Intel Researchers See Moore's Law Becoming Obsolete 396
prostoalex writes "A paper, published by Intel researchers, claims we might be the witnesses of Moore's Law becoming obsolete, as the rate of shrinkage for transistors goes lower with each year. In 2018 we might be able to get the chips manufactured with 16-nanometer technology, then one or two more manufacturing processes will shrink it even further, but after that we're facing the physical limits."
Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
Silicon is, indeed, close to its limit, but that does not mean semiconductors are.
This Wired article [wired.com], which I'm sure many of you have read, details how new industrially-produced diamonds, thanks to their cheap price and purity (most importantly, being absolutely identical to each other), along with research done by both the government, several corporations, and possibly Intel, may make unbelievably fast systems powered by diamond semiconductors possible.
Some interesting quotes:
Also, a rather ironic one from Intel themselves:
Silicon is dead. Long live diamonds!
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
This would be a thin layer of synthetic diamond, not the mined type that deBeers has a monopoly in.
The fundamental limits are reached sooner in some technologies than others, but there is no technology that is immune from any sort of limit.
Even if there is an alternative technology the transition from silicon to a totally different substrate is something the industry has tried before and conspicuously failled at. There was a time when Galium Assenide was the bees knees, these days it is an important niche (direct band gap and all that) but nobody is building GaAs computers.
The other factor is that there seems to be a tradeoff between the point where you hit the quantum limit in a given technology and electron mobility that bites you in the a**.
I suspect that we see Moore's law start to slow before it comes to a halt.
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
Progress is not going to end, but the automatic metronome of Moore's law will no longer be the driver. The rate of progress will slow for a while then start to pick up. The Intel paper says as much.
Incidentally the point of the paper seems to be to push out the end date and fend off rivals proposing the same ideas. The tunneling effect is quite definitely the end point of traditional logic gates. The astonishing part of the paper is that the end they cite is a 16nm process (with a 5nm gate), the smallest scale currently in use is 37nm. In other words there are only four more generations to go, two generations resulting in the feature size halving which means four times the number of transistors. So if the old two year schedule were kept Moore's law comes to an end in 2011.
They also point to the fact that Intel themselves have pushed out their dates for adopting new processes and are planning for three year gaps between generations. I have suspected that Intel has been the main factor in keeping the industry to the roadmap of Moore's law for some time.
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
There's nothing fundamental about diamond that will change electron tunnelling. The Intel paper was not silicon specific--to quote the article itself:
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
These fundemental limitations are not material specific. When you get geometric feature sized on your transistor where the source and sink are within 4-5nm of each other, the electrons can tunnel from source to sink more than 50% of the time, regardless of the field imposed on the electron. Therefore it cannot be used as a basis for a logic circuit. Essentially you are killed by Heisenberg uncertainty.
I agree, Diamond based transistors look very very promising, mostly for their thermal properties. When you can maintain a very high thermal gradiant, while maintaining your semi-conductor properies, you can clock the chips much faster without having to worry about overheating and thermal effects, but this research article that Paulos wrote if about a much more fundemental problem.
The content of this paper is pretty much old news, but it is actually promising to see this published by Intel researchers. Intel is well aware of the fundemental limits of its current design, this does not mean the end of Moore's law, in it's most general meaning, this just means that Intel will find new better ways to keep increasing it's core competancy, making amazing CPUs with very low manufacturing costs.
-PT
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:2, Informative)
The reason I posted about diamonds is the same reason the researchers quoted mentioned having to seek out alternative materials. Silicon is on its way out. To get to the theoretical 5-nM limit, some other material will be necessary as a conductor, hence diamonds.
Silicon is indeed reachings its limit, and diamonds, due to the properties you noted, may very well be able to extend Moore's law over several decades (perhaps only 2 or 3, but I digress) until this 5-nM limit is reached.
Touc
You're still missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, Moore's Law says that progress will occur at a certain (very fast) rate, not just that progress will occur. If you take longer to make progress than Moore's Law predicts it should take, then Moore's La
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, because diamonds are forever!
