GoodOwl
The 1 Hoo Knocks
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RE: New Grim Reaper Death Thread
Gordon Moore, 94, a pioneering scientist, one of the Traitorous Eight who left Shockley Semiconductor en masse (leading to a culture of startups in what would be called Silicon Valley), later co-founded Intel Semiconductor Inc. and wrote a forward-looking article on the future of "integrated electronics" containing a prediction that would be called "Moore's Law" and for decades was the guiding-light mantra for chip innovation.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/03/24/i...ies-at-94/
(Here's a link to the 1965 paper in which he outlined what would be called "Moore's Law": https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_...rticle.pdf
![[Image: cover-image2.0_0.jpg]](https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/cover-image2.0_0.jpg)
After Moore's law
The End of Moore’s Law
Quote:I like to think of it like piles of sand. Is there a pile of sand on the table or not? We might have a convention about how big a typical pile of sand is. But we can make it work if we halve the normal size of a pile of sand. We can still answer whether or not there is a pile of sand there using just half as many grains of sand in a pile....
Given the pile of sand analogy from above, why not just go to a quarter of the size of a pile of sand each year, or one sixteenth? It gets back to the yield one gets, the number of working integrated circuits, as you reduce the component size (most commonly called feature size). As the feature size gets smaller, the alignment of the projected patterns of light for each step of the process needs to get more accurate.
Since \sqrt{2} = 1.41, approximately, it needs to get better by {{\sqrt{2}-1}\over{\sqrt{2}}}= 29\% as you halve the feature size. And because impurities in the materials that are printed on the circuit, the material from the gasses that are circulating and that are activated by light, the gas needs to get more pure, so that there are fewer bad atoms in each component, now half the area of before. Implicit in Moore’s Law, in its original form, was the idea that we could expect the production equipment to get better by about 29\% per year, for 10 years.
For various forms of Moore’s Law that came later, the time constant stretched out to 2 years, or even a little longer, for a doubling, but nevertheless the processing equipment has gotten that 29\% better time period over time period, again and again....
In his original paper Moore only dared project out, and only implicitly, that the equipment would get 29\% better every year for ten years. In reality, with somewhat slowing time constants, that has continued to happen for 50 years.
Now it is coming to an end. But not because the accuracy of the equipment needed to give good yields has stopped improving. No. Rather it is because those piles of sand we referred to above have gotten so small that they only contain a single metaphorical grain of sand. We can’t split the minimal quantum of a pile into two any more....
As I pointed out earlier we can not halve a pile of sand once we are down to piles that are only a single grain of sand. That is where we are now, we have gotten down to just about one grain piles of sand. Gordon Moore’s Law in its classical sense is over....
Once you get down to 5nm features they are only about 20 silicon atoms wide. If you go much below this the material starts to be dominated by quantum effects and classical physical properties really start to break down. That is what I mean by only one grain of sand left in the pile.
Today’s microprocessors have a few hundred square millimeters of silicon, and 5 to 10 billion transistors. They have a lot of extra circuitry these days to cache RAM, predict branches, etc., all to improve performance. But getting bigger comes with many costs as they get faster too. There is heat to be dissipated from all the energy used in switching so many signals in such a small amount of time, and the time for a signal to travel from one side of the chip to the other, ultimately limited by the speed of light (in reality, in copper it is about 5\% less), starts to be significant. The speed of light is approximately 300,000 kilometers per second, or 300,000,000,000 millimeters per second. So light, or a signal, can travel 30 millimeters (just over an inch, about the size of a very large chip today) in no less than one over 10,000,000,000 seconds, i.e., no less than one ten billionth of a second....
Quantum computers are a largely experimental and very expensive at this time technology. With the need to cool them to physics experiment level ultra cold, and the expense that entails, to the confusion over how much speed up they might give over conventional silicon based computers and for what class of problem, they are a large investment, high risk research topic at this time. I won’t go into all the arguments (I haven’t read them all, and frankly I do not have the expertise that would make me confident in any opinion I might form) but Scott Aaronson’s blog on computational complexity and quantum computation is probably the best source for those interested. Claims on speedups either achieved or hoped to be achieved on practical problems range from a factor of 1 to thousands (and I might have that upper bound wrong). In the old days just waiting 10 or 20 years would let Moore’s Law get you there. Instead we have seen well over a decade of sustained investment in a technology that people are still arguing over whether it can ever work. To me this is yet more evidence that the end of Moore’s Law is encouraging new investment and new explorations.
Unimaginable stuff
Even with these various innovations around, triggered by the end of Moore’s Law, the best things we might see may not yet be in the common consciousness. I think the freedom to innovate, without the overhang of Moore’s Law, the freedom to take time to investigate curious corners, may well lead to a new garden of Eden in computational models. Five to ten years from now we may see a completely new form of computer arrangement, in traditional silicon (not quantum), that is doing things and doing them faster than we can today imagine. And with a further thirty years of development those chips might be doing things that would today be indistinguishable from magic, just as today’s smart phone would have seemed like utter magic to 50 year ago me.
![[Image: qIUb1.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/qIUb1.jpg)
It was fun while it lasted...R.I.P. Mr. Moore...
(This post was last modified: 03-27-2023 12:49 PM by GoodOwl.)
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