Do we? Because all current software runs on current hardware. Even if in the next ten years we only get another 1% increase in speed, then the current software will run at the current speed (something which we are all perfectly fine with right now). I think it's indeed a doom and gloom article.
- RogerL 12y ago
  I want it. Python is 100x slower than C. I want a language that doesn't need to worry about performance. I want computers optimized for humans, not them. I want computers that can model the weather, the ocean. I want search algorithms that optimize car engines, electric plants. a million x isn't nearly good enough.
pmorici 12y ago
Either this article or the guy's speech perhaps both are pretty lame. No supporting facts are presented as to why he thinks the 7nm generation will be the last frontier. He just basically states the obvious that if there is no profit motive or the technology isn't there then it won't happen. No kidding. The whole article reads like an appeal to authority. Are there any factual reasons to believe this time is actually different than the past 35 years?
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  > No supporting facts are presented as to why he thinks the 7nm generation will be the last frontier. I don't know about his reasons, but charge carriers at doped silicon have orbitals that are typically around 10nm in diameter. (They vary with dopant density, temperature, etc, and don't have clearly determined boundaries, thus there is no hard number.)
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  > The whole article reads like an appeal to authority. You might be right. But Colwell isn't just a country rube who hitched a ride into town on the turnip truck. He's been there, done that, literally made billions of dollars in profit for Intel. I reiterate: Bob was the chief architect for a number of design teams who, *LITERALLY*, no exaggeration, generated billions of dollars in profit for Intel. You might have heard of a few of the products he architected. [1] "Authority" is frequently wrong. But this guy certainly deserves a little more respect than your flippant dismissal. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Colwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Colwell
  - pmorici 12y ago
    Interesting, I wonder why it doesn't say that in the article which would lend a lot more credability to it. It just talks about his position with DARPA
beloch 12y ago
There are gains yet to be realized besides reducing the size of the process. For example, reversible (a.k.a. isentropic or adiabatic) computing offers a way to reduce heat generation, which might combine with 3D construction in interesting ways. New ways of designing chips might allow progress to continue, but they're hard and risky. They're not terribly attractive as long as shrinking the process offers predictable advances and remains economically feasible. Still, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate how crazy just getting under 10 nm is. The wavelength of light that is visible to the human eye starts at around 380 nm. Looking at a 10 nm chip with violet light would be like trying to navigate your house by sonar using a sub-woofer as your emitter!

60 points by davidiach 12y ago

It's always been economics. EUV already works. E-beam lithography already works. Carbon nanotube transistors already work. III-V transistors already work. It's just that none of these technologies work as cheaply as double patterned silicon.

kev009 12y ago
And it will be economics that breaks through the cost challenges. If you can do something that nobody else can, it's a nice spot to be, you can even license out the actual implementation. There are companies like IBM that take a more holistic approach to R&D. I'd expect someone like them to prevail in adaptation of new techniques or even paradigm shift.
hershel 12y ago
The fact the we can't manufacture transistors cheaper doesn't mean we won't see big jumps in compute value.We could seem improvements from fpga's(500x max),approximate computing(100x-1000x), packaging(3x-10x) or the radical option of analog computing(6-9 orders of magnitude for brain simulation etc). Also, there's still huge amount of value to unlock from software, interfaces and the rest.Just look at the iphone where most of the value comes from a great touch interface and an app store. Moore's law is just a bonus.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  500x performance improvement from using fpgas? Where do you get this number?
  - hershel 12y ago
    Asics can max out at about 1000x , and zvi orbach has a recent column talking about how to make an fpga with 50% efficiency of asic. http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1322021 http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?doc_id=1322021
    - sliverstorm 12y ago
      I must have misunderstood, I thought you were saying FPGA's will surpass CPU's 500-fold.
mahyarm 12y ago
Could these eventually be as cheap as double patterned silicon?
- tedsanders 12y ago
  Yes, potentially. There are strong research efforts underway for all of them.

