26 ms·

Will 7nm And 5nm Really Happen?

128 points by matt42 12y ago

baldfat 12y ago
We are quickly coming to an end of an era where hardware can compensate for sloppy code and processes. We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers. We might even get surprised by the code of something like Elite. An incredibly brilliant piece of software that did so much more then what was thought possible.
- reitanqild 12y ago
  I quite like that perspective. Having to accept wait and lag on i7 processors, 2digit gigs of ram as fast as never before etc * ) is really frustrating. Luckily, in my experience at least, Microsoft is finally starting to catch up on usability and efficient use of hardware. Windows 7 didn't raise the bar for hardware specs significantly and neither did Windows 8, 8.1 etc [1] *) not talking data science, rendering, games or user/admin misconfiguration, i.e. DNS timeouts etc. [1] : windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/system-requirements
- fredsted 12y ago
  >something like Elite What is it? Elite is a word used many places so I couldn't google it.
  - dasmoth 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) The original version did indeed to an amazing amount with a 6502 and 32kb of RAM.
  - apl 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
  - sgift 12y ago
    An old video game, which is often praised for its clever code (and gameplay): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
- ownagefool 12y ago
  We also had computers that'd fall over at the drop of a hat, with a crapton of low level code that'd cause all sorts of havok because not everyone who writes code is a genuis or infallible.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    > We also had computers that'd fall over at the drop of a hat Hm. That's not my experience at all, rather the opposite. Those 8 bitters were incredibly reliable.
    - chiph 12y ago
      I think he's remembering the TSR battles of the early IBM PCs under DOS. You had to be careful what you ran because they'd conflict with each other, resulting in bizarre failure modes.
    - noir_lord 12y ago
      Unless you had a Kempston interface attached to a Speccy, then a butterly fluttering it's wings in South America would crash it ;).
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        The Sinclair was a species all by itself in that respect. I'm thinking along the lines of the bbc micro, the dragon / color computer and the TRS-80. Compared to those the Sinclair was incredibly cheap but that was definitely reflected by the build quality. I remember the microdrive, that was a funny little design, very creative but very flawed. Like an 8-track endless tape but for data.
        YZF 12y ago
        I was (still am?) the proud owner of a microdrive. It was supposed to fill the niche between tape and floppies. Tape is interesting media but somehow it keeps losing (spoken by someone who still has tons of audio tapes lying around). It would be cool to do a teardown of the microdrive.
- Jtsummers 12y ago
  > We are quickly coming to an end of an era where hardware can compensate for sloppy code and processes. We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers. I don't think we've ever had a "golden age" of software development. Sort of like going back to find examples of good art (in whatever medium) from decades ago, we end up with the impression that the scifi of Asimov's era was somehow better than what we have today. Really, the crap just disappeared. Pointing to examples of good software in the 80s, certainly impressive feats can be found, doesn't mean that they were the norm. Having worked on a lot of legacy projects, I can assure you there's plenty of crap from that era as well. What we end up with is a false impression of our current time. We see all the crap, we're filtering it out now, and we think things must be worse now than they used to be. We just won't know until we can have a proper retrospective in 10-20 years. Once the crap's filtered out, what remains?
  - weland 12y ago
    This is precisely what sprang in my mind. It's stuff like the LISP Machines and Elite that have survived the 1980s long enough for us to consider them as part of a "golden era". Those were the exception, not the norm, of the 1980s.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- jerf 12y ago
  "We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers." I think software is already getting there, since we've been dealing with slowing returns for a while. The previous generation of languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. traded convenience for performance and waited for hardware to catch up. It was a good trade in many cases at the time, but as we collectively learned more about the design space I think it has become clear that it is not an intrinsic trade; it is possible to get a more convenient language that we had in the 80s or 90s without trading away performance. LuaJIT was an early example of this, but the flood gates are opening now. Go is not architected to the nth degree for speed, but it's a language that's only slightly slower than C, and in my experience, only slightly slower to develop in than Python (possible with a crossover point as the program size grows where Go is simply faster). Rust ought to be a lot easier to work with than C++ once you learn it, and I expect it to reach near-optimal speeds, possibly even beating C/C++ in practice as it will be more feasible to perform some aggressive optimizations for multithreading. And I've noticed a lot of the other little bubbling languages that may become languages of the future, like Nimrod, have the same sort of focus in them, "how can we get these convenient features without a 20-100x speed penalty"? Then, once you have these languages, I'm noticing that in many cases while bindings exist, entire stacks are being rewritten to be simpler and faster. Go has its own webserver. Dollars-to-donuts Rust will too in another couple of years. I suspect this is actually part of the trend; rather than binding to older, huge frameworks and code written without much concern for latency issues, etc, more code is going to start being rewritten to care more about those things. Between mobile pressing us on one end and desktop speed advancement stalling out on the other, there's increasing motivation to write faster code where it matters, without necessarily having to use C or C++. I'm not saying paradise is incoming, but I get the impression that we're seeing more care about performance manifesting in real languages and code than we used to.
  - mreiland 12y ago
    Pretty much every competitor I've ever seen for C/C++ has always made the same claim: with X optimization that C/C++ can't do, we can eventually meet or beat C/C++. It's never actually came true in the general case. ever
- mreiland 12y ago
  We've been hearing that statement for atleast the last 15 years. Is it anymore true now than it was then? The only thing that's caused people to start worrying about efficiency has been social: mobility and environmental concerns. In no way has technological issues stopped us from increasing our performance throughput.