I find it interested that just because Intel thinks it has reached the limits of its ingenuity that Moores law will become obsolete. As you say, if they don't do it, some other company will. Especially since they have so much money tied up in silicon, another competitor with less capital tied up could emerge.
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:2, Funny)
Hey, if it applies to our national debt, why not.
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:2)
The article wasn't based on silicon or anyother substance, but fundimental physics.
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
The article wasn't based on silicon or anyother substance, but fundimental physics.
From my understanding of the article, the limit toted by Intel is based on leakage due to quantum tunnelling over distances of 5 nanometers or less. Now, IAAP (I am a physicist), and I know that tunneling probabilities have an exponential dependence [physicspost.com] on both distance and the height of the potential barrier which is being penetrated through. This barrier height depends on the particular materials used to manufacture pn semiconductor junctions; therefore, the OP was correct in pointing out that using different materials can get around the problems which silicon will soon meet.
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
As you mentioned, the tunneling probability is a function of width, barrier height and effective mass of the tunneling particle. We are trying to construct a switch where we can control the flow of the particle from one side of the barrier to the other. In the "on" state, there is no energy barrier, the electron can move freely, and in the "off" state, the barrier is erected. We need to control the tunneling probability such that we can distinguish on from off.
Consider that the Shannon-Von-Neumann-Landauer (SNL) limit for the smallest energy required to process a bit is k_b * T * ln(2) ~= 0.017eV where k_b is the Boltzmann constant and T is temperature. For width > 5nm, this holds as a good approximation for the minimum height of the barrier to maintain a coherent switch. For a 5nm the energy increases as (1/w)^2 where w is the barrier width.
This is a LOT of power when summed over the entire chip area.
They invoke power density arugments that say that it is impractical to have 5-10 MEGAWatt! / cm^2 power density. The rate at which this thermal energy can be removed from a solid is limited -- and THIS is the reason why we can't scale smaller.
Fundamentally, we are power limited.
I am not a physicist, but I do design microprocessors for a living and I did study semiconductor physics in school.
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for the insight; I wasn't aware of the SNL limit. But is it specific to semiconductors, or does it also apply to optical/quantum computers?
Re:Moore's law is NOT obsolete (Score:2)
So you are saying that diamonds prevent electron tunnelling at the scale the article speaks of?
(Hint, the answer is no. The article mentioned silicon only to state that it wasn't silicon they were talking about. It is assumed that silicons limitations will be worked around as other substances will be need
Ok, Ill say it... (Score:3, Funny)
"Do you have a nerd or geek in your life? show him how much you love him by purchasing a intel diamond wedding processor(tm). A processor is forever."
"Introducing, the new intel pentium 9, the Bling Bling Ice(tm), available in both yellow and white gold settings!"
I for one, welcome our....oh, wrong tired, over used tagline....
Again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are aware that Moore's Law [intel.com] is about the doubling of density of transistors and not "computing power" or some such undefinable quantity? Moore's law will be broken simply because physical entities cannot follow an exponential growth for very long. Computing power will still increase.
Re:Again? (Score:5, Informative)
From Intel's website: "Moore observed an exponential growth in the number of transistors per integrated circuit and predicted that this trend would continue. "
Re:Again? (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW, Moore's original hypothesis was that the transistors/$ would double every 12 months, so his "law" hasn't been correct for quite some time. We had been seeing a doubling of transistors about every 18 months for a while, but now it's more like every 24 months. With the current troubles that Intel, AMD and IBM all seem to be having at implementing their new 90nm manufacturing process, it seems likely that the pace will continue to slow.
Again and Again and Again and that's just Slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Jan 2003 [slashdot.org] Dec 2002 [slashdot.org] Oct 1999 [slashdot.org]
Oh no its not...
Feb 2003 [slashdot.org] Sept 2002 [slashdot.org]
Re:Again? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this paper is 'more' (sigh) significant than many are taking it to be. What they are saying is that the electron will no longer be able to provide us with greater computing power in twenty or so years time. Super computer builders prepared to pay will get a little extra milage out of stacking and clever parallelism but your desktop computer will never get any faster after this time using electronics as we understand it.
What we need is a breakthrough as fundamental as the discovery of a new law of nature to get any further.
