We know fab sizing is going to stop being worth it. But bigger dies, with better heat dissipation, and processors that better fit today's use cases, all that should be within Intel's capabilities.
There are some pretty hard physical boundaries. Businesses write off their hardware in 3 or 5 years, it's rare to see a machine older than that. But there may come a time when a 10 year old computer is just as powerful as one you buy today. The replacement market is what's driving Intel's revenues for a very large part and if that should ever stop then it probably wouldn't be a great idea to hold a lot of intel stock.
Oh I wish. Oh I wish..
You mean like my 2012 laptop, upgraded to 16GB RAM, which is perfectly good at web browsing, Google docs and html/python/postgres dev ?
People didn't WANT to see it coming. The data that it broke were back at 65nm but very much at 40nm and 28nm. RAM hasn't scaled in years.
However, the history of technology is littered with the corpses of those who bet against Moore's Law. Combine this with the fact that your job basically depends upon Moore's Law continuing, and you have something similar to the Wall Street collapse. I can bet against it, but I lose my job if I'm wrong, and I lose my job if I'm right. Better to just close my eyes and cash my paycheck.
For consumer evidence simply look at embedded microcontrollers. Note that RAM and flash haven't been scaling every 18 months for a while.
It's like the world just after the Cambrian explosion. Lots of room for expansion but no real plan or intelligence behind it resulting in a ton of repeat work and variations on themes that will ultimately go nowhere.
And once all that noise has died down the real work can finally begin, much more wood behind far fewer arrows.
There was a fantastic video about IC manufacturing linked here on HN a while ago, I'm not sure if I'll be able to find it.
edit: Hah, found it :)
Some of these will cause some pain in other areas like software development.
That said, there's absolutely no guarantee that there's a true CMOS 2.0 on the horizon that will provides anything like the approximately 3500X performance gains we've seen from CMOS process scaling. There are huge macro implications if computing basically stops getting faster/cheaper/smaller from year to year.
First of all, let's be more precise. In this context, what people mean by the "end of Moore's Law" is the slowdown and, soon, probable end of CMOS process scaling. The issue is that CMOS process scaling has been such an incredible engine for performance that just getting those kinds of performance increases in other ways isn't easy. I wrote a bit about this a year ago.
http://bitmason.blogspot.com/2016/01/beyond-general-purpose-...
To answer your question, people did see this coming. There were disagreements about how far down you could economically drive feature sizes so there has been debate about exact dates. But pretty much no one thought CMOS features could be made arbitrarily small.
Pretty much no one qualified, maybe. There are lots of laymen (including many True Believers in The Singularity) who operate under the impression that it's a fixed law of nature.
That's a fin of a modern transistor (Intel 22nm). The dots in the photo are atoms. It's fair to say that Moore's law is nearing an end or has already ended.
Still, it's not like the physical size of semiconductors is the problem. A CPU today is maybe 100mm^2 of silicon. 4U of rack space can easily hold tens of thousands of CPUs, if you can power them, cool them, and connect them up in a useful way.
Good luck with that. Power costs go up linearly at best with cores if you don't have any more transistor scaling.
Actually useful reversible logic is, as they say, an open problem.
[1] http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/all-aboard-/4426188/Rul...
EEs in the semiconductor industry have been talking about it for the past 20 years; they didn't know exactly when it would occur but they knew it was coming. It's only software developers who were blissfully unaware.
EDIT: The interesting thing about the end of Moore's Law from AMD's (and everybody who isn't Intel) perspective is that finally the playing field is moving closer to even. Before, Intel always had the most advanced fab processes because of the vast amounts of money they funneled into it, which meant that everybody else had to have a better architecture than Intel chips just to get equal performance. Now that Intel is losing that process advantage, it should become possible for everyone to compete purely on the basis of architecture again.
We're nowhere near the absolute limits imposed by the fundamentals of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc. Those are relatively straightforward bounds to calculate but are completely useless for anything but extremely long-term projections.
What we wish we could compute is what the limits are on current manufacturing techniques and incremental advances from that. But we don't know precisely how many incremental improvements we have left to discover before we need to abandon silicon entirely.
[1]http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-coming-i...
Maybe future data-centers will be used to pre-heat the water that goes into the turbines that power the electricity plant, in some kind of perverse version of a perpetuum mobile.
You'd need to make up for the difference lost on each cycle with extra fuel.
Well, it is not as if we will just suddenly stop using CMOS, but the end of improvements is in sight:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_nanometer
If we are willing to putter along with no process improvements whatsoever, then yes, we can keep using 5nm indefinitely. And no doubt there will be incremental improvements in performance and yield at that node.
But we can't, and won't stop there to continue to drive down the cost of computing. It is just the end of the road for CMOS lithography.
I mean, is there any reason to believe this is actually true? There's no law that just because something is super useful its price will continue to drop forever. Just check out this chart: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/import/switchboard/.... The blue line is the inflation-adjusted price of electricity by year. I think it's fair to say that electricity is even more vital to the modern economy than compute power, and that having more of it for cheaper would unquestionably raise the standard of living for everyone. There's also a functional and mostly-free market for its production. And yet its real cost has remained essentially stagnant over the last 40+ years.
