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Intel Hardware

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."
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Intel Researchers See Moore's Law Becoming Obsolete

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  • by __aavhli5779 ( 690619 ) * on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:05PM (#7603829) Journal
    I think several upstarts are soon going to be ready to extend Moore's law for at least another few decades, thanks to diamond semiconductors.

    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:


    But the greatest potential for CVD diamond lies in computing. If diamond is ever to be a practical material for semiconducting, it will need to be affordably grown in large wafers. (The silicon wafers Intel uses, for example, are 1 foot in diameter.) CVD growth is limited only by the size of the seed placed in the Apollo machine. Starting with a square, waferlike fragment, the Linares process will grow the diamond into a prismatic shape, with the top slightly wider than the base. For the past seven years - since Robert Linares first discovered the sweet spot - Apollo has been growing increasingly larger seeds by chopping off the top layer of growth and using that as the starting point for the next batch. At the moment, the company is producing 10-millimeter wafers but predicts it will reach an inch square by year's end and 4 inches in five years. The price per carat: about $5.


    Also, a rather ironic one from Intel themselves:


    Indeed, Intel's top materials executives weren't aware of the latest research breakthroughs when I spoke to them in June, although they certainly understood the potential for diamonds in computing. "Diamonds represent a seismic change in semiconductors," says Krishnamurthy Soumyanath, Intel's director of communications circuits research. "It takes us about 10 years to evaluate a new material. We have a lot of investment in silicon. We're not about to abandon that."


    Silicon is dead. Long live diamonds!
    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:10PM (#7603889)
      This is assuming that De Beers doesn't push these people off a high rise first. :/
      • by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:09PM (#7604505) Homepage
        This is assuming that De Beers doesn't push these people off a high rise first. :/

        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.

    • by IvyMike ( 178408 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:11PM (#7603913)

      There's nothing fundamental about diamond that will change electron tunnelling. The Intel paper was not silicon specific--to quote the article itself:

      The tunneling effects, Gargini said, will occur regardless of the chemistry of the transistor materials. Several researchers over the years have predicted the end of Moore's Law but made the mistake of extrapolating on the basis of existing materials.
      The concept behind the Intel researchers' paper was, "why don't we do something based entirely on fundamental principles?" Gargini said. "The beauty of our paper is that it is independent of materials."
    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:15PM (#7603959)
      You obviously didn't RTFA.

      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
      • I read the article.

        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
        • The point is not to extend the time it takes to reach the 5nm limit, beyond which no material will allow further shrinkage. If we don't reach that limit as fast as Moore's Law predicts -- if it takes several more decades to reach 5nm as you suggest -- then Moore's Law will have already failed.

          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
      • Another odd effect is the current erosion. Once the circuitry of a semiconductor got so small, there mere flow of electrons will actually erode the wirings away, causing breaks in the circuit after a period of time. In another word, CPU lifetime will be shorter and shorter.
    • Silicon is dead. Long live diamonds!

      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.
    • Mod parent down. He didn't read the article.

      The article wasn't based on silicon or anyother substance, but fundimental physics.
      • by Aardpig ( 622459 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:33PM (#7604158)

        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.

        • by akuma(x86) ( 224898 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @12:13AM (#7606588)
          The reason that this calculation is material independent is that there is an additional constraint of power-density on the shape of the energy barrier.

          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.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      ...Diamonds are a boy's best friend!

      "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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:07PM (#7603855)
    We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue. This is talking about 2018...Quantum computers anyone??
    • Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kallisti ( 20737 ) <rmidthun@yahoo.com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:28PM (#7604093) Homepage
      We keep hearing this over and over again, and yet there's always a new technological breakthrough that lets the trend continue. This is talking about 2018...Quantum computers anyone??


      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)

        by gregorio ( 520049 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:33PM (#7604722)
        You are aware that Moore's Law 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.
        Nope, Moore's law is about transistor count.

        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)

          by Hoser McMoose ( 202552 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:50PM (#7604841)
          To be a tiny bit pedantic, Moore's original paper talked about the number of transistors per integrated circuit at any given price point. You can always stick more transistors on the chip if you're willing to throw sufficient amounts of money at the problem, but to get those transistors for a reasonable price is another matter.

          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.
    • by Maddog Batty ( 112434 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:53PM (#7604357) Homepage
      Mores law is coming to an end...
      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)

      by coastwalker ( 307620 ) <acoastwalker&hotmail,com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:57PM (#7604389) Homepage
      Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.

      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)

        by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:09PM (#7604512)
        Its not a technology issue though, electron tunneling is a fundamental limit that says you just cannot pile any more transistors into chips made of any solid.