Quantum computers show some possibility along with self organising molecules to instantate them - but we are still at the practical ability to do this, that we were at with electricity when kite flying in the clouds was a good way to study electrons.
It is prahaps somewhat significant that the number of gates on a chip will be comparable to the number of neurons in the human brain by the end of this decade. Maybe we dont need faster computers at all, maybe the clever thing will be expecting a computer to do something that it cannot do at the momment - think for itself. Sadly creating artificial intelligence has proven a brick wall that has almost no mainstream spin off so far unless you count Microsofts ghastly paper clip...
However my bet is that when the megahertz race is over, the new race will be how to make the compute element more intelligent - through a mixture of software and hardware. Sadly it seems to be a lot more than twenty years away as we cant even program all human brains to read and write despite the several hundred thousand years of development that have been applied to the grey matter
Re:Again? (Score:5, Interesting)
When light-through-air microscopes reached the physical limit, we came up with light-through-oil to get a greater magnification than was "physically possible". Then when that reached its limit we replaced the light with electrons....Even if this is a fundamental limit of electrons-through-solid, who says we're limited to that technology?
Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]
Re:Again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps if Intel can't make chips very much smaller or faster, they can concentrate on getting more performance in other, more clever ways. Improve the instruction sets and data handling, branch prediction, parallelization, and hundreds of other parameters that only chip designers know about.
Re:Again? (Score:4, Insightful)
We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue.
Agreed, every few years we're supposedly up against limits that will break Moore's Law. I also remember when we finally got 5.25 inch form factor 80 MEGAbyte hard drives. We were supposedly up against the physical limits of electromagnetics, and we couldn't expect any more big improvements. The next step would have to be bubble memory. Besides, nobody needed 80MB of storage anyway. :)
Re:The future is now! (Score:3, Informative)
but we are already switching the fuel technology backbone to Hydrogen
Hehe, I always get a kick out of it when people start talking about our new "hydrogen based society" or some other garbage like that. It's incredible how many people seem to believe that you can generate power from hydrogen! Of course, anyone with an once of scientific knowledge can tell you, unless you're talking about nuclear fussion, than hydrogen is simply an energy carrier and not an energy source. You don't pick hydrogen off t
mirror (Score:4, Informative)
Dec. 1 -- Moore's Law, as chip manufacturers generally refer to it today, is coming to an end, according to a recent research paper.
GRANTED, THAT END likely won't come for about two decades, but Intel researchers have recently published a paper theorizing that chipmakers will hit a wall when it comes to shrinking the size of transistors, one of the chief methods for making chips that are smaller, more powerful and cheaper than their predecessors.
Manufacturers will be able to produce chips on the 16-nanometer manufacturing process, expected by conservative estimates to arrive in 2018, and maybe one or two manufacturing processes after that, but that's it.
"This looks like a fundamental limit," said Paolo Gargini, director of technology strategy at Intel and an Intel fellow. The paper, titled "Limits to Binary Logic Switch Scaling -- A Gedanken Model," was written by four authors and was published in the Proceedings of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) in November.
Although it's not unusual for researchers to theorize about the end of transistor scaling, it's an unusual statement for researchers from Intel, and it underscores the difficulties chip designers currently face. The size, energy consumption and performance requirements of today's computers are forcing semiconductor makers to completely rethink how they design their products and are prompting many to pool design with research and development.
Resolving these issues is a major goal for the entire industry. Under Moore's Law, chipmakers can double the number of transistors on a given chip every two years, an exponential growth pattern that has allowed computers to get both cheaper and more powerful at the same time.
Mostly, the trick has been accomplished through shrinking transistors. With shrinkage tapped out, manufacturers will have to find other methods to keep the cycle going.
These issues will likely be widely discussed this week, when the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors is unveiled in Taiwan. The ITRS, which is comprised of several organizations, including the Semiconductor Industry Association, outlines the challenges and rough timetable for the industry for 15 years. A new version of the plan will be released in Taiwan on Dec. 2.
Still, Gargini said, researchers are exploring a variety of ideas, such as more efficient use of electrons or simply making bigger chips, to surpass any looming barriers. Other researchers likely will dispute these conclusions.
