<story><title>ARM Pioneer Sophie Wilson Also Thinks Moore’s Law is Coming to an End</title><url>https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/04/13/arm-pioneer-sophie-wilson-also-thinks-moores-law-coming-end/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Animats</author><text>Some limits were hit a decade ago.  The Pentium 4 (2004) clocked at 3.8GHz max.  Most Intel processors today are slower than that. Intel&amp;#x27;s fastest offering is a little over 4GHz.&lt;p&gt;The article says that 28nm will dominate for another decade, even though 14nm fabs exist.  Having to use extreme ultraviolet (really soft X-rays) for lithography runs costs way up.  EUV &amp;quot;light sources&amp;quot; are insanely complex, involving heating falling droplets of metal to plasma levels with lasers. It&amp;#x27;s amazing that works as a production technology.  The equipment looks like something from a high energy physics lab.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s interesting that we hit the limit of photons before the limits of atoms or electrons.&lt;p&gt;Another problem with all this downsizing is electromigration. Every once in a while, an atom gets pulled out of position by the electric field across a gap. Higher temperatures make it worse. Narrower wires make it more of a problem. This is now a major reason ICs wear out in use.&lt;p&gt;Getting rid of the heat is another problem. High performance CPUs are already cooling-limited. This is also why 3D IC schemes aren&amp;#x27;t too useful for active components like CPUs.  Getting heat out of the middle of the stack is hard. Memory can be stacked, if it&amp;#x27;s not used too hard.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no problem making lots of CPUs on a chip, if the application can use them.  Things look better server-side; you can use vast numbers of CPUs in a server farm, but it&amp;#x27;s hard to see what 20 or 100 CPUs would do for a laptop.&lt;p&gt;Drastically different architectures may help on specialized problems.  GPUs have turned out to be more generally useful than expected. There will probably be &amp;quot;deep learning&amp;quot; ICs; that&amp;#x27;s a problem where the basic operation is simple and there&amp;#x27;s massive parallelism.&lt;p&gt;For ordinary CPU power per CPU, we&amp;#x27;re close to done.</text></comment>
<story><title>ARM Pioneer Sophie Wilson Also Thinks Moore’s Law is Coming to an End</title><url>https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/04/13/arm-pioneer-sophie-wilson-also-thinks-moores-law-coming-end/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>static_noise</author><text>Moores law has been the driving force of chip development?&lt;p&gt;Prophet Moore predicted the future and now engineers start breaking the law?&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t it the other way around that Moore made an observation about some effect that arose naturally? The formula was then called Moores law and its extrapolation had great predictive power for a long time.&lt;p&gt;Similar effects occur all through industries when you start scaling things up. Quality will go up and cost per unit will go down. Often following a simple mathematical formula which describes the learning curve.&lt;p&gt;In many technologies there is something called maturity where the straight line in the diagram starts to bend and approaches a technical limit. Markets overcome this a few times by changing the technological approach of solving a problem to an approach that has a better limit. This makes the general trend continue for decades... until the point where the next technology is so expensive that noone can afford it anymore.&lt;p&gt;Thus far Silicon has won every round and chip manufacturing plants cost many billions of dollars.</text></comment>