- nadam 12y ago
  The fastest modern 3D engines (Frostbite, CryEngine) are as brilliantly efficient as those programs from the early days. The difference is that today's highly efficient systems are much more complex, so besides brilliant ideas, more and longer hard work and studying is needed to create something that really impresses people.
- Tloewald 12y ago
  People have been talking about the impending end of Moore's law for a long time. Now, we have run into a wall with clock speeds which has already slowed things down, and led to a lot of back filling (e.g. The huge push in improving the speed of VMs and interpreted languages is essentially a tradeoff of memory for performance, which follows from memory continuing to get cheaper while performance stagnates (kind of).
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure those days are gone forever. Even if there's a slowdown of CPU power, there's still quite a lot left over for the sloppy coders of the world. Especially when we consider a lot of software isn't CPU bound, but storage bound, and even the most commodity SSD blows away the spinning disk. Oh, we're also all 64-bit now and computers shipping today come with 8gb of RAM. We recently played the constraint game with the mobile/tablet space. It was fun while it lasted, but now with quad-cores and 1 to 2gb of RAM standard, its over as well. Tablets have become the new laptops. Phones have become the new tablets. Its boring. I think the days you pine for are forever gone, at least in the general computing space. I find that once something new comes around, its naturally constricted and if it allows people some level of freedom and creativity, then the weirdo early adopters will rush in, and in that group there will always be a handful of super-stars. This minority makes the big crazy strides or the crazy efficient game and then go into more respectable work. We also saw this with the early web, which was so much more innovative and experimental than the "social marketing" mode we've all agreed works best. That matured quickly as well. Look how the web browser is pretty much a platform, if not a quasi-OS, in itself. We keep reinventing the big bloaty OS and big bloaty applications for reasons that make sense; because people want big bloaty toys and the bells and whistles they offer. So where's the next new constrained system young hackers are going to blow ours minds with? Maybe 3D printing. Maybe drones. Maybe VR. Maybe automated and electric cars. But even those have a certain level of maturity already. We might not know until it actually happens. Who saw TBL and the www coming? I suspect very few. I personally hope to wake up one day to a new Jobs/Woz combo offering me something straight out of sci-fi, like a home robot with useful arms and enough AI to make use of it or a lucid dreaming machine that actually works or a nootropic that makes us all near geniuses. Come on guys, stop writing bejeweled clones and financial apps and blow our minds again. I suspect I still have a few mind blowing events left in my lifetime (almost 40 now).
  - DigitalJack 12y ago
    Perhaps we'll end up with programming competitions that have restrictions on equipment like some forms of auto racing. Perhaps a common VM would be used for those competitions (maybe this already goes on?) It could rate limit the CPU/peripheral access, limit memory, etc...
- chondos 12y ago
  >We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days I disagree (though I hate inefficient code and design). Hardware has improved massively over the last 30 years. It doesn't quite seem like it sometimes because with the advent of the internet, usage/consumption has gone up just as much. Back in the day a mainframe app on the world's fastest server would only be limited to maybe 1000 concurrent users. Now there could me millions of internet users concurrently using a web app with an actual UI. Having said that, scalability can now be maintained in many ways aside from smaller nm die fabrication. Server farms or cloud distributive scenarios will take over (this is already where we are in many cases) if there is ever a limitation of a single machine. There are only so many people on the planet and consumption rises with us. Hardware improvement may be slowing, but so is consumption inertia (as we reach a saturation plateau).
- chrismcb 12y ago
  The word you are looking for is "clever" and we all know that clever isn't always better. Yeah, stuffing everything you needed into <64K was difficult (and fun) But that code isn't "world class" and I wouldn't want to use that code in today's zero day security environment. Yes people need to write cleaner, less sloppy code. But we also don't need to go back to the days of self modifying code either.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  If only. But no. What happens when FAB technology stagnates, everything locks in place and micro-processor advancement halts? Nope, it takes years for the state of the art FAB technology to trickle down everywhere. All the while getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. That state of the art smartphone in your pocket, it uses processors fabbed using 28nm technology. Even switching to 14nm technology would quadruple the transistor count and allow a corresponding increase in performance. Also, as FAB costs come down it would be more and more cost effective to increase chip sizes up to the maximum feasible die size, further increasing performance. Meanwhile, as former state of the art processor manufacturing becomes cheaper and cheaper it becomes more and more ubiquitous. So now not only your CPU but also your flash storage is made using 14nm technology, and maybe they decide to cram a shit-ton of micro-controlling processing power in there (they already do) and a bunch of static ram for caching or whatever, and performance keeps improving. Meanwhile, the processors and controllers in the radio system, on the cell towers, in the switches and routers, and in desktop and server devices keep getting faster and cheaper too. So now you have a butt-load of resources "in the cloud" or "the fog" or whatever idiom you want to ascribe to the phenomenon, all available for making sloppy code run faster and better. Ah, but wait, there's more. This is all the boring stuff, but there's crazy stuff out there too. Memristors are almost certainly the future of computing in more ways than one, and so far it looks like they'll be as feasible to manufacture and as practical as we've theorized. With durable storage that has access times faster than modern ram the performance bottlenecks of the past (which have rarely been in CPU and have more often been in I/O or RAM) will fall by the wayside. Pocket sized computers will have terabytes of non-volatile super RAM. You can write 3D renderers in javascript and they'll run at 4k resolution / 60 fps with detail beyond what state of the art GPUs are capable of pushing today. So no, the hardware train isn't coming to a stop, in many ways it hasn't even started yet. That doesn't mean that caring about quality and writing highly efficient code isn't worthwhile, but it does mean that there probably won't be a big mean performance bottleneck forcing everyone to get their shit together in the near future.