"We cannot let physics beat us," he said, laughing.
THE DISTINGUISHED CIRCUIT
The problem chipmakers face comes down to distinction and control. Transistors are essentially microscopic on/off switches that consist of a source (where electrons come from), a drain (where they go) and a gate that controls the flow of electrons through a channel that connects the source and the drain.
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When current flows from the source to the drain, a computer reads this as a "1." When current is not flowing, the transistor is read as a "0." Millions of these actions together produce the data inside PCs. Strict control of the gate and channel region, therefore, are necessary to produce reliable results.
When the length of the gate gets below 5 nanometers, however, tunneling will begin to occur. Electrons will simply pass through the channel on their own, because the source and the drain will be extremely close. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.)
Gargini likens the phenomenon to a waterfall in the middle of a trail. If a person can't see through it, they will take a detour around it. If it is only a thin veil of mist, people will push through.
"Where you have a barrier, the electrons penetrate a certain distance," he said. "Once
Re:mirror (Score:3, Funny)
Moore's law is about to hit the wall (Score:2, Troll)
I assume these will be manufactured on a 90 nm process but I'm not sure...anyway, after 10ghz is hit then what?
Do they just keep adding cache? OR, how about putting some R&D into something that actually NEEDS a speed boost, like perhaps, RAM, or hard drives!
Re:Moore's law is about to hit the wall (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Moore's law is about to hit the wall (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, my sources are accurate (Score:2)
My sources are accurate--several big-level consultants who work for numerous large corporations, as well as much personal research I've done in the past.
Quantum computing adds I believe, 26 different levels to the traditional "on/off", "yes/no", "1s and 0s" approach to the tran
Re:Moore's law is about to hit the wall (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll throw some numbers out. These are fictitious. Say we have an application that is processor intensive and read/writes a massive amount. It takes 10
thrillbert's law (Score:5, Funny)
This law states that new laws to govern electronics and transistors will become obsolete every few years and will be replaced by new and improved laws which again will become obsolete as we as humans become smarter and find newer and better ways of creating things.
That is all, you may return to your previously scheduled activity.
---
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.
HALtheComputer's Law (Score:3, Funny)
This law states laws that govern new laws to govern electronics and transistors will become obsolete every few years and will be replaced by new and improved laws which again will become obsolete as we as humans become smarter and find newer and better ways of creating things.
Sorry, your law is already out of date. The march of progress and all that. Don't feel bad; they replaced me with a new HAL in 2010.
It's still an issue. (Score:3, Insightful)
Damon,
Re:It's still an issue. (Score:3, Informative)
If you think about it a little, old (big) chips were 5V (remember that?), then 3.3V hit around the PCI era (in those days, I/O voltage and internal voltage we usually the same.) Then 2.5V (often with 3.3V on the I/O still), and 1.8V, etc. As the process geometries have shrunk, they have used lower and lower voltages.
Re:It's still an issue. (Score:3, Interesting)
The big problem isn't the total voltage. It's the electric field--potential change (voltage) per unit distance. As the transistors in a circuit shrink, the field across them goes up. Electrons get pulled across--the system is 'leaky'. This problem imposes a minimum limit on the size of each transistor, and also increa
What is it about Moore's Law ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is it about Moore's Law ... (Score:2)
is useful because this is the time when people
will seriously consider better materials than
silicon, this is when all this talk of better
computing techniques (whether the simple
tri-valued logic or quantum computing) will
finally get the all out funding that better
lithography tech now enjoys. I imagine that once
you can no longer just turn the crank and push
the process smaller, Intel will start to decline
and streamlined instruction sets will become more
important. Ba
Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out (Score:5, Interesting)
Engineers will be able to continue the shrink for another 15 years based on what we know now. However, the cost for designing setting up manufacturing for a chip will continue to increase exponentially. It will only be worth the money to do this for a part that can be sold in the billions, and there will be few such parts. The end will come not because the technologists can't reduce feature sizes any further, but because no one will be willing to sink an investment equal to the GDP of a mid-sized country into a fab.