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

I think maybe we might have been mis-reading Moore's Law for years, or rather, Moore himself might have mis-stated it. The radical changing reality that it describes is the number of transistors a person could economically employ at any one time to perform work on their behalf. So yes, physics and economics might provide us with a limit (or increasing slope of difficulty) for the construction of single chips, the practical effects of the Law continue unabated, at least as far as I can see. The average person continues to be able to employ more and more electronics to perform work for them. This is increasing geometrically. I'm not trying to dismiss either this DARPA guy or Moore, just point out that the specific details of Moore's Law may not be as important as we make them out to be. In my mind, the big obstacle we have now to continued growth is small-system, imperative thinking. Systems of the future will be massively parallel. I have no idea how long it will take the IT industry to truly transition, but that's the next big hurdle, not counting atoms inside a switch.

Detrus 12y ago
Yea I remember reading that DWAVE could tackle classical computing problems at 20 petaflops. All of Google today is 20 petaflops, across many cartoon colored datacenters. If you can produce small numbers of expensive computers that are more efficient than millions of cheap computers cobbled together, you are still advancing how much computational power each person has access to. But a significant problem with this approach is most real time video games aren't practical when the computer is far away.
- nullc 12y ago
  Latency isn't the only issue— do we want to be building a world where people are constantly trusting third parties to process their data privately and correctly? Certainly there are also cryptographic workarounds to those problems but their overheads are so high as to make the outsourced computation somewhat pointless.
danmaz74 12y ago
Except that, for most classes of problems, creating a software solutions that uses a massively-parallel system efficiently is much more difficult - and thus more expensive. This may be the real economic limit to using more transistors.

hershel 12y ago

For the talk by the DARPA guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g#t=15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpgV6rCn5-g#t=15

tambourine_man 12y ago

I've been hearing about the end of Moore's Law ever since I was a kid. I remember smart people citing wave lengths and economics convincing me that there as no way we'd go beyond 300nm. Oh yes, and that would mean the end of x86 as well (since intel wouldn't have the process advantage to compensate for the less efficient CISC). Well, maybe they are right this time, who knows, but I'm way more skeptical.

bsder 12y ago
Moore's Law broke a while ago. Note the past tense. nVidia couldn't get their economics at 28nm. RAM cells are now more expensive in 20nm than 28nm. There are lots of other examples. Remember: the strong form of Moore's law was that transistors get cheaper ever 12-18 months. The original formulation of Moore's law was always about economics, not technology. The problem is: nobody knows what to do. You now need clever circuit design and humans who can squeeze another 15-20% out of existing technologies. Unfortunately, all the humans who knew how to do custom VLSI design are dead, retired, or doing something else since custom VLSI was fool's errand for so long (see DEC, IBM, Silicon Graphics, etc.).
- williadc 12y ago
  > You now need clever circuit design and humans who can squeeze another 15-20% out of existing technologies. Unfortunately, all the humans who knew how to do custom VLSI design are dead, retired, or doing something else since custom VLSI was fool's errand for so long (see DEC, IBM, Silicon Graphics, etc.). Broadwell is a custom-designed part, and it's scaled extremely well from 22nm to 14nm. There have been yield issues going to 14nm, but the biggest hurdles have been solved, with a lot of help from the design team. I guess Intel must have hired all the people you think are dead or retired.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    It really helps to specify what you mean by custom. There is hand-built vs. tool-built, there is full-custom vs. semi-custom, etc... I for one doubt Broadwell is hand-built, hand-routed, full-custom. Which is what your parent was probably talking about, as they mention DEC.

anigbrowl 12y ago

Worst formatting I've ever seen. Anyway: Colwell said that for the Defense Department, he uses the year 2020 and 7 nanometers as the "last process technology node." But he adds, "In reality, I expect the industry to do whatever heavy lifting is needed to push to 5nm, even if 5nm doesn't offer much advantage over 7, and that moves the earliest end to 2022. I think the end comes right around those nodes." Let's assume that in 10 years time everyone agrees we have hit the wall on how small we can go. What then? Is there any reason to believe that popular architectures of today are necessarily optimal? I'm curious to hear people's ideas about what we do instead of shrinking dies. My personal guess is that we move towards massively parallel systems with large numbers of low-power cores, but bare-metal programming completely and work on developing smarter and smarter compilers to take advantage of parallelism. My personal hope is that we find some sort of cold optical switching technology that lets us build ridiculously fast computers that look like glowing crystal cubes. Of course, I have no idea how that would work, or I'd be out pitching it XD