  - rphlx 12y ago
    With 16nm parts in production now, I suspect conventional NAND flash has less an 8X density increase, and less than 10 years left, before we need some totally new tech to keep the party going. AFAICT memristors will not be anywhere near ready for high-volume production by then, at least not in a way that's better than NAND. With the USD supply expanding 8-10%/yr, within a decade, we may actually see flash storage costs increase over time.
Filligree 12y ago
Nothing in there about how they'll do 1.5nm. That's understandable; it's a hard problem, and I imagine any solutions they've come up with will remain trade secrets for some time. I've heard stories, though. Scanning-tunneling microscopes on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Massively parallel arrays of atomically precise probes, used to build CPUs atom by atom. Things you wouldn't believe. I'm sure it's coming one day, but once you've gotten that far, how far away are you from outright nanofactories? Which are science fiction, and therefore can't happen.
- vorbote 12y ago
  Love the reference, but I'm sure all young phillistines that hang out in HN have missed it completely. :-( You have my upvote. Time to die.
  - yzzxy 12y ago
    This is hardly an obscure reference... I think you underestimate the pop culture literacy of young programmers.
    - noir_lord 12y ago
      Shhh allow them their "programmers these days" elitism. My 25 year old non-techie gf would have gotten that reference. Blade runner is hardly an underground cult classic.
      - nealabq 12y ago
        Eh, what's that, you young whippersnapper? In my day we had to debug our difference engine with a flyswatter.
      - xcntktn 12y ago
        Blade Runner is different because of the attention it received due to the "Final Cut" version that came out in 2007. If it hadn't been for that, references to it would probably be a lot less recognizable with the younger crowd. Case in point: I recently made a "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference in front of a room full of 20-something programmers and not one person picked up on it. It wasn't even that obscure -- it was a picture of the monolith, one of the most recognizable images from the movie (and in science fiction in general). The people in the room generally just hadn't seen or even heard of (really all that is required to get the reference) the movie.
jmpe 12y ago
How i learned to stop worrying and love the miniaturization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY Seriously, watch it. Memristor-tech relies on this kind of miniaturization and can provide a speed boost in several areas in current architectures. Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics.
- kken 12y ago
  HP and the Memristor is a good PR story. Unfortunately there is not too much beef behind it. The Memristor is actually the same as an RRAM element (Resistive Random Access Memory). Companies other than HP have started working on it long before and are significantly ahead. For example Micron recently presented a multi-gigabit prototype chip. But there is still a lot to be done. HP lacks the funds, manpower and manufacturing muscle to really get anywhere in this area.
  - mikeyouse 12y ago
    > HP lacks the funds, manpower and manufacturing muscle to really get anywhere in this area. They might lack the political will, but HP has ~$15B cash on its balance sheet, 350k employees, and tens of billions in fixed assets.
    - nl 12y ago
      They have money, but not the semiconductor expertise, assets or experience of an Intel. See this explanation forvwhy that matters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922277
- kken 12y ago
  >Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics. Such as? Getting new materials into manufacturing is only the last step. Before that there has to be a significant benefit of doing it. And yes, that is usually benchmarked against risks and capex.
AshleysBrain 12y ago
I find it just amazing that modern chips already have parts that are just thirty or so atoms across [1], and that there are plans to go even smaller. I guess you can't go much smaller than 1.5nm because that's, like, three atoms, right? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_nanometer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_nanometer
- tfgg 12y ago
  1.5nm is more like 10 atoms across, given that, for example, a C-C bond is 0.154 nm. Not that that helps tremendously :)
  - Denvercoder9 12y ago
    I don't think we can actually make chips out of carbon...
    - tfgg 12y ago
      It was an number for the length of a chemical bond that I had easily to hand, other bonds aren't significantly different, definitely not 5 Angstrom. Also, people working on graphene and related materials are trying damn hard to make chips out of carbon ;)
      - josaka 12y ago
        Unit cell is 5.43 Angstroms, according to this site: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solids/sili2.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solids/sili2.html. Of course the bonds by which the cell is constructed are smaller.
  - josaka 12y ago
    Unit cell of Silicon is about 5 angstroms (0.5 nm), so we'd be at about 7 atoms wide for a diamond cubic structure (I think).
  - claudius 12y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon has 0.5nm for the lattice spacing, distance between Si atoms ranges somewhere between 0.3nm and 0.5nm, I guess. Even if you go to graphene instead of Si wafers, I don’t think you’ll get more than three atoms within 1.5nm, as graphene is not a cubical lattice.
Tloewald 12y ago
Tl;dr. Yes.
rwmj 12y ago
Question, probably going to come across as dumb, but I'll ask it anyway ... Is there a market for "huge" feature chips (eg. 100nm+)? Would it be worth making these older processes very cheap and widely available and growing the market that way? (You can still build an early Athlon at 130 nm or a 486 at 800 nm).
- goteborg 12y ago
  The cost of making chips at 100nm+, 90nm, 45nm, etc, is almost indifferent. It actually gets cheaper with smaller sizes because you can fit more chips in the same number of waffles. The problem described by the article is that 10nm is already so small that we are hitting the barrier of what's physically possible.
  - rwmj 12y ago
    What (I think) I mean by the question is this: Why can't I have a $1M machine sitting in the corner of my lab which turns out 800nm chips on demand? Can the technology which in 1990 was incredibly demanding now be turned into a product, thus vastly opening up the chip market, albeit for "obsolete" varieties of circuits.
    - CapitalistCartr 12y ago