At least, that's the case for CMOS silicon chips. To get Moore's Law to continue to operate in a meaningful way, something completely new is likely to be needed: maybe molecular gates that self-assemble or something equally exotic.
Re:Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we're finally on the verge of the next big step; fuel cell autos. Just like they expected cars to fly fifty years after they were invented (but with no real change in the actual technology of the machine), so now we're expecting exotic things like quantum mechanics to be commonplace in computing environments in twenty years.
I think rather we'll see companies settle in; the big ones will survive if they're smart, while others will come on the market with their own claim to fame; shapes, colors, "safety" ratings, and finally government efficienty mandates. It could well be 100 years of "getting it right" before we finally see widespread implementation of a completely new technology.
Damon,
Re:Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out (Score:2)
Great point, though.
Re:Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Economics will cause Moore's Law to peter out (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a funny coincidence that Moore's Law will hit the wall (S-curve actually) at about the same time that nanotechnology is maturing, allowing for the next paradigm in computing to continue our exponential progress. [kurzweilai.net]
Molecular manufacturing -- while still 10 to 20 years away -- means that billion-dollar factories won't be needed to manufacture ANYTHING anymore. Everything, from food to clothing to genetically evolved open source 3D chip designs, will be built bottom-up for the same lowcost as growing a potatoe.
--
The end of Moore's law is a shame (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The end of Moore's law is a shame (Score:2)
Well, we still have "cheaper" and "more" (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also possible that DNA computation and other kinds of biocomputing are going to come along. These have the advantage of being gigantically parallel; they would possibly be good for tasks that are not latency sensitive but require immense brute force.
I'm satisfied that we have enough axes of advance to keep progress moving forward. Remember, computers have only been around for a very short while; I refuse to believe that we hit on the fitness maximum on the first try; there have to be technologies out there that are far faster/cooler/smaller.
Re:Well, we still have "cheaper" and "more" (Score:2, Interesting)
A BJT generally uses more power, because it is controlled by current rather than voltage, but the current it draws is mostly fixed, it doesn't vary with switching rate like a FET.
At some speed point, it will be more heat efficient to use BJTs than FETs. At le
So What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So What? (Score:3, Funny)
Funny ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Technologically, there will probably be enough clever ideas to take chip manufacturing beyond the point where it is no longer economical to make such fast processors. Consider that in 1980, a handful of engineers could sit down with pencil and paper and design a microprocessor. Today it takes teams of PhDs in physics, math, and engineering to do the same, in multi-billion-dollar facilities with the latest design tools and techniques. One day the buying public will realise that e-mail and word processing does not need a bazillion gigahertz, and gamers will have photorealistic animation with excellent AI. The chip maker will not make back the investment on a fab plant, and on that day Moore's Law will be dead, not for physical reasons but for economical ones.
Re:Funny ... (Score:5, Funny)
based PC with 1Gb of ram about the same
time to boot as it did my 100MHz Pentium
Pro with 32Mb of Ram from 1995.
What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.
Re:Funny ... (Score:5, Interesting)
1GB/3GHz = 0.3 Byte/Hz
32MB/100MHz = 0.3 Byte/Hz
Basically, as processors have gotten faster, the resources attached to the processor have gotten correspondingly larger. Thus it takes more clock cycles to initialise these resources and get them ready for use (ie. 'boot' them). The end result is boot times will be approximately constant (as observed).
By way of comparison, my first computer had 6kB of RAM and a 3.6MHz processor. 6kB/3.6MHz = 0.002. As one would expect, this computer booted in milliseconds!
Re:Funny ... (Score:2)
Anyway, your point was made in the joke.
Re:Funny ... (Score:3, Informative)
100MHz Pentium had ~ 533MB/s of memory bandwidth
3.0C P4 has 6400MB/s of memory bandwidth
533MB/s / 100MHz = 5.33B
6400MB/s / 3000MHz = 2.13B
As you can see, memory bandwidth has only increased half as quickly as your processor speed and memory size (actually it's not quite that bad since the P4 reaches a higher percentage of it's theoretical peak than the old Pentium does). But it gets worse.
