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End of Moore's Law in 10-15 years?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Sep 19, 2007 09:52 AM
from the no-for-real-this-time dept.
from the no-for-real-this-time dept.
javipas writes "In 1965 Gordon Moore — Intel's co-founder — predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years. Moore's Law has been with us for over 40 years, but it seems that the limits of microelectronics are now not that far from us. Moore has predicted the end of his own law in 10 to 15 years, but he predicted that end before, and failed."
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it's the law (Score:5, Funny)
So then it seems with regards to his Law, Moore has fallen prey to Murphy.
Re:it's the law (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Moore's law says nothing at all about the speed of a processor, or of a program. It only says the number of transistors will double every 2 years. The fact that performance benefits have traditionally been had by adding transistors does not mean this will hold. In fact today the performance of most applications is no faster on current computers than top of the line computers from 2 years ago (it's definitely not twice)
It's a law of econmics (Score:3, Insightful)
To put it another way, growth needs to be geometric not addative. that is things need to grow at x% per year, which leads to a doubling time. If the grew linearly at x += D then as x grew the proportional rate (1/x dx/dt) of x growing shrinks with time--or the doubling period gets longer and longer. Eventually it takes a lifetime before y
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. Whenever one process technology reaches its physical limits, we get a new one, because the new process makes money. X-ray lithography, chip stacking, 3D circuits, and eventually nanotech will all keep us on the Moore's law path probably for the rest of my life, at least.
-jcr
Re:It's a law of econmics (Score:5, Interesting)
I kinda agree and kinda disagree.
Moore's "Law" is clearly stated in terms of physics. It says that the number of transisters will double, not the speed will double over time.
However, as Kurzweil and other's have observed, the speed of _computation_ has doubled over time before Moore's law and there is no reason or hint that this will stop once Moore's law is obsolete.
Take a peek at http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 [kurzweilai.net] specifically http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/images/chart03.jpg [kurzweilai.net]
ICs have been good for a while, but then so were abacus' at one time.
CPUs are simply different than they were a few years ago. Things like the Niagra chip from Sun and the multi-core stuff from AMD and Intel is pretty different design (SMP on a chip -- yes, that is an oversimplification).
10-15 years is about in the middle of 2020, which seems to be a common point of a number of interesting stuff. Physics computations are predicted to be pretty interesting by then. Computers are predicted to be interesting by then. Who knows what else.
Its not hardware that I think is the problem or challenge, its the pains of software that seems to be more challenging. I mean its 2007 and we have what for software? OSes and compilers and whatnot have pretty much stagnated since the early 70s. Sure, we have 4g languages that are easier for us stupid people to program with, but from a performance and efficiency POV they are backwards, not forwards. JIT stuff in
I guess we will have to wait and see.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Corollary to moores law (Score:5, Interesting)
Moores law stays fixed because the industry invests enough research dollars--and not one dollar more-- to keep it at that rate. Their entire economic model is built on this.
Therefore, if we every do reach a point where we simply are running out of available physics and computer science (multiprocessing) then the first sign of this will be an increasing fraction of research dollars spent to sustain moores law.
Plot the industry's margin, smooth the curve, and you will be able to extrapolate to the point where the research dollars cross the profit line. somewhere shortly before that is when moore's law will end.
The only way that would not be true is if the nature of innovation changes from frequent small leaps to massive leaps spaced far apart.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Moores law stays fixed because the industry invests enough research dollars--and not one dollar more-- to keep it at that rate. Their entire economic model is built on this.
What makes you say that? What about competition? If you knew "the other guys" were striving to exactly meet Moore's law, wouldn't you try to beat it?
No it's called a Nash Equilibrium. A point in competition space where no player can imporve his strategy given the other players moves. I can't say what the costs that drive it are. But it's so fixed it apparently has reached equilibrium.
nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, who wouldn't want cars to become twice as gas efficient (without losing power) every 18 months, ad infinitum? If such a thing were technically possible, it would happen, because all the car makers would jump on the gas-mileage bandwagon to get ahead of their competitors.