      Making chips requires a large, expensive fab plant. Using it to make something as obsolete as that would be more expensive than just making a couple generations old chips; perhaps 30-50 nanometers. But no matter what it makes, those plants are expensive still.
      - williadc 12y ago
        I think the point that the OP is missing is that Silicon manufacturing is extremely complex, requiring 1000's of steps, tons of water and electricity, and extremely pure materials. That's not something you can fit in a lab, let alone a machine within the lab. To give you a sense of scale, I ride past Intel's research fab (Ronler Acres) in Oregon and the Hillsboro airport on the way to work. The fab is bigger than the airport, and even that fab does not contain all the equipment necessary to manufacture chips for public consumption. There are separate plants for package and testing.
izzydata 12y ago
If you doubled the number of transistors in the same space then wouldn't that nearly double(quadruple) the heat output? How would someone even keep these things at a reasonable temperature at 7nm?
- coryfklein 12y ago
  No, because the heat generated by the transistors is a function of their size.
- didroe 12y ago
  My limited understanding is that heat is related to the square of the voltage. And that by reducing the size of a transistor, you can lower the voltage. I don't think you can lower the voltage by quite as much as the reduction in size, so there must be a point when you can't just pack more in. Though gate design or choice of materials can reduce the voltage needed as well. They can also make the chip smarter about switching off parts that aren't needed at a given point in time to keep overall heat down.
ufmace 12y ago
Here's an article that disproves Betteridge's law of headlines
phkahler 12y ago
It sounds like 7nm and 5nm are entirely feasible, but nobody is prepared to spend $10Billion on the fab until they're sure they've got (close to) the best solution. Also, I feel like the whole industry is getting a bit lazy. The big foundries are all around 28nm and getting 100 percent utilization of their capacity. So long as their customers competitors have no better foundry to go to, there is little incentive to press forward. There is the possibility to fall behind, but waiting just means increasing certainty in the path forward. Meanwhile Intel...
- ebiester 12y ago
  Or, alternatively, the simple solutions have all been squeezed out and these are genuinely hard problems.
- discodave 12y ago
  That will change if/when intel gives up sticking to x86 only. Then anybody who has space and power constraints (hint: mobile) will be playing fabs off against each other.
zw123456 12y ago
The drive to smaller gate structures is because a MOSFET transistor gate is essentially a capacitor, and as such, it takes time to charge and discharge the capacitance of the gate. So to further increase the performance, one must reduce the capacitance of the gate. The gate is basically and RC circuit. The easiest way to reduce the capacitance is to reduce the physical size of the gate. The size of the gate is directly proportional to the capacitance. Once you get down to a few atoms wide, which they are approaching now, then quantum effects kick in and it starts getting impractical to go further. The alternatives for the next generation have to do with attacking the R part of the equation which is what they mean when they talk about electron mobility. Other approaches that are unrelated to the traditional MOSFET are being researched, but there is such a huge amount of IP based on MOSFET any move away from that will incur huge cost in porting over. (think of it as the hardware version of switching to a new programming language). I am not sure what the next gen answer will be as it seemed the author did not either (which tells me he knows what he is talking about).
- rdrdss23 12y ago
  I've heard that the whole quantum tunneling stuff is in practical terms bullshit. While it's a real effect (and physicists looove to talk about it), it's virtually irrelevant b/c the overwhelming issues is parasitic capacitances. When you have a 3Ghz clocks, everything acts like a capacitor and you have current leaking all over the place (the smaller the circuit the closer all the elements are). So transistors in modern processors don't end up switching consistently. There is all sorts of error correction to compensate for that, but it only goes so far.
  - sigterm 12y ago
    The gate leakage current was a serious concern until the High-K gate dielectric was found. It increased the gate dielectric thickness so tunneling current is reduced significantly (exponentially). Nowadays the main problems are subthreshold leakage and dynamic power. Here's a good article about it: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-highk-solution http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-highk-sol...
tedsanders 12y ago
This question faces a tremendous amount of uncertainty. So much rides on whether the power/$ of EUV sources can be significantly boosted. No one knows when (or even whether) this will happen. It's not even known whether we will reach 10nm any time soon, as the article asserts we will. The industry's history has inculcated a huge amount of technological optimism, but someday that optimism will be misplaced. There is a fairly high chance that day is today.
- joosters 12y ago
  A fairly high chance? Care to quantify that? Is it 50%? 10%? 1%?
  - tedsanders 12y ago
    Sure, I'd be happy try to quantify my views. What question would you like a quantifiable answer to?
jostmey 12y ago
Let's keep the size of the transistor in perspective. The human synapse is on the order of 20 to 40nm in diameter. I have to wonder if we will be able to do that much better than what Nature has already come up with.
- w-ll 12y ago
  Nature really has produced some amazing things, but they are generally not optimal, just good enough.
  - jostmey 12y ago
    True. And Natural Selection never discovered how to extract energy by breaking apart the atom---that took an act of intelligence. Still, I suspect there may exist limits to how small a fundamental computational unit can be: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021126203508.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021126203508.ht...
    - ars 12y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_reactor
      - nullc 12y ago
        Oh yea?! so where does there exist a natural fusion reactor?!? Man: 1 Nature: 0 (... :P I think the point was that there are— as far as we know, no evolved organisms using fission. Not that there wasn't fission in nature prior to man.)
        cowardlydragon 12y ago
        I thought there was bacteria that used nuclear radiation to sustain themselves. They aren't doing fission... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061019192814.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061019192814.ht...
agumonkey 12y ago
I cant wait for haswell-like processors to be so small they can be powered by kinetic side-effects (walking, etc).

