
Moore’s Law Running Out of Room, Tech Looks for a Successor - ingve
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/05/technology/moores-law-running-out-of-room-tech-looks-for-a-successor.html
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GavinB
The end of Moore's law is like commercial fusion power--always just around the
corner but it never seems to get here.

It does seem like we should stop counting how many transistors fit in how much
space. At this point, size isn't the limiting factor. Tracking either the cost
of a unit of processing power or the total processing power of the planet
would be more meaningful in benchmarking technological progress.

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thoughtsimple
The end of exponential growth is inevitable. We've reached the end of Moore's
law as it applies to silicon wafers. We may be able to get to 5nm but no one
really has an idea on how to do it and make a profit. Alternate technologies
are just theoretical ideas that have no timeline for commercialization.

The main point of the decline of Moore's law is that it is about economics as
much as it is about the size of the features on a chip. Even if someone does
figure out how to get to 5nm it may not be cost effective to mass produce
chips at that size. Already we see that Intel can't afford to keep up with
shrinking scale as they've moved away from their tick-tock cadence to tick-
tock-tock. Intel has the most advanced materials research in the world and
they can't make it work cost effectively. That indicates pretty clearly that
the exponential scaling of transistors is over. Smaller transistors may still
be possible or new materials may emerge but the future scaling isn't going to
happen on Dr. Moore's timetable which is the basis for Moore's law.

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bluetomcat
> Even if someone does figure out how to get to 5nm it may not be cost
> effective to mass produce chips at that size.

On top of that, it is not quite clear what would the hardware designers
achieve with an increased transistor budget. CPU cores are becoming
increasingly small in comparison to the surrounding circuitry (graphics,
caches, control logic). We are bumped on clock speeds, too.

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thoughtsimple
Mostly lower power from what I understand. Do phones, tablets, and small
laptops really need more than 4 cores? Probably not. So the only thing you get
is lower power and maybe smaller chips (which can help with the economics).

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paulddraper
If you only run one NodeJS app at a time, probably not

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weatherlight
So there's two obvious ways for faster machines, one of which we can do today:
1) Move off of silicon. 2) Write better code.

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tachyonbeam
I'm kind of skeptical we'll move off of silicon any time soon, but
fortunately, I think there's still a lot we can do with silicon. We aren't
nearly done optimizing hardware. Then there's the promise of 3D stacking,
optical interconnects, more cores and more memory bandwidth.

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fudged71
From an article a while ago, I was convinced that the next generation of
computers would be built on memristors... Allowing you to dynamically allocate
memory and computation resources in a 3D framework. And photonics would be
used to connect multiple computing units.

Is any of this feasible or realistic?

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dTal
Sounds a bit like using FPGAs for everything. I actually think we'll start
seeing a lot more of that sort of thing once tooling for FPGAs stops sucking.

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johngalt
The next step is specialization. Developing an ASIC makes more sense if there
isn't going to be a general purpose x86 that eats your lunch in 5 years just
by brute clock speed.

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jeffreyrogers
The upside of the end of Moore's law is that hardware should stabilize as the
focus goes from making things faster to making things easier to work with. I
think there are already trends in this direction with projects like RISC-V.

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gogopuppygogo
I think the focus will go toward making hardware more power efficient instead
of faster.

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bravo22
Power efficiency and size reduction go hand in hand. The gate capacitance is
reduced at lower geometry, and you can also reduce the core voltage. Both of
which directly contribute to power.

The only other way to reduce power is by clock gating, which pretty much
happens these days on any decent SoC design targeted at mobile.

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fintuple
Moore's law is as much about economics as it is about shrinking. For all you
code types, switching to a new device is not just as simple as fabricating a
new chip in a research lab. Thousands of experimental devices and chips have
been made in many research labs. Moore's law is about being able to
_consistently_ manufacture more and more millions (and now at billions) of
very small transistors every generation (for silicon, this used to be about
1-1.5 years in the late 90's early 2000's).

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xiphias
''After the 28nm node, we can continue to make transistors smaller, but not
cheaper.'' As computer vision and reinforcement learning improved dramatically
in the last few years, robots will take over a lot of manufacturing jobs of
humans, so as long as there's enough demand to finance robot developments and
there's no serious material shortage, I don't see why the cost could not go
down to the cost of the material itself + development cost + robot cost in the
following years.

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petra
The fabrication plants are highly automated. The cost is mostly capital costs
for equipment.

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xiphias
What is the biggest cost in the equipment? I'm sure a big part of it is
engineering but there must be expensive hand craft part as well.

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akeck
What ever happened to processors made with synthetic diamond? If I recall
correctly, diamond has incredible heat transmission capability, so diamond
processors made at the same density as current silicon processors could run at
higher (and hotter) clock rates.

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DasIch
Given that both diamond and graphene are both just carbon, what's the
difference between the two approaches?

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gilleain
What does sharing a common element have to do with anything? They are
allotropes
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_carbon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotropes_of_carbon))
- diamond, graphite, fullerenes, SWNT, etc all have very different properties.

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DasIch
Well, I'm not a chemist or anything but I, maybe naively, thought that the
properties would be similiar. More similar to each other than to silicon
anyway.

I mean it's similiarity that makes you think of carbon as an alternative to
silicon rather than some other element, no?

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scentoni
Diamond's electronic and optical properties are far more similar to those of
silicon than they are to graphite, graphene, or other forms of carbon. Diamond
and silicon are diamond cubic lattices with sp3 hybridization (tetrahedral),
graphite and related planar allotropes have sp2 hybridization (triangular).

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randommodnar
Can we quit with the Moore's law bullshit? It's not a law! It's just an
observation about the direction a graph seems to be moving.

Yeah, we hope processors keep getting more powerful. Calling this "Moore's
law" is idiotic. And probably confuses poor journalists and undergrads.

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bravo22
In all fairness the article says:

"Despite its official sound, it is not actually a scientific rule like
Newton’s laws of motion. Instead, it describes the pace of change in a
manufacturing process that has made computers exponentially more affordable."

