Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 12:11:24 10/17/03
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On October 16, 2003 at 23:48:18, Dann Corbit wrote: >On October 16, 2003 at 22:48:09, Robert Hyatt wrote: >>On October 16, 2003 at 19:11:20, Dann Corbit wrote: >>>On October 16, 2003 at 18:49:55, Anthony Cozzie wrote: >[snip] >>>>1. Moore's law is NOT A LAW. Its going to come to an end by 2020, if not >>>>earlier. >>> >>>Not a chance. It will continue to accelerate. Of course, I could be wrong. >> >>It can't possibly continue to accelerate. Everything is limited by C. Nothing >>can propagate faster than that. So we are stuck with shrinking to shorten >>distances so that C doesn't kill us. But then we are limited by how far we >>can shrink things. IE we now do traces that are a few dozen atoms wide. We >>won't get to 1-atom widths. And we _certainly_ won't get below that. > >Too many assumptions. > >Imagine (for instance) if we grow IC's that are 3-dimentional. Suppose (for >instance, that instead of making 10 nanometer traces on a 1x1 cm flat face, we >are making 10 nm thick slices linked together in a 1x1x1 cm cube. Now the >compute power is suddenly 1e8 times larger. That's not sound math. First, 3d silicon has already been done. Look up the Cray-3 project. 3" "blocks" of tiny silicon wafers, linked in the 3rd dimension by tiny bird-cage wires inserted by tiny robotic fingers... As far as the math goes, silicon is already multi-layer. Stacking chips is already done. There is no manufacturing process to make N-level deep silicon circuits however, and it is unlikely there ever will be. > >Now, that's just one sort of work-around. I imagine that there are many people >a lot more clever than I am that can think of even better solutions. (Using DNA >to compute is a popular idea that may have merit). You are _still_ limited by C. I'm not going beyond silicon ideas as that has been the main-stay of computing for 40 years. And so long as we stay with silicon, Moore's law is definitely on the end of the curve... > >When we run out of ways to make the chip faster, why not just add more chips? >So instead of 1 50 GHz chip, why not use 1000 10 GHz chips? already done. Nothing new... but it doesn't make things 1000X faster if you have 1000 chips, of course. And they _still_ have to talk to each other. And that is bound by C. Which means distance is critical. One big chip. 1000 small chips. No advantage whatsoever in solving the space problem. > >I would be very surprised if chips fail to follow Moore's law for the next 30 >years. Prepare to be surprised. :) > >[snip]
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