        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:4, Insightful)

      by vsprintf ( 579676 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:03PM (#7604459)

      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. :)

  • mirror (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:07PM (#7603863)
    looks like they're gotting slashdotted like Kathleen Fent on her wedding night...

    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.

    IT Jobs
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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)

      by Vengie ( 533896 )
      You do realize that less and less people get that "Kathleen Fent" joke every day. [stfu, i lurked long before i registered, dont look at my numeric id...]
  • Intel said many years ago that 10ghz was a rational barrier. Well, I have an inside connection to Intel, knowing several people who work closely with the company--and next year they will release 4-and-10 ghz chips.

    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!
    • Perhaps Intel could hold off on the 10 ghz chips and concentrate on making some that don't get so damn hot.
    • by LoveTheIRS ( 726310 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:25PM (#7604058) Homepage Journal
      4 and 10 Ghz is a huge jump. I doubt Intel would release them that close together. It would be horrible marketing sense. Why make such a big bang jump to 4 and 10 when Intel can suck much more money producing a 4 Ghz then a 5 Ghz and the 6 and so on. Indeed I am questioning your source, but time will tell if you are correct about these releases. As far as Moore's law: In the past when people have said Moore's law must stop it was because researchers were having harder and harder times finding ways to product smaller chips. Now we are getting close to the point that we are arranging the silicon semiconductors atom by atom. Once your organizing atoms you physically cannot do much more. You cannot work with smaller components than on an atom by atom basis. Researchers have trouble even isolating the constituent parts of an atom, and the components of an atom are still highly theoretical. And those components that have been identified are highly unstable. Supposedly though there is something called quantum computing. I don't understand it but maybe quantum computing which doesn't use transistors (as far as I know) will be the future.
      • They are doing this to take ABSOLUTE control of the chip market. Think about it: AMD can't come close to 10ghz just yet, and if Intel puts AMD out of business, they will secure their place atop the chip market once and for all.

        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
    • I think we're all missing the point here. Say we have a 2 gHz computer. (By the way, gHz really means nothing.) The speed doubles. Is that same machine twice as fast? Of course not. For sure, the limiting factor is the hard drive. While SCSI may be the most viable option for speed, we don't see drive speeds following any sort of marked increase.

      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
  • by thrillbert ( 146343 ) * on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:08PM (#7603873) Homepage
    Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present to you thrillbert's Law :

    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.
    • Ladies and Gentlemen, I proudly present to you HALtheCompuer's's Law:

      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.
  • by ActionPlant ( 721843 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:09PM (#7603883) Homepage
    We may be getting smaller, but as this happens we'll need higher voltages to force things to happen on that level. And with those increased voltages (and the problems of things being crammed so tightly together) we'll see the effects of those electrons in such close proximity resulting in errors. Sure, maybe we won't hit a brick wall for a while as far as how much we can cram onto a chip, but what about the logistics? Will it really be worth the effort if we can't rely on these little marvels to remain accurate?

    Damon,
    • Huh? I think you got that backwards -- smaller gates require lower voltages (allow, really, since we like it when we can use lower voltages -- it saves power and makes switching faster.)

      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.
      • Huh? I think you got that backwards -- smaller gates require lower voltages (allow, really, since we like it when we can use lower voltages -- it saves power and makes switching faster.)

        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

  • by Ra5pu7in ( 603513 ) <<ra5pu7in> <at> <gmail.com>> on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:11PM (#7603900) Journal
    ... that drives people to try to pinpoint the exact coming moment when it will become obsolete? I suspect it is a desired to tack their own 15 minutes of fame to the long-lasting fame Moore has enjoyed.
    • Knowing when Moore's law will run out of steam
      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
  • by JoeBuck ( 7947 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:11PM (#7603903) Homepage

    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.

    • by ActionPlant ( 721843 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:28PM (#7604092) Homepage
      Your point is exactly what makes the necessity of the "next big thing" essential to the survival of that industry, and which leads me to believe that we'll see the computer industry wind up look a lot like the auto industry. We saw great advancements in the first several decades, but nothing that really changed how the core machine worked; we simply spent 100+ years refining it and improving efficiency and power (and safety). Of course there were always those exotic electic cars, but their use never become too widespread.

      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,
    • [quote] Engineers will be able to continue the shrink for another 15 years based on what we know now [/quote] this should make for an interesting effect. A whole new market will open up in tiny cubicles and desks, with tiny-engineer sized keyboards as well. What will the final engineer size be? Will they finally become small enough that millions can be employed as miniature chip makers themselves, thus solving the problem of high costs associated with the creation of a new chip-fab?
    • by Saeger ( 456549 ) <farrelljNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @08:27PM (#7605075) Homepage
      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.

      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.