128 points by matt42 12y ago

We are quickly coming to an end of an era where hardware can compensate for sloppy code and processes. We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers. We might even get surprised by the code of something like Elite. An incredibly brilliant piece of software that did so much more then what was thought possible.

reitanqild 12y ago
I quite like that perspective. Having to accept wait and lag on i7 processors, 2digit gigs of ram as fast as never before etc * ) is really frustrating. Luckily, in my experience at least, Microsoft is finally starting to catch up on usability and efficient use of hardware. Windows 7 didn't raise the bar for hardware specs significantly and neither did Windows 8, 8.1 etc [1] *) not talking data science, rendering, games or user/admin misconfiguration, i.e. DNS timeouts etc. [1] : windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/system-requirements
fredsted 12y ago
>something like Elite What is it? Elite is a word used many places so I couldn't google it.
- dasmoth 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) The original version did indeed to an amazing amount with a 6502 and 32kb of RAM.
- apl 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
- sgift 12y ago
  An old video game, which is often praised for its clever code (and gameplay): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
ownagefool 12y ago
We also had computers that'd fall over at the drop of a hat, with a crapton of low level code that'd cause all sorts of havok because not everyone who writes code is a genuis or infallible.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  > We also had computers that'd fall over at the drop of a hat Hm. That's not my experience at all, rather the opposite. Those 8 bitters were incredibly reliable.
  - chiph 12y ago
    I think he's remembering the TSR battles of the early IBM PCs under DOS. You had to be careful what you ran because they'd conflict with each other, resulting in bizarre failure modes.
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    Unless you had a Kempston interface attached to a Speccy, then a butterly fluttering it's wings in South America would crash it ;).
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      The Sinclair was a species all by itself in that respect. I'm thinking along the lines of the bbc micro, the dragon / color computer and the TRS-80. Compared to those the Sinclair was incredibly cheap but that was definitely reflected by the build quality. I remember the microdrive, that was a funny little design, very creative but very flawed. Like an 8-track endless tape but for data.
      - YZF 12y ago
        I was (still am?) the proud owner of a microdrive. It was supposed to fill the niche between tape and floppies. Tape is interesting media but somehow it keeps losing (spoken by someone who still has tons of audio tapes lying around). It would be cool to do a teardown of the microdrive.
Jtsummers 12y ago
> We are quickly coming to an end of an era where hardware can compensate for sloppy code and processes. We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers. I don't think we've ever had a "golden age" of software development. Sort of like going back to find examples of good art (in whatever medium) from decades ago, we end up with the impression that the scifi of Asimov's era was somehow better than what we have today. Really, the crap just disappeared. Pointing to examples of good software in the 80s, certainly impressive feats can be found, doesn't mean that they were the norm. Having worked on a lot of legacy projects, I can assure you there's plenty of crap from that era as well. What we end up with is a false impression of our current time. We see all the crap, we're filtering it out now, and we think things must be worse now than they used to be. We just won't know until we can have a proper retrospective in 10-20 years. Once the crap's filtered out, what remains?
- weland 12y ago
  This is precisely what sprang in my mind. It's stuff like the LISP Machines and Elite that have survived the 1980s long enough for us to consider them as part of a "golden era". Those were the exception, not the norm, of the 1980s.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
jerf 12y ago
"We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days. It was amazing how efficient programs were and the genius of the software engineers." I think software is already getting there, since we've been dealing with slowing returns for a while. The previous generation of languages like Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. traded convenience for performance and waited for hardware to catch up. It was a good trade in many cases at the time, but as we collectively learned more about the design space I think it has become clear that it is not an intrinsic trade; it is possible to get a more convenient language that we had in the 80s or 90s without trading away performance. LuaJIT was an early example of this, but the flood gates are opening now. Go is not architected to the nth degree for speed, but it's a language that's only slightly slower than C, and in my experience, only slightly slower to develop in than Python (possible with a crossover point as the program size grows where Go is simply faster). Rust ought to be a lot easier to work with than C++ once you learn it, and I expect it to reach near-optimal speeds, possibly even beating C/C++ in practice as it will be more feasible to perform some aggressive optimizations for multithreading. And I've noticed a lot of the other little bubbling languages that may become languages of the future, like Nimrod, have the same sort of focus in them, "how can we get these convenient features without a 20-100x speed penalty"? Then, once you have these languages, I'm noticing that in many cases while bindings exist, entire stacks are being rewritten to be simpler and faster. Go has its own webserver. Dollars-to-donuts Rust will too in another couple of years. I suspect this is actually part of the trend; rather than binding to older, huge frameworks and code written without much concern for latency issues, etc, more code is going to start being rewritten to care more about those things. Between mobile pressing us on one end and desktop speed advancement stalling out on the other, there's increasing motivation to write faster code where it matters, without necessarily having to use C or C++. I'm not saying paradise is incoming, but I get the impression that we're seeing more care about performance manifesting in real languages and code than we used to.
- mreiland 12y ago
  Pretty much every competitor I've ever seen for C/C++ has always made the same claim: with X optimization that C/C++ can't do, we can eventually meet or beat C/C++. It's never actually came true in the general case. ever
mreiland 12y ago
We've been hearing that statement for atleast the last 15 years. Is it anymore true now than it was then? The only thing that's caused people to start worrying about efficiency has been social: mobility and environmental concerns. In no way has technological issues stopped us from increasing our performance throughput.
nadam 12y ago
The fastest modern 3D engines (Frostbite, CryEngine) are as brilliantly efficient as those programs from the early days. The difference is that today's highly efficient systems are much more complex, so besides brilliant ideas, more and longer hard work and studying is needed to create something that really impresses people.