100MHz Pentium
Re:Funny ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Photorealistic is NOT GOOD ENOUGH! gimme more! (Score:2)
And maybe people who don't know progress will too (Score:2)
Sure you're desktop computer will be able to product real-time photorealistic graphics, but what about your laptop? And then what about your palmtop? and then your watch? what about chips implanted under your skin?
There will always be new uses for computers that you can't begin to think of. Sure if we limit all our computing to what we are doing today we won't need much faster computers. It's new technologies that will make people want faster computers.
Example: a
Limits (Score:3)
but after that we're facing the physical limits.
There's an insidious corollary to Moore's Law: the increasing cost of building fabs.
More than any other factor, money limitations will bend Moore's Law.
Re:Limits (Score:2)
Moore's Law is Obsolete (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Moore's Law is Obsolete (Score:2, Funny)
Less's Law was made obsolete by Most's Law.
Can anyone say paradigm shift? (Score:3, Insightful)
- electomechanical calculators
- relay based computers
- vacuum tubes
- discrete transistors
- integrated circuits
Moore's law will continue, but it will continue based upon a new paradigm that sweeps in and seems to "miraculously" preserve Moore's law. The obvious next step is three dimensional integrated circuits and there is already research in exactly that direction: Intel's 3d gates [com.com]. AMD is also in the game. When 3d transistors lose steam some new paradigm will take its place.Re:Can anyone say paradigm shift? (Score:3, Informative)
Moores law was origionaly "the number of transistors on a given amount of integrates circut space will double every 12 months". It has been basterdized twice, first changing density to speed, and secondly changing the timeframe from 12 to 18 months.
mcc's law (Score:5, Funny)
Re:mcc's law (Score:4, Funny)
Re:mcc's law (Score:5, Funny)
The presumption (Score:3, Interesting)
3-D (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:3-D (Score:2)
Five years after that, and the chip would be as big as a VW Bug. Ten years after that, the chip would be as big as the Library of Congress.
Doesn't make much sense to build a computer that could hold a Library of Congress inside of a computer that's the size of the Lib
Yeah we're all doomed. (Score:2)
For those who do not know (Score:4, Insightful)
Moore's Law [intel.com] is a marketing term which was coined by the press, not Gordon Moore himself. It's not a law in the scientific sense, like the Law of Gravity. The 'law' simply states that the number of transistors on IC's roughly doubles every 18 months. People have been predicting the death of Moore's Law for many years, and probably will for many more.
If it truly were a law, it could not die. But eventually it will fail. In the mean time, it's a 'law' that keeps sales and marketing people busy, ensuring there will always be faster processors to run the latest bloatware.
Translation: (Score:3, Insightful)
Electron tunnelling visualization (Score:5, Insightful)
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says that we can't know an electron's position accurately. There's always a little bit of uncertainty about where it is. So, imagine the position of an electron not as a point, but as a little 'O'. That circle is the area that the electron could be. At any time it could be in any random place in that circle.
Now, if the 'O' is centered on the edge of one side of the gap, and the gap is bigger than the circle radius, then the electron has zero probability of crossing the gap. But, once the gap is smaller than the radius of the circle, then you've got parts of both sides of the gate within the area of the circle. Since the electron can appear randomly anywhere inside the circle, that means that sometime that electron will appear on the other side of the gate. As the gates get smaller, the probability that the electron will randomly appear on the other side of the gate goes up, until so many electrons are crossing the gate that we can't tell if the thing is on or off.
So... (Score:3, Funny)
Heard that one before (Score:3, Interesting)
- - - - - - -
Sample my Google Hacks [douweosinga.com]
Current Direction and Logic Sensing (Score:2, Informative)
This article has some interesting "facts" about how transistors work. I particularly like the following quote:
This is amazing.
Re:Current Direction and Logic Sensing (Score:3)
AMD on the other hand... (Score:3, Funny)
"Physical limitations? Fuck physical limitations!"
Moore's law then changes (Score:2)
every 18 months the the size of a computer doubles (due to increasing number of transistors).
We already have that law in bloatware: every new version of a mature piece of software will contain twice as many features as the previous version and be written in a language that is half as efficient, causing both the size and the interface of the software to double every X months.
