Author: Roy Eassa
Date: 11:26:38 06/07/02
Go up one level in this thread
On June 07, 2002 at 14:10:39, Jesper Antonsson wrote: >On June 06, 2002 at 20:12:36, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On June 06, 2002 at 19:40:56, Roy Eassa wrote: > >>>In any case, how many more years can we keep doubling speed every 1.5 - 2 years >>>before we run into the laws of physics? I can't imagine it's more than a few >>>decades more. >> >> >>I find it amazing that we have not already run into this. Clock frequencies >>above 2 gigahertz are way into the microwave range, and electrical properties >>of things change way up there... How electrons propagate. How atoms physically >>move around. Etc. > >I attended a university course in Modern Physics some years ago where one of the >professors argued that the physical limit using extensions of current technology >lie around 20 nm; less than that nothing could keep electrons from tunneling >around too much. Today, P4 processors are manufactured using a 130 nm process >(0.13 micron). If 20 nm holds, since the number of transistors are proportional >to the inverse square of the line width, we could get about 42 (that is: >(130/20)^2) times the transistors of today in the same space. That means the >chip limit for RAM would lie somewhere around there; 256*42 Mbit is somewhat >more than 8 Gbit, so barring a technology breakthrough, don't expect much more >per chip. 42 is between 5 and 6 doublings, so given 2 years for each doubling, >we should hit the barrier in ten to twelve years. > >Processor speed, then? Well, that depends on what you use the transistors for, >but clock speed alone has traditionally scaled *better* than the inverse square >of the line width, so 100 GHz for a processor should be a conservative estimate >of the limit. Then the extra transistors enable us to get even more speed, so >200 million nodes/s should be very possible before we hit the physical wall. >That's Deep Blue capacity on a chip, folks! > >One problem is that the cost of plants seem to increase almost as fast as speed, >so that may stop development before the actual physical limit does. Lets hope it >won't, though. :-) Thank you for a thorough answer. So the "decades" region is a better guess than the "centuries" region for how much longer Moore's Law can hold, eh? BTW, when I first read your name, I mis-read it as Jennifer Aniston. (Sorry!)
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.