      --

  • by Anonymous Coward
    because if Moore's law continued forever, it would prove P=NP. Think about it.
    • I choose to look at outstanding issues like this from the perspective of my career in the semiconductor industry.
      • Moore's Law until 2018. Great! A few years at that last process node, and hopefully my 401k will be set for my retirement.
      • No Quantum Computing anytime soon. See above.
      • NP completeness. Efficient algorithms? Boo. Hiss. I'm in the hardware business. Buy big iron.
  • by carcosa30 ( 235579 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:12PM (#7603922)
    Even if there were no way to manufacture chips smaller/faster than the ones we have today, there are always going to be refinements in the manufacturing process, making chips cheaper and cheaper. There are always supercomputers. Perhaps, also, we could find a way to really minimize waste heat, allowing many CPUs per board.

    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.
    • There are some other ideas being discussed. One is a return to BJT technology from FET technology. Simplified explanation: A FET is kinda like a capacitor, it pulls a little current each time it changes state. This makes heat frequency dependent.

      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)

    by Tyler Eaves ( 344284 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:12PM (#7603926)
    Once we approach the phyisical limits, we can simply expand in a different way. Just start adding CPU cores to the machine. SMP boxes are becoming fairly common already, even the in the PC market, and I definatly see that trend continuing. Once things get cheap enough, why not stick 16 or 32 chips in a machine? Heat and power issues can be minimized by greatly UNDERclocking the chips. In another few years, chips will be at insane frequecys, and instead of pushing them the limit by running that at super high power levels, just back things off a bit.
  • Funny ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:13PM (#7603933) Journal
    I remember sitting in a lecture in 1997, where some luminary from IBM predicted the death of Moore's Law in 10 years. Now it's 2003 and the death of Moore's Law is being predicted in 15 years.

    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.
    • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:25PM (#7604059)
      Perhaps, however, it takes my 3GHz Xenon
      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)

        by femto ( 459605 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:36PM (#7604181) Homepage
        Note:

        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!

        • The time to initialisize the ram is a fraction of the boot time, at least when booting win2k/xp. Most time is spent loading processes and data from disk to ram when the OS starts, which the grandparent's joke attributed to Microsoft growing the size of these processes and data at the same rate as CPU speed growth. So, yeah, we have the same B/Hz ratio, but [joke]only because MS keeps increasing the B[/joke].

          Anyway, your point was made in the joke.
        • Re:Funny ... (Score:3, Informative)

          Interesting, but there are a lot of other issues at work here. Take, for example, memory bandwidth.

          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)

      Actually, somebody wrote a paper making just the same observation. It was mentioned a while back in EE-times, can't find it now (obviously). If somebody knows what I am talking about, please post a link. In summary, the authors reviewed publications over the last 20 years or so and found out that the average time to the predicted end of Moore's law is 10 years, IIRC. E.g., papers published in 1980 predicted the end of Moore's law in 1990. Looks like Intel's researches couldn't find the paper either when t
    • Gamers are going to be able to consume the flops for a long time yet to come. After photorealistic comes holographic, then holo-realistic, then immersive holographic, then immersive-realistic. Then augmented intelligence. All the way up to full personality upload and immortality! I want it all!
    • People will always want faster computers.

      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
  • by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:15PM (#7603957) Homepage Journal

    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.

    • heh, I would bet on $$$$ DRIVING the bending of moore's law, and smaller and smaller circuits throughout the 21st century
  • by use_compress ( 627082 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:15PM (#7603962) Journal
    Because Less' Law has just been developed. Of course, Moore's Law made Kat's Law obsolete.
  • by Michael Crutcher ( 631990 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:16PM (#7603972)
    Electronics have already gone through five paradigms:
    • 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.
    • Moores law only applies to the last of those paratigms.

      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)

    by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:17PM (#7603980) Homepage
    The number of papers publicly published proclaiming the "real soon now" end of Moore's law will double every 18 months.
  • The presumption (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hartley1 ( 634401 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:17PM (#7603984)
    to predict technologies and processes 20+ years down the road is beyondd amusing. You cannot predict breakthroughs and discoveries.
  • 3-D (Score:4, Insightful)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:17PM (#7603987)
    Moore's actual Law does not require ever-shrinking transistors. It only requires that we put more of them into each chip. Double-sides chips, multi-die packaging, or 3-D layering of circuits would help increase the number of transistors in each "chip." You may think that multi-die chips is a cheat, but when it comes to packing in several billion transistors into a CPU, who cares how they do it.
    • I care how they do it. At first, doubling the transistors without shrinking them wouldn't be a big deal. Just like it took over 20 years to get to the first 100 MHz chip, it would probably take 20 years to get to the first PC case sized chip.

      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
  • There's absolutely nowhere to go anymore. It's not like Moore's law could just be extended into another dimension or something. 3D processors with the number of layers doubling every 18 months? Nah, who'd go for that.
  • by Ridgelift ( 228977 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:22PM (#7604029)
    Most of you know this, so please just bear with the sermon for those who do not.