So what is new, exactly?
The real barrier - what about 20nm (Score:2, Informative)
Also the weight of laptops would increase dramatically once lead shielding becomes a requirement...
Re:The real barrier - what about 20nm (Score:3, Informative)
What you'll get is radio frequency emissions with the same frequency as the clock speed of the CPU. At a THz, your emissions are
Haven't we learned yet? (Score:3, Interesting)
I am sure we all remember when we were told that phone lines could not physically hold more than 2,400 bps.
Well, we are at 56k now, and the only reason we stopped there is because cable modems have been invented and there is not as much money in it anymore.
If there is enough money to be had, humans will always find a way to push the limits further and further.
Re:Haven't we learned yet? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is also inevitable that advances will never actually stop, but this article is all about the rate, which so far has been exponential
3bit or 4bit computing vs binary (Score:2)
Like different voltages on each gate. I could see having a 3way gate by 0 charge, + charge, - charge. I'd imagine a 5 way gate to have: 0, -1, -2, +1, +2.
Is this possible?
What a newsflash (Score:3, Funny)
Say.... (Score:2)
ACCK! (Score:2)
This means we top out at 10000 FPS in Quake. Damn it... I want my silky smooth 128x FSAA 10k^2 images.
Computers just won't be any fun anymore...
Time to start another flame war :) (Score:3, Funny)
Question: Which will happen first - Moore's "law" will be broken or we'll have a compelling reason to switch everything to IPv6?
Moore's Law only ever intended as a joke (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a bit like when my daughter was born, one of the photos I put on her website was captioned "she's doubled in age in the last 24 hours - surely this can't continue". You can get seemingly odd curve shapes when things are young, but you don't take them and extrapolate to the longer term. Everyone knows that, and that's what made Moore's curve amusing.
The staggering thing about Moore's Law is that reality then proceeded to follow it. Unprecented !
Oh, no! (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean that by 2020 we won't be able to keep up with Moore's law?
Golly-gee! That means that we'll only have another 11 doublings of transistor count, meaning we'll be limitted at about 2000 times the number of transistors we have today. Geez, what how would I ever survive with only the equivalent of 2,000 P4/Opteron processers in my desktop?
steve
On the subject of impossibility (Score:3, Insightful)
- Arthur C. Clarke
While I think that quantum tunneling effect is likely to place limits on the size of electronic gates, who says we have to use electronic gates?
Journalistic piece of crap (Score:3, Interesting)
1) End draws nearer for Moore?s Law - we do not know that and this might even be false. Remember, Moore himself thought that his observation will only be valid for a decade or so. But instead the end of Moore's Law has been constantly postponed for almost half a century now. It might be that, with increased R&D, in 10 years we will expect the end of Moore's Law in 2025. Then the opposite to the article title is true - the end of Moore's Law is always pushed further into the future.
2) Ignoring the stupid and factually incorrect headline, let's turn to the idea itself that this Law will stop working some day. Well, duh. Obviously, if we are talking about transistors on silicon, we can't increase the density infinitely, because every transistor must have at least one atom and we can only pack the atoms so tightly before they start to fuse.
3) Why do we ignore all computing technologies and concentrate on transistors and silicon alone? Like Kurzweil writes [kurzweilai.net], they are just a small part of the big picture. It might very well be possible to make a computer based on the electron tunneling effect, which complicates traditional transistors.
The truth is - it is possible to fit a shitload of computational capacity in a very small volume. As a minimum, we can fit a computer able to run a human-level AI in a cube 10x10x10 cm. And most likely, we will be able to do 5-20 orders of magnitude better. Most likely, not without Intel's help. Computers will not stop becoming much faster, simply because it is fashionable (or rather it was 10 years ago) to bash Moore's Law.
In short, journalists are complete idiots, we are tired from sensationalist bullshit.
Re:SO what's new (Score:2)
Intel engineers are cretins if they think otherwise.
Re:bullshit (Score:2)
Re:Technological prognostication (Score:3, Insightful)
(BTW, why are we worried about AI when our I is suspect in the first place?)
Because *we* are the "I" attempting to create the "AI". That worries me.