
After Moore's Law: how phones are becoming open-source - jsnell
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2015/08/features/moores-law/viewall
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phkahler
I was just thinking about the end of Moore's law. People in the industry will
tell you they've been overcoming obstacles for decades, but there is a
fundamental change going on. Previous obstacles were manufacturing: Reduced
wavelength, double patterning, immersion lithography. Some were part
manufacturing and part device change: SOI, strained silicon. But now we're
seeing changes to the devices themselves: Tri-gate transistors and now IBMs
SiGe material for 7nm.

That change to SiGe is to increase electron mobility. The material could have
been used all along, but it has been easier to stick to the tried and true Si.
The bottom line is that plain silicon is not really viable below 10nm. A
material change to effect one parameter isn't likely to be useful for more
than a node or two before the same problem arises in that material.

I'd say 14nm FinFET will be a long lived node just like 28 has been. Then 7nm
SiGe will be a higher end node with higher cost. Perhaps there will be another
at 5nm but that's going to be a long time.

The equipment manufacturers will need to stay in business so they'll start
selling stuff cheaper to the lower cost players as development of new nodes
stops. This will lead to more capacity at the advanced node. Every micro
controller will be made at 28nm and have an FPU (I can finally abandon fixed
point math). Every SoC with a GPU will be made at 14nm. And lastly, laptops
and desktops will have 7nm parts that are very expensive due to the expense of
different materials, light sources, and the number of masks.

That's my guess at the market over the next few years and lasting for at least
10 more years beyond that. It will be very interesting to see how all the
players cope with this. Even ARM will suffer as their CPU license cost starts
to become a problem in a world of cheap chip production.

~~~
minthd
First , we don't need to wait, there are already microcontorllers for $1 with
a floating-point unit.Also sleep current is rising greatly as one moves to new
nodes - so some micro-controllers will stay on older nodes. But yes 28nm
should be popular for mcu's - especially that now we have tools to package
very tiny(sub mm2^2 dies) with lots of pins.

Anyway, today , and much more so in the future, microcontorllers will be
commoditized(heck for most purposes today, many companies offer chips with
low-enough power) and extremely cheap - and the determining factor will be
software - and software ecosystem.

So the company who could come with with a great improvement to productivity
and quality of embedded software developmet - and control that tool - would be
in a very good place.

~~~
wtallis
> _Also sleep current is rising greatly as one moves to new nodes - so some
> micro-controllers will stay on older nodes._

How fundamental is this? TSMC has 5 different 28nm processes, so there's
obviously some room to adjust things. Can't microcontrollers get effective
power gating to keep idle power low when moving to smaller processes?

~~~
sliverstorm
TSMC can tweak it all they like, but a smaller gate leads to higher leakage
currents. Plus popular older nodes are still getting tweaked.

That said, you can still attain amazing sleep currents on modern advanced
nodes. The catch is just that the best way to do that is with advanced design
techniques, which require more design effort.

~~~
minthd
>> amazing sleep currents on modern advanced nodes.

How low sleep current on a 40nm/28nm mcu would be with those advanced
techniques ? can youplease estimate ?

~~~
sliverstorm
Well, anywhere from full power to zero, if you design a chip that can flush
its state to persistent storage and go dark. x86 chips exemplify this wide
range, with many power states all the way from full power to shutting off the
entire package.

------
Leszek
I agree with Linus Torvalds about Moore's law:

"It's like Moore's law - yeah, it's very impressive when something can
(almost) be plotted on an exponential curve for a long time. Very impressive
indeed when it's over many decades. But it's _still_ just the beginning of the
"S curve". Anybody who thinks any different is just deluding themselves. There
are no unending exponentials."

------
hyperpallium
So we'll switch to an entirely different basis - as we did from vaccuum tubes,
relays, gears - I like Kurzweil's historical argument on this.

It's like Peak Oil - when the straightforward methods are exhausted, the price
goes up, making it viable to explore other avenues that were comparatively
inefficient before. Think about an intel-killer. Think about VCs thinking
about an intel killer. Some tech may turn out to be much better than expected.
To change the figure again, those neglected minor veins may lead to greater
deposits, as has happened before.

There is _so. much._ demand for this.

eg biological neurons are far superior to our best silicon.

~~~
titanomachy
This reminds me of Peter Thiel's idea of "indefinite optimism": we've been
spoiled by a recent history of frequent cutting-edge innovation, so we assume
that it will continue despite having no idea of the shape it will take. The
key here is _recent_ history -- humanity has only been advancing at its
current breakneck pace for a few generations. Technological stagnation is more
the normal mode.

I think we should consider the possibility that growth in processing power
will level out at least for a while. There are some interesting research
avenues which may yet bear fruit, but there's no guarantee that some
miraculous scientific breakthrough will appear just in time to salvage
exponential growth. "Moore's Law" is not some fundamental law of the universe.

~~~
carapat_virulat
Yes, some people take the approach that because one guy called Malthus was
wrong before, things can't turn really bad ever. Never understood that kind of
reasoning.

Seems like plenty of people even if they don't believe in Father God, they
still have some kind of faith in Mother Nature, or Brother Progress that have
our backs covered whatever we do.

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tzs
> Reworking the supply and demand equation, Xiaomi limits availability through
> online-only flash sales. Tightly controlled and lean, this model allows the
> manufacturer to sell phones at near cost to the fortunate few who can catch
> a flash sale before supplies run out.

Why does the manufacturer want to sell at near cost?

~~~
minthd
Controlling the OS many people use, selling other services, having a great
consumer brands and using it to sell other stuff(it has a plan to partner with
200 startups) ,building an e-commerce store/empire , etc.