Now, there are obviously reasons why Moore's law has been a thing for so long (probably a lot to do with the exponentially increasing number of chips we use and the experience curve http://www.economist.com/node/14298944), but the last 50 years in chips may have been more the exception than the rule.
The entire computer industry, well, the entire technology industry is founded on compute power becoming cheaper each year.
What happens to these billion-dollar companies when that is no longer the case? Will Intel's investors be OK with it when they announce that they won't be coming out with anything much better than what they've currently got? Or will they be punished (severely) in the stock market after such an announcement? [1]
The board of directors will respond to pressure from the investors (or get replaced), and will replace company leadership if needed to continue advancement in technology.
And so they (or someone else) will invest in new technologies to move beyond CMOS lithography, such as molecular nanotechnology. Which will disrupt everything else related to technology and biology as well.
[1] I read articles about gamers buying 5-year old Xeon processors for their game machines for $70 USD which are competitive with current-generation i7 desktop processors that cost much more. If Intel can't sell new processors that are effectively better than older ones, that's going to be a real problem for them, and the stock market will eventually notice.
No, we've just gotten used to it. So now, like any junkie with a bad habit we're going to have to get used to doing without that. Or deal with the increased electricity bill.
> The board of directors will respond to pressure from the investors (or get replaced), and will replace company leadership if needed to continue advancement in technology.
Company leadership being replaced is not going to magically change the laws of nature.
At some point even Intel investors will have to accept that there are such things as physical laws and nature doesn't care one bit about your quarterly earnings reports.
Well, that's just it, we haven't hit the physical limits of computing yet. But we are indeed close to the limits of what is practical with CMOS photo-lithography.
At some point even Intel investors will have to accept that there are such things as physical laws and nature doesn't care one bit about your quarterly earnings reports.
This acceptance process will be quite painful, and someone, some way, some how will step in to promise greater returns.
I agree that the consequences of compute power no longer advancing year-to-year will be significant but I can't agree this is a case of nobody's trying hard enough.
I look at these yuuuuge teams at Intel working on their processors, and what kind of returns are we getting on that investment? How much are they, in comparison, investing in molecular nanotechnology related research?
I look at this, and it is mostly software-ish things:
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/education/highered/re...
There is some hardware stuff, further down the page, and some talk of the post-CMOS world. But I don't see enough. In my view, they're not placing nearly enough emphasis on the foundational technologies they need for their business.
It's also the case that Intel has become less forthcoming on their semiconductor research directions so I wouldn't necessarily expect there to be a lot of information on their website.
Abandon for what? In many series they hand-wave this away using words like "hyperspace substrate" or "dark matter" or "unobtanium." Do we have an idea of what we could use in reality?
What can happen is to make chips simpler in that less computation is spent in instruction decoding, tracking, scheduling and more is spent on actual execution.
These problems seem to be what VLIW architectures like tried to to solve. Is that sort of architecture going to make a comeback? Will even that help?
16 registers is not a lot when compared to other architectures. POWER, SPARC, Arm64 and MIPS have 32 (SPARC is weird, but 32 are always visible). Itanium has 128.
Also you're probably aware that modern CPUs have many more physical registers, they just don't expose them all at the same time.
E.g. AMD Zen physically has 168 integer and 160 floating-point registers. Of which you can only use 16 at a time, but to my uninformed eye that looks like a reasonable trade-off.
If you want your CPU to run fast, you have to pipeline instructions and you need caches that can run at full CPU speed. It's easy to design a CPU without all the complexity, but it will be slow. No one knows how to do both simple and fast. It's probably impossible.
For machine learning applications, I don't think the end game is to have complex CPUs, though.
Assuming that brains have managed to find more than a local optimum and that our understanding of them is somewhat accurate, ditching all those caches, translation buffers, etc. most of the bus bandwidth, and moving computation towards memory is the way to (eventually; we need to learn a lot before that's feasible) go for machine learning applications.
Does the brain even have instruction decoders?
I can't even begin to understand this question. It makes no sense at all.
There is absolutely no reason to reach that conclusion.
The careful balance of every aspect of a modern CPU is an art very few people practice. I'd say IBM and Sun have't left this game just yet for very high performance platforms, but don't expect a Core i3 coming out of either.
If you look at a particular technology node, one of the best correlations of power consumption is chip area. It's pretty much a straight line.
Now, that has probably changed a bit with how aggressively we turn chip areas off nowadays. So, we probably have to alter that to power consumption vs active chip area--but it's still a fixed line for a technology node.
It'd be, of course, totally incompatible with what we have now.
Whose only competitor is ARM, which is little better in terms of decoding complexity.
T32 indeed has this problem, but not A32. With ARMv8 ARM released the A64 instruction set, which is designed new from ground up and is to my knowledge also not hard to decode. Nevertheless decoding complexity is not that relevant anymore. What is much harder and involves more die area is (super-)pipelining the execution, out-of-order execution etc. But even all this together: What consumes most die area are typically the caches.