Tloewald 12y ago
People have been talking about the impending end of Moore's law for a long time. Now, we have run into a wall with clock speeds which has already slowed things down, and led to a lot of back filling (e.g. The huge push in improving the speed of VMs and interpreted languages is essentially a tradeoff of memory for performance, which follows from memory continuing to get cheaper while performance stagnates (kind of).
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
I'm pretty sure those days are gone forever. Even if there's a slowdown of CPU power, there's still quite a lot left over for the sloppy coders of the world. Especially when we consider a lot of software isn't CPU bound, but storage bound, and even the most commodity SSD blows away the spinning disk. Oh, we're also all 64-bit now and computers shipping today come with 8gb of RAM. We recently played the constraint game with the mobile/tablet space. It was fun while it lasted, but now with quad-cores and 1 to 2gb of RAM standard, its over as well. Tablets have become the new laptops. Phones have become the new tablets. Its boring. I think the days you pine for are forever gone, at least in the general computing space. I find that once something new comes around, its naturally constricted and if it allows people some level of freedom and creativity, then the weirdo early adopters will rush in, and in that group there will always be a handful of super-stars. This minority makes the big crazy strides or the crazy efficient game and then go into more respectable work. We also saw this with the early web, which was so much more innovative and experimental than the "social marketing" mode we've all agreed works best. That matured quickly as well. Look how the web browser is pretty much a platform, if not a quasi-OS, in itself. We keep reinventing the big bloaty OS and big bloaty applications for reasons that make sense; because people want big bloaty toys and the bells and whistles they offer. So where's the next new constrained system young hackers are going to blow ours minds with? Maybe 3D printing. Maybe drones. Maybe VR. Maybe automated and electric cars. But even those have a certain level of maturity already. We might not know until it actually happens. Who saw TBL and the www coming? I suspect very few. I personally hope to wake up one day to a new Jobs/Woz combo offering me something straight out of sci-fi, like a home robot with useful arms and enough AI to make use of it or a lucid dreaming machine that actually works or a nootropic that makes us all near geniuses. Come on guys, stop writing bejeweled clones and financial apps and blow our minds again. I suspect I still have a few mind blowing events left in my lifetime (almost 40 now).
- DigitalJack 12y ago
  Perhaps we'll end up with programming competitions that have restrictions on equipment like some forms of auto racing. Perhaps a common VM would be used for those competitions (maybe this already goes on?) It could rate limit the CPU/peripheral access, limit memory, etc...
chondos 12y ago
>We are heading back to the days of 640k barrier or the old C-64 days I disagree (though I hate inefficient code and design). Hardware has improved massively over the last 30 years. It doesn't quite seem like it sometimes because with the advent of the internet, usage/consumption has gone up just as much. Back in the day a mainframe app on the world's fastest server would only be limited to maybe 1000 concurrent users. Now there could me millions of internet users concurrently using a web app with an actual UI. Having said that, scalability can now be maintained in many ways aside from smaller nm die fabrication. Server farms or cloud distributive scenarios will take over (this is already where we are in many cases) if there is ever a limitation of a single machine. There are only so many people on the planet and consumption rises with us. Hardware improvement may be slowing, but so is consumption inertia (as we reach a saturation plateau).
chrismcb 12y ago
The word you are looking for is "clever" and we all know that clever isn't always better. Yeah, stuffing everything you needed into <64K was difficult (and fun) But that code isn't "world class" and I wouldn't want to use that code in today's zero day security environment. Yes people need to write cleaner, less sloppy code. But we also don't need to go back to the days of self modifying code either.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
If only. But no. What happens when FAB technology stagnates, everything locks in place and micro-processor advancement halts? Nope, it takes years for the state of the art FAB technology to trickle down everywhere. All the while getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. That state of the art smartphone in your pocket, it uses processors fabbed using 28nm technology. Even switching to 14nm technology would quadruple the transistor count and allow a corresponding increase in performance. Also, as FAB costs come down it would be more and more cost effective to increase chip sizes up to the maximum feasible die size, further increasing performance. Meanwhile, as former state of the art processor manufacturing becomes cheaper and cheaper it becomes more and more ubiquitous. So now not only your CPU but also your flash storage is made using 14nm technology, and maybe they decide to cram a shit-ton of micro-controlling processing power in there (they already do) and a bunch of static ram for caching or whatever, and performance keeps improving. Meanwhile, the processors and controllers in the radio system, on the cell towers, in the switches and routers, and in desktop and server devices keep getting faster and cheaper too. So now you have a butt-load of resources "in the cloud" or "the fog" or whatever idiom you want to ascribe to the phenomenon, all available for making sloppy code run faster and better. Ah, but wait, there's more. This is all the boring stuff, but there's crazy stuff out there too. Memristors are almost certainly the future of computing in more ways than one, and so far it looks like they'll be as feasible to manufacture and as practical as we've theorized. With durable storage that has access times faster than modern ram the performance bottlenecks of the past (which have rarely been in CPU and have more often been in I/O or RAM) will fall by the wayside. Pocket sized computers will have terabytes of non-volatile super RAM. You can write 3D renderers in javascript and they'll run at 4k resolution / 60 fps with detail beyond what state of the art GPUs are capable of pushing today. So no, the hardware train isn't coming to a stop, in many ways it hasn't even started yet. That doesn't mean that caring about quality and writing highly efficient code isn't worthwhile, but it does mean that there probably won't be a big mean performance bottleneck forcing everyone to get their shit together in the near future.
- rphlx 12y ago
  With 16nm parts in production now, I suspect conventional NAND flash has less an 8X density increase, and less than 10 years left, before we need some totally new tech to keep the party going. AFAICT memristors will not be anywhere near ready for high-volume production by then, at least not in a way that's better than NAND. With the USD supply expanding 8-10%/yr, within a decade, we may actually see flash storage costs increase over time.

