Comments on: Moore's Law lives

For how long can the semiconductor industry keep up its innovation and fast growth? Some say indefinitely.

Tunneling Current at Room Temperature

We're going to hit the wall for room-
temperature silicon CMOS pretty soon.
I'd say that 35 nanometer is about as
small as you can get without unacceptable
lowering of the operating voltage.

That means that, sometime in 2011 or 2012,
we'll have to develop a new method of
making chips bigger. 3-D stacking is one
possibility. Another is to make the dice
bigger. Perhaps wafer-scale is going to
make a come-back. . .

Back in the good ole days

I remember back in 2000, the 1Ghz machines were out. But needed refridgeration, to keep them cool.

Now the very laptop, I'm using to type this, runs a 3.2Ghz with no problems at all.

I don't know where this will all end. But I suspect architectural changes will help lower voltages.

But if we go 3D, perhaps processor chips/blocks will have to eventually be built around a cooling source - built around a fan, or including liquid cooling.

[Blito]

Moore's Law good but not limiting

Limitation means destination not brokeness.

It explains how atoms are the limit or last
horizon but once you control the atom with
nanotechnology and multi-dimensional techniques
(3D chips etc.) you have the speed you need to
retain at or about even the speed of light
processes.
That means instantaneous operations to all.
i think the question here is what do we want? We
want full organic simulation per perspective.
That means we need a processor per perspective or
person to achieve this I think.

Already computer graphics are easy on the eyes at
3 gigs speeds but they don't go deep like to the
cell or atom mainly for more technical reasons.
We need Petaflop speeds to emulate organics on a
computer and maybe even upload ourselves to a
virtually prefect environment and that is not far
off if not here already with IBM's Blue Gene at
around 1/3 a Petaflop. These speeds emulate and
fix organic deterioration issues and limitations.

If the new light speed technology or Nano-tech
comes it will probably allow for petaflop speeds
in your back pocket and that means a fully
organic digital world for each individual to
experience.

[Stomfi]

Other Substrates and Strategies

One of the problems with Silicon is the on chip heat at the transistor junction can melt the silicon substrate. In a typical Intel clocked chip all transistors are receiving power all the time, whether working or not. The asynchronous design, where only thos transistor arrays needed for current work are powered, can help alleviate this problem.
A better way for all concerned may be a higher melting point substrate, and recent innovations in manufacturing cheap diamond slices which can be doped to carry a current, can carry existing designs forward, while work on other carbon based technology like nanotubes and gated quantum diodes (transistors) develops into something useful.

Although we all concentrate on transistors when speaking about Moore's Law, little is said of the other electronic components and their size that make up the chip's population of parts, so a parallel development for the size and performance of these must also be a priority for chip designers.

Apart from young people with 20-20 vision, size of hand held devices need not shrink too much in an aging population, so that new innovations in chip design could be focused towards functionality of the interface, like what is happening with the Cell chip, and performance for vertical function like what the Rock chip is promising.

As is seen in the development of graphics chips, it is the length of the registers that let instruction set engineers let us have complex functions in a minimum of chip cycles, so that CPU with say 256 bit instructions and data paths will also enable faster processing and complex funtionality.

Another architectural change which can enable these features is a return to the asynchronous 32 bit multi chip systems of the 70s to 80s workstation era, where each I/O and vector function was performed autonomously by a different chipset, the CPU only getting involved in traffic jams.

So apart from helping Intel sell "moore" of their very out of date 80's technology 32 bit chips, Moore's Law is not the only way to increase speed and, "moore" importantly, funtionality of computing devices.