Who wouldn't want the amount of food that can be grown per man-hour to double every 18 months, so the price per pound of beans and broccoli fell as fast as the price per CPU cycle of computers? If such a thing were possible, it would happen, as every farmer raced to lower his costs of production and undersell his neighbors like crazy, earning millions.
In very few industries other than microelectronics has anything like Moore's Law applied, and that's not from a lack of economic incentive, but from the plain uncooperativity of Mother Nature. You're arguing backwards, from effect (the economic structure of the industry) to cause (the physical nature of microelectronics).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Your point on economics is well taken. However, there is one aspect of physics in Moore's law - that the equations governing a MOS transistor scale with size. That is, if you make a transistor that is 1/2 the size in all dimensions, and you run it at 1/2 the voltage, it will behave exactly the same as the original. So there has always been a clear development path for doubling your transistor density - cutting the size in half.
Other technologies
Law? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Although at this point, I think it can only be justified as between "hypothesis" and "theory", but I'm no expert.
A law is an observation (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Law? (Score:5, Funny)
This is slashdot, so ...
no.
Parent
Not to worry... (Score:5, Funny)
Moore's Second Law (Score:5, Funny)
Moore's third law: "Moore's second law applies from the time it is quoted not from when it was originally uttered".
Moore's Law (Score:2)
Again? (Score:5, Interesting)
I do recall someone telling me that no CPU would ever run at more than 2GHz, as it would then start emitting microwave radiation...
Re:Again? (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember having / making a similar claim myself way back when -- with the 486/33 and 486/66 being the hot system in the day. I predicted they'd have a hard time getting above ~80Mhz because of FM radio interference / shielding problems. Boy was I wrong....
Today I predict "Moore's Law" to hold pretty true -- even in 10 or 15 years. IBM has been playing with using atoms as the gate / switch which will make today's CPU's look like Model T's.
In the 90's they had http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV1003.html [ibm.com]
Not too long ago they've done http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20040909_samm.html [ibm.com]
And recently it has been http://www.physorg.com/news107703707.html [physorg.com]
This will both be a boom for storage and the chips themselves IMHO (not to mention my stock
Parent
Moore's law isn't really a law (Score:3, Insightful)
Best part about predicting own failure (Score:4, Funny)
Wow, that Moore guy was so smart he outsmarted Moore.
Hafnium Breakthrough (Score:5, Funny)
And next year ... (Score:4, Funny)
CPU speed already on the wane as consumer bait (Score:5, Insightful)
The new hook for consumers is the number of "cores", and once again most people have probably picked up the vague sense that having more of them inside means the computer is better. I've been told by people who might be in a position to know that it's not that they can't keep cranking up CPU speeds, but that the cost/benefit (profit-wise) stops making sense at some point because of the huge cost of implementing a new fab at a finer length scale, and we're pretty much at that point. So it makes sense that cores are the new GHz, and Moore's Law will have less and less direct impact on the end computer buyer from now on.
Maybe there's a Core Law to be formulated about how often the average number of processors per computer can be expected to double?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We reached a wall a few years ago in terms of transistor speed, mostly due to the thin gate oxides giving rise to significant leakage current, which translates into heat. The upcoming high-k metal gate technology mitigates but doesn't eliminate this problem. Thus, Intel and the like are putting those smaller transistors to work in redudant cores rather than faster, monolithic circuits. Howeve
Re:CPU speed already on the wane as consumer bait (Score:5, Insightful)
The transistor count will keep going up, Moore's Law will continue. It's just that those new transistors will be used a little differently.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Moore's Law is a law of economics, scale and progress.
The gist is that computing power at a given cost will double every 18 months. It does not matter if this progression is achieved by cranking the frequency (MHz rule) or by increasing the number of transistor and parallel processing (Core rule). This is all about the economics
NO NO NO NO NO!!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Or at least, that's what the singularity nuts claim. Sorry people, there are limits on this planet.