2muchcoffeeman 12y ago
Have you heard of photonics crystals? http://optoelectronics.eecs.berkeley.edu/eliy_SCIAM.pdf http://optoelectronics.eecs.berkeley.edu/eliy_SCIAM.pdf But I think that since the features of the materials are on the same order of magnitude as the wave lengths of light you are trying to switch, this actually makes things bigger. But still really cool.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  I had heard of it and I know that has been some progress with optoelectronics recently, but hadn't looked into it in this detail - thanks. Most of his recent work seems focused (groan) on things like solar cell efficiency and suchlike rather than my fanciful goal of a completely optical processor, but I need to read more. Maybe I should ask him to lunch, since I live within walking distance of UC Berkeley and don't really take advantage of it :-/
marcosdumay 12y ago
There are several other structures that behave like transistors, there is no reason to believe that silicon is the optimum computer building material.

reitzensteinm 12y ago

For a nice dose of doom and gloom, I quite like the dark silicon paper[1], which explores the limited use we'll get out of Moore's Law, even if it manages to continue (and as far as I understand it, transistors/$ has already flat lined so it's at least temporarily over). Since we're no longer getting good power scaling out of shrinking, if Moore's Law keeps up, we're just essentially getting price discounts. A nice thought exercise for me is what would computing look like if you could fab wafers for free, today. Sort of the ad absurdum take on Moore's Law continuing. We'd have more memory, and a ridiculous amount of flash storage, and high end graphics cards would become cheaper (but not faster). Desktop CPUs might look more like server CPUs, but single core performance wouldn't change one bit. We'd probably see heterogeneous computing a whole lot more. Xeon Phi like processors on package next to Haswell cores at the very least. Probably computers would start to have FPGAs in them, as well as large amounts of niche circuitry to compute hashes, encode videos. We might see computation embedded inside memory (I think Hynix did this recently but I couldn't find a link). Maybe memory that accelerates garbage collection in order to accelerate modern workloads. So there are some interesting places to go, especially from a Hacker News perspective, but even if transistors became free, we still wouldn't see the rate of progress we did in the 80s or 90s (in terms of speed up to the tasks we're doing). Of course, this is all near to medium term stuff. I personally believe we'll see that rate of progress again when we move off of silicon, to a different computing paradigm, or (most likely) both - I can't believe we'll inch our way to science fiction computing, or that science fiction computing won't be possible at all. [1] Dark Silicon and the End of Multicore Scaling (ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/dburger/papers/ISCA11.pdf)

gizmo686 12y ago
I wouldn't underestimate our ability to through raw power at a problem. Imagine if we can give each process its own cpu/ram (with some mechanism of accessing a segment of another process's ram if given permision). Not only would this be good for security, responsiveness, general parallelism, but it would also reduce a lot of the complexity we have in emulating concurrency in software. Of course this also assumes that power is free.
- TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

williadc 12y ago

One thing that seems to be glossed over in his argument is the impending move to 450mm wafer technology. That should allow Intel and others to continue shrinking at reasonable cost.

skywhopper 12y ago

One thing I can predict with complete confidence is that we have no clue what the path forward for improving computer processing power will be from 2022. It's fun to speculate but that's a long time for new technologies, approaches, and architectures to take hold. Intel isn't the only company with an interest in improving the state of the art here.

transfire 12y ago

For decades I have heard that 11nm would be the end of Moore's law as we know it. This is proving to be true. CPUs have been frozen at 1 to 4GHz for nearly a decade, with the latest advances going to power savings. Currently at 22nm, the next step is 14, and then 11. Perhaps they can eek out one more jump to 7nm or 5nm, but I expect that will barely be worth the effort and thus will drag out for at least decade itself. But Moore fans need not worry. There is a clear next step, and I am wondering why no one is talking about it: Optical Interconnects. Connecting chips and circuits within chips with optical channels should allow plenty of room for speeding up processors and reducing power requirements well into the mid-21st century.