Filligree 12y ago

Nothing in there about how they'll do 1.5nm. That's understandable; it's a hard problem, and I imagine any solutions they've come up with will remain trade secrets for some time. I've heard stories, though. Scanning-tunneling microscopes on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Massively parallel arrays of atomically precise probes, used to build CPUs atom by atom. Things you wouldn't believe. I'm sure it's coming one day, but once you've gotten that far, how far away are you from outright nanofactories? Which are science fiction, and therefore can't happen.

vorbote 12y ago
Love the reference, but I'm sure all young phillistines that hang out in HN have missed it completely. :-( You have my upvote. Time to die.
- yzzxy 12y ago
  This is hardly an obscure reference... I think you underestimate the pop culture literacy of young programmers.
  - noir_lord 12y ago
    Shhh allow them their "programmers these days" elitism. My 25 year old non-techie gf would have gotten that reference. Blade runner is hardly an underground cult classic.
    - nealabq 12y ago
      Eh, what's that, you young whippersnapper? In my day we had to debug our difference engine with a flyswatter.
    - xcntktn 12y ago
      Blade Runner is different because of the attention it received due to the "Final Cut" version that came out in 2007. If it hadn't been for that, references to it would probably be a lot less recognizable with the younger crowd. Case in point: I recently made a "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference in front of a room full of 20-something programmers and not one person picked up on it. It wasn't even that obscure -- it was a picture of the monolith, one of the most recognizable images from the movie (and in science fiction in general). The people in the room generally just hadn't seen or even heard of (really all that is required to get the reference) the movie.

jmpe 12y ago

How i learned to stop worrying and love the miniaturization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY Seriously, watch it. Memristor-tech relies on this kind of miniaturization and can provide a speed boost in several areas in current architectures. Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics.

kken 12y ago
HP and the Memristor is a good PR story. Unfortunately there is not too much beef behind it. The Memristor is actually the same as an RRAM element (Resistive Random Access Memory). Companies other than HP have started working on it long before and are significantly ahead. For example Micron recently presented a multi-gigabit prototype chip. But there is still a lot to be done. HP lacks the funds, manpower and manufacturing muscle to really get anywhere in this area.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  > HP lacks the funds, manpower and manufacturing muscle to really get anywhere in this area. They might lack the political will, but HP has ~$15B cash on its balance sheet, 350k employees, and tens of billions in fixed assets.
  - nl 12y ago
    They have money, but not the semiconductor expertise, assets or experience of an Intel. See this explanation forvwhy that matters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7922277
kken 12y ago
>Secondly, having worked for semi: there's a lot of conservative force holding back development. We could have had current tech with much less worries than we have now if they didn't respond so allergically to everything that looks a little exotic in the CMOS process, like high-k dielectrics. Such as? Getting new materials into manufacturing is only the last step. Before that there has to be a significant benefit of doing it. And yes, that is usually benchmarked against risks and capex.

AshleysBrain 12y ago

I find it just amazing that modern chips already have parts that are just thirty or so atoms across [1], and that there are plans to go even smaller. I guess you can't go much smaller than 1.5nm because that's, like, three atoms, right? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_nanometer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14_nanometer

tfgg 12y ago
1.5nm is more like 10 atoms across, given that, for example, a C-C bond is 0.154 nm. Not that that helps tremendously :)
- Denvercoder9 12y ago
  I don't think we can actually make chips out of carbon...
  - tfgg 12y ago
    It was an number for the length of a chemical bond that I had easily to hand, other bonds aren't significantly different, definitely not 5 Angstrom. Also, people working on graphene and related materials are trying damn hard to make chips out of carbon ;)
    - josaka 12y ago
      Unit cell is 5.43 Angstroms, according to this site: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solids/sili2.html http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/solids/sili2.html. Of course the bonds by which the cell is constructed are smaller.
- josaka 12y ago
  Unit cell of Silicon is about 5 angstroms (0.5 nm), so we'd be at about 7 atoms wide for a diamond cubic structure (I think).
- claudius 12y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocrystalline_silicon has 0.5nm for the lattice spacing, distance between Si atoms ranges somewhere between 0.3nm and 0.5nm, I guess. Even if you go to graphene instead of Si wafers, I don’t think you’ll get more than three atoms within 1.5nm, as graphene is not a cubical lattice.

Tloewald 12y ago

Tl;dr. Yes.

rwmj 12y ago

Question, probably going to come across as dumb, but I'll ask it anyway ... Is there a market for "huge" feature chips (eg. 100nm+)? Would it be worth making these older processes very cheap and widely available and growing the market that way? (You can still build an early Athlon at 130 nm or a 486 at 800 nm).