Ob Simpsons quote (Score:3, Funny)
Not yet, (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not yet, (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody wants to increase the size of cpus...defects scale more than linearly with area, so there is a strong incentive to keep the die area down. Also, as the physical size increases you run into other problems...power transfer, clock pulse transfer, etc.
Parent
My prediction (Score:5, Funny)
Obligatory Pedantry -- it's about what's cheap (Score:3, Insightful)
Moore was/is a technology manager, and his law is a management law. It says the number of transistors that can be economically placed on an integrated circuit, i.e. the transistor density of the price/performance "sweet spot", will increase exponentially, doubling roughly every two years.
The original [wikipedia.org] refers to "complexity for minimum component cost", which emphasizes the economic aspect of it even more strongly.
Moore's law has never been about what's possible, it's always been about what's cheap.
Nope, nope, and nope (Score:3, Informative)
Secondly it's not so much a "law", as a consequence of how long it takes to amortize the cost of a fab plant.
Thirdly, it's tied to 2-D circuit layouts. If and when 3-D IC technology becomes practical, then all we need is 2^1/3 percent or about 22% linear shrink every year, which is somewhat more maintainable for a few more generations.
10 years is 5 more cycles (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's 16 years, thats 256 times as many transistors. 256 generic cores and 256 application specific cores in 2024? Let's not even imagine the per-core speeds! It's all pretty exciting, and I'm being conservative with the figures here.
Of course, applications will grow to utilise this stuff, but more and more tasks are getting to the point of 'fast enough', even despite the bloating efforts of their creators. Even if there is a 10 year hiatus in process improvements after 2024, it'll take some time for the applications to catch up apart from certain uses. If those uses are common enough, there will be hardware available for it instead. Of course if only Intel and IBM have fabs that can make these products, because the fabs cost $20b each...
It's not a law it's an observation (Score:3, Informative)
Moore's 2nd Law (Score:3, Funny)
Moore's Law as Energizer Bunny: not about silicon. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds About Right (Score:3, Interesting)
Going to still smaller wavelengths means that the photons pack more punch. It's like trying to play billiards by shooting the cue ball with a high powered rifle. You get pieces of cue ball everywhere. When random photon collisions are pushing random atoms by several dozen radii, your nice ordered atomic lattice becomes a horrid mess. we are nearing the limits of what nature allows for photo lithography now.
Increasing chip size is not a viable solution, as the full wafer is used now. Increase chip size, and yield drops quickly. Yes, they could double the size of the chip to increase transistor count, but that would mean increasing the cost of the chip by 4X. That's not he direction we want chip cost to go.
Off in the distance, there are more real hard boundaries, beyond which no amount of effort will yield additional benefits. One of those is component size. Minimum transistor size is 7 atoms (it's been done). Minimum diode size is about 5. Minimum trace size varies with material. The best I've seen is benzene, at about 6 atoms width. Keep in mind that at room temperature, benzene is a gas. It's going to be very hard to make wires of the stuff. We really need a solid. Aluminum, silver, gold, all have been used, and all need to be 30 to 60 atoms wide or more, and several thick to be even a poor conductor. Some creative metallo-insulator engineered materials might allow for smaller trace sizes, but probably not. Please note that this is still smaller than buckytubes, which are also as tall as they are wide, creating other connection problems, so don't peddle that as a panacea. That means that the trace sizes required will probably be the final limit. Real capacitors are larger than the traces, but their size is really controlled by the number of electrons needed to operate the transistor/switch. I'm still betting on the traces as establishing the limit.
Heat dissipation is also a problem. It gets to be more of a problem as densities go up. Current best designs are operating half way to melt now. switching to silicon carbide would let us go hotter, say 400 to 800 C. Diamond/graphite bases would let it get higher still, though diamond heated to 1,200 in an oxygen atmosphere isn't going to last very long. Need some creative packaging there. Heat dissipation is the real reason we can't go 3D. The systems that tried to be true 3D, or near to it, all relied on the chips being immersed in some coolant and having channels for the coolant through the chip. Liquid nitrogen cooled some that IBM did a few years ago. bubbles were a problem. move the coolant fast enough to transport the heat before bubbling and erosion is a problem.