dippyskoodlez 12y ago
Clock Speed is not relevant. In that "decade" our single thread performance has increased a fair amount, but we now have an additional 4-8 CPUs in the same amount of space. An Ivybridge will very handily beat a Northwood based system even in single threaded performance.
- autokad 12y ago
  Dont get me wrong, I love having all of my 12 cores, but I dont really count that as improved speed. More (no pun intended) importantly the rule was every 18 months if I'm not mistaken, not 10 years. Lets double it and add a little bit, 3 years ago you pretty much could have bought the same machine. in the last 3 years, processors have been about 3.4ghz, 3 years before that it was still around 3.1ish. I personally haven't noticed any improved performance on single threads. they pretty much do things at the same completion time. I have a 12 core 4.5 ghz machine (3.4 overclocked), and I ran a compute intensive process on a 2010 machine that was 8 cores 3.4ghz and they finished about 5 minutes later at about the exact same time. i'm not saying all things are equal and that things havent improved, just that i would have expected a lot more from something that was supposed to double (and get cheaper) every 18 months after 4 years

kstenerud 12y ago

Yeah, I'm sure someone had similar doom and gloom to say about vacuum tubes. The thing is, you just don't know where the next technological revolution will come from. Yes, we've about hit the limit for silicon, and we may very well stagnate for another decade because of it, but there's always going to be someone scrappy enough to try what the big slow incumbents won't.

gugol 12y ago

One thing that makes me think of Intel having planned obsolesence processors is that they seem to have figured out the future (I can't find the chart but it looked like this: http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2013/10/intelbroadwell.jpg http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2013/10/intelbroadwell.... ). They seem to be sure they will have 5 nm processors (or they already have them but have to get there slowly (22, 14...) because if they sell them now then they will have a very hard time making them better?) instead of making the announcement when they supposedly have them ready.

lsc 12y ago

I have, perhaps, a different perspective. I have been spending a lot of my income on computer hardware and power for the last decade or so; and being involved in spending other people's money on same for another half-decade back. My take? When Intel thinks they are ahead, compute doesn't get cheaper. In the DDR2 days, If you were on Intel, you had the choice between the stunningly inefficient and expensive rambus ram, or a stunningly shitty memory buss with (not very many) low-power ddr2 modules. At the time, the AMD HyperTransport system was absolutely beautiful. Even on cheap boards, you could get more than 2x the low-power ddr2 ram modules per CPU that intel could. (at the time, lower-density modules were dramatically cheaper, per gigabyte, than higher-density modules) It worked way better when you had multiple CPUs, too. Then ddr3 came, and Intel came up with their QPI systems, which were awesome. AMD came back with a competently built ddr3 platform, too; the G34 systems were a huge upgrade from the mcp55 chipset socket F platform. But the benchmarks came out in Intel's favor, even when AMD had twice the cores. I mean, you could argue that the AMD systems had advantages in some limited situations, but they had lost the dramatic advantage. As far as I can tell, intel has been largely resting on their laurels, price-wise. The E5-2620 is better than, but really not radically better than the E5520. Now, some of the higher-end E5s are pretty nice, but they are priced accordingly. Until Intel gets some real competition again, we have to pay for our performance gains. So yeah, really, until AMD gets their legs back under them, and I hope the A1100[1] will do it, I don't expect dramatic performance per dollar gains from Intel. [1]http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-accelerate-2014jan28.aspx http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/amd-to-acceler...

