

IBM may have extended the lifespan of Moore’s Law - allenleein
http://qz.com/448302/ibm-may-have-just-extended-the-lifespan-of-moores-law/

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Animats
Awful article. Clueless writer. Better article from the Register.[1]

Actual news: IBM fabs test chip with 7nm line width. Intel is at 10nm right
now. IBM had to use "extreme ultraviolet" and silicon germanium rather than
plain silicon. Both are known technologies. IBM is spending $3 billion.
Everyone has been trying to avoid going to "extreme ultraviolet", which is
really soft X-rays. They're produced by a synchrotron or some exotic laser
tricks, not a lamp, and the cost of the "light source" is high.

The other side of Moore's Law is that each generation of fab costs a lot more
than the last one. Also, getting rid of the heat now dominates; only mostly-
idle memory devices like flash reap the full benefit of the highest densities.

For reference, a single atom is about 0.1nm. Experimentally, wires 1 atom wide
and 4 atoms high have been made. A single-atom transistor is theoretically
possible. There's still room at the bottom.

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/09/ibm_cracks_7nm_barri...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/09/ibm_cracks_7nm_barrier/)

~~~
effie
> A single-atom transistor is theoretically possible.

How do you mean? How do you pack three distinct components into one atom?

~~~
cleverjake
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-
atom_transistor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-atom_transistor)

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kordless
> According to IBM, this could lead to a 50% performance and power boost over
> chips that are on the market today, effectively keeping Moore’s Law more or
> less intact for the time being.

I propose when we finally break the 'law' of Moore's Law, _that 's_ when we
should say it's not intact. All this "we're at the limit" stuff is just hot
air, IMHO.

Compute is going to continue to increase at a steady rate and networking is
going to lag behind just a _little_ bit less. That's the real mess in all
this, not Moore's Law breaking!