    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)

    by scrod ( 136965 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:22PM (#7604031) Homepage
    Intel is becoming obsolete. Intel's steadfast opposition to changing their (unbelievably ancient) chip architecture and/or changing their manufacturing processes radically enough to actually innovate is no reason to declare the imminent failure of their competitors.
  • by Uma Thurman ( 623807 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:24PM (#7604055) Homepage Journal
    This is how you visualize an electron tunnelling across a gate:

    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)

    by splaytree ( 13203 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:27PM (#7604083)
    Does this mean in 2018 I can put my cat Schrodinger and a vial of hydrocyanic acid in my PC and watch the sparks fly?
  • by DOsinga ( 134115 ) <{moc.liamg} {ta} {kcabdeefbew.ewuod}> on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:30PM (#7604117) Homepage Journal
    Every year or so, an article is published along this lines. Moores law is obsolete, no more bigger hard disks etcetera. The thing is that Moores law isn't a law as such, but the prediction that a series of revolution will increase computer power by a seemingly nice and constant line. Every time we get to the physical limits, we find other limits to go to.
    - - - - - - -
    Sample my Google Hacks [douweosinga.com]
  • This article has some interesting "facts" about how transistors work. I particularly like the following quote:

    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.

    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."

    This is amazing.

  • by Loki_1929 ( 550940 ) * on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:32PM (#7604135) Journal
    Has announced that they have hired Voyager's Kes [bbc.co.uk], who can see past [3sygma.com] the subatomic level. Thus, AMD expects Moore's Law to survive for many years to come. Said one senior engineer at AMD's Dresden facility:

    "Physical limitations? Fuck physical limitations!"

  • So beginning in about 2020 we can expect moore's law to morph into something like this:

    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?
  • 20nm marks the edge of the soft X-ray band in the energy spectrum and thats not a good thing to put into people's homes. Those freqencies would make working with your case open very dangerous and proper shielding would become pretty important. It's bad enough we're regularily dosed by low level X-ray emissions from CRTs but once we hit that 20nm range we're talking about harmful radiation exposure.

    Also the weight of laptops would increase dramatically once lead shielding becomes a requirement...
    • Uh, the feature size of the ship has absolutely nothing to do with the radiation coming out of it. Your monitor releases X-rays (mostly blocked by the lead they put in the CRT glass) because of Brehmstrahlung (sp?) radiation from the interaction of high energy electrons with the inside of the CRT. The same process is used in an X-ray machine at the doctor's office w/o shielding.
      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
  • by dracocat ( 554744 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:46PM (#7604265)
    There is no barrier.

    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.
    • Get real. There is the speed of light and plank's constant which give fundamental limits on (classical) computation. The wavelength/momentum of an electron (for example) give fundamental limits on how fast an electronic computer can be. Eventually, the practical limits will get close to the fundamental limits and the rate of advances will slow down. This is inevitable.

      It is also inevitable that advances will never actually stop, but this article is all about the rate, which so far has been exponential

  • Has there been any work at making 3,4,or 8 bit gates instead of just on/off ?

    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?
  • by p3d0 ( 42270 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @06:54PM (#7604361)
    We need a new Slashdot category for "Predictions of the End of Moore's Law".
  • Does that mean we'll be able to use the Last Chips Ever Made to run Duke Nuke 'Em Forever?
  • by barfy ( 256323 )

    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...

  • by RevMike ( 632002 ) <revMike.gmail@com> on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:02PM (#7604449) Journal

    Question: Which will happen first - Moore's "law" will be broken or we'll have a compelling reason to switch everything to IPv6?

  • by waimate ( 147056 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:25PM (#7604657) Homepage
    People seem to have become disconnected to the fact that Gordon Moore only ever pointed out this relationship as a joke. He never seriously suggested that this was a trend that would continue, rather he was pointing out how rapidly things had moved in recent times, and his extrapolation was humorously (to engineers) pointing out the shape of the curve. Of course that wouldn't continue.

    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)

    by NerveGas ( 168686 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:34PM (#7604724)

    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
  • by the eric conspiracy ( 20178 ) on Monday December 01, 2003 @07:49PM (#7604834)
    When a scientist says that something is possible, he is most probably right. When he says that something is impossible, he is probably wrong.

    - 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?

  • by danila ( 69889 ) on Tuesday December 02, 2003 @07:26AM (#7607860) Homepage
    I mean, we've seen this kind of crap so often, it is no longer funny, but anyway, I will bite. :)

    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. :) Of course, any constant (moreso exponential) growth will have to stop. How is that news?
    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.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. -- Ambrose Bierce

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