lplplplplp 12y ago
I agree. HyperTransport was stunning when it came out. Revolutionary, even. Ditto for AMD64, still the standard as we speak. I'm not sure, however, if this is due to Intel resting on their laurels vs an entire Intel generation being shown the door because of epic (excuse the pun) fuckups. With the (largely wasted) effort expended on Itanium / Itanium 2 / EPIC / IXP / Netburst / etc, no wonder other vendors excelled. The MHz wars took a horrible toll on Intel for mainstream x86 with things like Prescott, with its 31 stage (!!) pipeline. Stalls on Prescott were horrific for performance. On IXP, microcode screwups (often due to explicit caching) were horrific for customers. On Itanium, everything was horrific. I doubt we will ever know exactly how much these escapades cost humanity. On the other hand, maybe we're all richer for lessons learned. It seems Intel is not interested in screwing up so badly anymore, so I think it's the competitors' turn to sweat. Intel still has a long way to go in recapturing territory it could have already had; ARM and MIPS have come a long way in the phone/server and NPU/packet processing space respectively, and they don't look as easily dislodged as AMD...

hyp0 12y ago

smaller devices will provide the economic drive, just as they did when 14" HDDs had enough performance.

deleted 12y ago

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PeterisP 12y ago

We still have a magnitude order or two of computing power that we can squeeze out iff the semiconductor density/price stops. We don't implement many optimization possibilities in each hw/sw layer because the "layer below" keeps changing all the time and we need to keep compatibility. Once we could say "this is it, this layer is as good as it will ever get", then (and not a day before) you can start to re-architecture everything above it to maximize performance by throwing away flexibility that won't be needed anymore. E.g., instead of transistors being spent on translating x86 to the underlying microcode and cycles being spent on translating JVM/CLR bytecode (or javascript) to x86, we'd be able to define a single standard and adapt both processors and compilers to that. You can't break compatibility at every technological change - but if you have a reason to believe that it will finally be stable (which hasn't ever happened yet) then it does make sense to make a single final switch that disregards all compatibility and legacy issues - even if the benefits are small, they accumulate for each such layer and you only have to do it once.

lucb1e 12y ago

> it's time to start planning for the end of Moore's Law Do we? Because all current software runs on current hardware. Even if in the next ten years we only get another 1% increase in speed, then the current software will run at the current speed (something which we are all perfectly fine with right now). I think it's indeed a doom and gloom article.

RogerL 12y ago
I want it. Python is 100x slower than C. I want a language that doesn't need to worry about performance. I want computers optimized for humans, not them. I want computers that can model the weather, the ocean. I want search algorithms that optimize car engines, electric plants. a million x isn't nearly good enough.

pmorici 12y ago

Either this article or the guy's speech perhaps both are pretty lame. No supporting facts are presented as to why he thinks the 7nm generation will be the last frontier. He just basically states the obvious that if there is no profit motive or the technology isn't there then it won't happen. No kidding. The whole article reads like an appeal to authority. Are there any factual reasons to believe this time is actually different than the past 35 years?

marcosdumay 12y ago
> No supporting facts are presented as to why he thinks the 7nm generation will be the last frontier. I don't know about his reasons, but charge carriers at doped silicon have orbitals that are typically around 10nm in diameter. (They vary with dopant density, temperature, etc, and don't have clearly determined boundaries, thus there is no hard number.)
PhantomGremlin 12y ago
> The whole article reads like an appeal to authority. You might be right. But Colwell isn't just a country rube who hitched a ride into town on the turnip truck. He's been there, done that, literally made billions of dollars in profit for Intel. I reiterate: Bob was the chief architect for a number of design teams who, *LITERALLY*, no exaggeration, generated billions of dollars in profit for Intel. You might have heard of a few of the products he architected. [1] "Authority" is frequently wrong. But this guy certainly deserves a little more respect than your flippant dismissal. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Colwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Colwell
- pmorici 12y ago
  Interesting, I wonder why it doesn't say that in the article which would lend a lot more credability to it. It just talks about his position with DARPA

beloch 12y ago

There are gains yet to be realized besides reducing the size of the process. For example, reversible (a.k.a. isentropic or adiabatic) computing offers a way to reduce heat generation, which might combine with 3D construction in interesting ways. New ways of designing chips might allow progress to continue, but they're hard and risky. They're not terribly attractive as long as shrinking the process offers predictable advances and remains economically feasible. Still, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate how crazy just getting under 10 nm is. The wavelength of light that is visible to the human eye starts at around 380 nm. Looking at a 10 nm chip with violet light would be like trying to navigate your house by sonar using a sub-woofer as your emitter!