Also most consumer brands sell via a retailer(and it;s hard to change that).
Xiaomi sells direct-to-consumer. That gives it more options with regards to
pricing.

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microcolonel
RISC-V is going to win now, it seems.

Just need a similar project for a big wide VLIW or similar part for graphics,
then plop them together. When that happens, ARM and intel will change
dramatically as companies, I imagine.

~~~
Narishma
GPUs have already transitioned away from VLIW to scalar architectures. At
least on the desktop front. They may still exist in mobile GPUs.

~~~
microcolonel
Indeed, looking at GCN, it seems like you could do as well with RISC-V
itself(with a fancier SIMD extension) as the shader ISA.

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cft
Silicon lattice constant (roughly the distance between atoms) is 0.56nm. The
5nm process will have 10 atom transistors. It's hard to imagine a traditional
process smaller than that. That means that the end if Moore's law is near.

~~~
jessepython
I think quantum computing with quantum states in atoms being transistor states
will be final progression of Moore's Law. But we are definitely feeling the
effects of the end right now. I think it was Michio Kaku who said that we have
about 50 years left until Moore's Law is officially done ushering in the
collapse of the industry and global economy.

~~~
coldtea
> _I think it was Michio Kaku who said that we have about 50 years left until
> Moore 's Law is officially done ushering in the collapse of the industry and
> global economy._

Not even sure what he means. The efficiency of processors, especially beyond a
certain point, hardly makes any difference to the "global economy".

Heck, there are even notable economists saying that the effect of the whole
"www" on the economy wasn't that special compared to things like the first
telecommunications, road and planes.

It's difficult to see when ones lives and breath in the IT industry echo
chamber, but, you know, diminishing returns.

The fact that despite 50 years of Moore's law we didn't have anything like a
8,589,934,592 [1] times larger global economy, actually not even a 100x
larger, should be enough proof that the Moore's law doesn't have a strong
influence on it...

[1] 2^((50*12)/18).

~~~
cft
The effect of the silicon computers was huge however (office productivity,
industry automation, embedded systems, numerical modeling of analog systems
such as biotech, airfoils, etc)

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thoughtsimple
Oddly timed article given the announcement by IBM of their successful 7 nm
test chips.

~~~
wtallis
Successfully making a 7nm chip doesn't mean it will ever be cost-competitive
with a 28nm or 16nm chip. Per-transistor cost isn't going down anymore, so
these new processes are only going to attract customers that are willing to
pay more for lower power or higher performance. It's no longer the case that
the whole product line will be brought forward when the fab capacity becomes
available.

It was only this spring that AMD finally removed 40nm GPUs from the low end of
their product line. They'll keep selling 28nm GPUs until the fab equipment
breaks.

~~~
minthd
But if you add the energy costs, it makes financial sense to move to newer
nodes. Maybe we need some financial innovation that charges a part of the chip
in small installments that you won't feel , because of savings ,while also
supporting moore's law ?

~~~
zanny
Then you get the option. Today you have a much more pronounced choice between
cheaper more power hungry AMD parts or expensive power efficient Intel ones.

In 2020 we will very likely have the choice between 7nm expensive high end
CPUs and 14-16nm midrange parts, and budget phones / tablets/ low end cpus
will be shipping 20nm. And we will still be using todays 24/28/32/40/45nm
plants for various other circuits.

------
mbertschler
This is so wrong. They are acting if processors can only get better by
increasing chip speeds. If that were the case todays quad core CPUs with 3GHz
should match the performance of a Pentium 4 3GHz * cores, which is definitely
not the case.

~~~
jsnell
You're making an extremely uncharitable reading, especially give the author.
The article specifically acknowledges that there are other ways of increasing
performance, which is exactly what CPU manufacturers have been concentrating
on for the last decade. And where they're getting that extra performance from
(e.g more cores or extra IPC through larger cache, better branch prediction,
extending the ISA, etc) you're going to need more transistors.

The real point of the article is what happens to the hardware ecosystem once
the density scaling stops. Not the exact mechanism by which node advances have
been translating to improved performance.

~~~
mbertschler
Probably I don't really get the point of this article, or the exact changes in
the hardware ecosystem when the density scaling stops? Because although
scaling became harder recently, I don't think we have reached the point where
the processing performance increase per year is slowing down.

I have a problem with that paragraph: _Even if it takes a couple of years and
several iterations for a self-taught engineer to reproduce, the resulting
product isn 't terribly out of date: the iPhone has only undergone a modest
increase in clock rate over the past four years, from 1GHz in the iPhone 4 to
1.4GHz in today's iPhone 6. This relative stagnation is endemic, leaving a
large window of opportunity for engineers to learn from and emulate the
designs of the best._

The iPhone 6 was released with iOS 8, which doesn't support the iPhone 4
anymore. Also the CPU performance of the A8 in the iPhone 6 has 12x the
performance of the iPhone 4. If you still want to use current apps, an iPhone
4 is really outdated.

On the other hand for the Novena laptop of the author the same principles
might not hold true, but that has more to do with software than hardware,
because especially Linux works very well with not so recent hardware. In my
experience Android and iOS software became way more processing power hungry
than desktop software did over the last 4 years.

~~~
pbbbt
Depending on what you mean by processing performance, the increases did slow
down, significantly, around 2004-2005. At least for non-numerical single-
threaded workloads. Had they continued at the same rate, CPU performance would
be anywhere between 5 to 10X higher today.

This is a commonly used motivation for a lot of modern computer architecture
research, here's one such plot:
[http://liberty.princeton.edu/Projects/AutoPar/](http://liberty.princeton.edu/Projects/AutoPar/)