Some of these issues can be fixed, some can never be fixed. So, when we are fully 30 nM size with our components, it all stops. It's a problem with the wiring. Solve that, and we would be close to being able to compute with atoms. But, with what we think we can do now, the shrinkage stops in about 20 years.
Enjoy it while you can.
Looks like you
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Either way, when Gordon Moore eventually dies he will still be overflowing the (long)money; variable.
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Re:Gordon Moore (Score:5, Interesting)
This abstraction would mean that most software wouldn't have to be written with any understanding of quantum computing: libraries and compilers would be designed to use CPU calls that launch the quantum co-processor, if available.
For many operations, the quantum CPU would not be needed. But for certain tasks, it would provide orders-of-magnitude speed boosts. If quantum co-processors became commonplace, we would see improvements in all kinds of parallel-processing tasks (matrix operations, simulations, graphics, maybe even search?).
Parent
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There is no doubt that we will reach a hard physical barrier beyond which we cannot shrink individual transistors any longer. This limit will be reach
Re:Gordon Moore (Score:4, Interesting)
IIRC, it ended up something like 150 years in the future.
Parent
Re:Gordon Moore (Score:5, Interesting)
Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation [nature.com]" Nature 406, 1047-1054 (31 August 2000) | doi: 10.1038/35023282 [doi.org] (for those without access to Nature articles, this arXiv preprint [arxiv.org] appears to be the same article).
The article reviews the absolute maximum limits for computation, based on current understanding of thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics.
The basic conclusion of the paper is that a theoretical 1 kg computer (confined to a volume of 1 liter), operating perfectly at the edge of what is physically possible could compute 10^51 operations/second on 10^31 bits of information (as compared to our current computers: 10^10 operations/second on 10^10 bits). Naively scaling Moore's law from current sizes, this suggests that we will reach such limits in 250 years. Of course the paper repeatedly points out that this is for an unrealistically 'perfect' computer, that is somehow able to perfectly organize all its internal matter solely for performing the computation at hand. For instance when running a computation it effectively has a temperature of ~10^9 Kelvin, which is considerably hotter than any known material could withstand.
Nevertheless, it's interesting to see what the fundamental principles of relativity and quantum mechanics indicate as a boundary for any sort of computation. The article is an interesting read.
Parent
sure they do (Score:5, Insightful)
And of course they would. Technology, like the stock market or the weather, is inherently a chaotic system over a certain characteristic timespan (1-2 weeks for the stock market and the weather, 25-50 years for technology). That is, over the characteristic timespan very small causes can produce enormous, system-wide effects, what you might call the butterfly wing flapping causing the hurricane phenomenon.
For example, a couple of guys (Jobs and Wozniak) screw around in the garage in the early 80s, trying to put together a really cheap personal computer. That's a very small cause. And twenty-five years later, it has had a giant effect: iMacs and iPods and iTunes oh my. Problem is, there was no practical way in the 1980s to distinguish the small cause that mattered (Jobs and Wozniak) from the other 50 zillion small causes that didn't matter (the other 50 zillion pairs of scruffy entrepreneurs in garages whose brilliant idea went nowhere).
This is why predictions of the future out more than 50 years usually end up looking hilarious in hindsight. When sf writers of the 50s and 60s predicted the present, they projected the dominant themes of their time (spaceflight, atomic physics, the struggle with Soviet Communism). They did not -- and could not -- realize that all three themes would pretty much abruptly and surprisingly come to an end in the 90s. When present writers predict the future, they project the dominant themes of our times (e.g. networked computing). It's very likely these projections, too, will end up wildly wrong. Networked computing is likely to become as humdrum and static as telephony within the next half-century or so.
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