goteborg 12y ago
The cost of making chips at 100nm+, 90nm, 45nm, etc, is almost indifferent. It actually gets cheaper with smaller sizes because you can fit more chips in the same number of waffles. The problem described by the article is that 10nm is already so small that we are hitting the barrier of what's physically possible.
- rwmj 12y ago
  What (I think) I mean by the question is this: Why can't I have a $1M machine sitting in the corner of my lab which turns out 800nm chips on demand? Can the technology which in 1990 was incredibly demanding now be turned into a product, thus vastly opening up the chip market, albeit for "obsolete" varieties of circuits.
  - CapitalistCartr 12y ago
    Making chips requires a large, expensive fab plant. Using it to make something as obsolete as that would be more expensive than just making a couple generations old chips; perhaps 30-50 nanometers. But no matter what it makes, those plants are expensive still.
    - williadc 12y ago
      I think the point that the OP is missing is that Silicon manufacturing is extremely complex, requiring 1000's of steps, tons of water and electricity, and extremely pure materials. That's not something you can fit in a lab, let alone a machine within the lab. To give you a sense of scale, I ride past Intel's research fab (Ronler Acres) in Oregon and the Hillsboro airport on the way to work. The fab is bigger than the airport, and even that fab does not contain all the equipment necessary to manufacture chips for public consumption. There are separate plants for package and testing.

izzydata 12y ago

If you doubled the number of transistors in the same space then wouldn't that nearly double(quadruple) the heat output? How would someone even keep these things at a reasonable temperature at 7nm?

coryfklein 12y ago
No, because the heat generated by the transistors is a function of their size.
didroe 12y ago
My limited understanding is that heat is related to the square of the voltage. And that by reducing the size of a transistor, you can lower the voltage. I don't think you can lower the voltage by quite as much as the reduction in size, so there must be a point when you can't just pack more in. Though gate design or choice of materials can reduce the voltage needed as well. They can also make the chip smarter about switching off parts that aren't needed at a given point in time to keep overall heat down.

ufmace 12y ago

Here's an article that disproves Betteridge's law of headlines

phkahler 12y ago

It sounds like 7nm and 5nm are entirely feasible, but nobody is prepared to spend $10Billion on the fab until they're sure they've got (close to) the best solution. Also, I feel like the whole industry is getting a bit lazy. The big foundries are all around 28nm and getting 100 percent utilization of their capacity. So long as their customers competitors have no better foundry to go to, there is little incentive to press forward. There is the possibility to fall behind, but waiting just means increasing certainty in the path forward. Meanwhile Intel...

ebiester 12y ago
Or, alternatively, the simple solutions have all been squeezed out and these are genuinely hard problems.
discodave 12y ago
That will change if/when intel gives up sticking to x86 only. Then anybody who has space and power constraints (hint: mobile) will be playing fabs off against each other.

zw123456 12y ago

The drive to smaller gate structures is because a MOSFET transistor gate is essentially a capacitor, and as such, it takes time to charge and discharge the capacitance of the gate. So to further increase the performance, one must reduce the capacitance of the gate. The gate is basically and RC circuit. The easiest way to reduce the capacitance is to reduce the physical size of the gate. The size of the gate is directly proportional to the capacitance. Once you get down to a few atoms wide, which they are approaching now, then quantum effects kick in and it starts getting impractical to go further. The alternatives for the next generation have to do with attacking the R part of the equation which is what they mean when they talk about electron mobility. Other approaches that are unrelated to the traditional MOSFET are being researched, but there is such a huge amount of IP based on MOSFET any move away from that will incur huge cost in porting over. (think of it as the hardware version of switching to a new programming language). I am not sure what the next gen answer will be as it seemed the author did not either (which tells me he knows what he is talking about).

rdrdss23 12y ago
I've heard that the whole quantum tunneling stuff is in practical terms bullshit. While it's a real effect (and physicists looove to talk about it), it's virtually irrelevant b/c the overwhelming issues is parasitic capacitances. When you have a 3Ghz clocks, everything acts like a capacitor and you have current leaking all over the place (the smaller the circuit the closer all the elements are). So transistors in modern processors don't end up switching consistently. There is all sorts of error correction to compensate for that, but it only goes so far.
- sigterm 12y ago
  The gate leakage current was a serious concern until the High-K gate dielectric was found. It increased the gate dielectric thickness so tunneling current is reduced significantly (exponentially). Nowadays the main problems are subthreshold leakage and dynamic power. Here's a good article about it: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-highk-solution http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-highk-sol...

tedsanders 12y ago

This question faces a tremendous amount of uncertainty. So much rides on whether the power/$ of EUV sources can be significantly boosted. No one knows when (or even whether) this will happen. It's not even known whether we will reach 10nm any time soon, as the article asserts we will. The industry's history has inculcated a huge amount of technological optimism, but someday that optimism will be misplaced. There is a fairly high chance that day is today.

joosters 12y ago
A fairly high chance? Care to quantify that? Is it 50%? 10%? 1%?
- tedsanders 12y ago
  Sure, I'd be happy try to quantify my views. What question would you like a quantifiable answer to?

jostmey 12y ago

Let's keep the size of the transistor in perspective. The human synapse is on the order of 20 to 40nm in diameter. I have to wonder if we will be able to do that much better than what Nature has already come up with.

w-ll 12y ago
Nature really has produced some amazing things, but they are generally not optimal, just good enough.
- jostmey 12y ago
  True. And Natural Selection never discovered how to extract energy by breaking apart the atom---that took an act of intelligence. Still, I suspect there may exist limits to how small a fundamental computational unit can be: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021126203508.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/11/021126203508.ht...
  - ars 12y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_reactor
    - nullc 12y ago
      Oh yea?! so where does there exist a natural fusion reactor?!? Man: 1 Nature: 0 (... :P I think the point was that there are— as far as we know, no evolved organisms using fission. Not that there wasn't fission in nature prior to man.)
      - cowardlydragon 12y ago
        I thought there was bacteria that used nuclear radiation to sustain themselves. They aren't doing fission... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061019192814.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061019192814.ht...

agumonkey 12y ago

I cant wait for haswell-like processors to be so small they can be powered by kinetic side-effects (walking, etc).