Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 11:41:10 10/17/03
Go up one level in this thread
On October 17, 2003 at 07:24:49, martin fierz wrote: >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. > >sounds good at first, but think about this: today's processors generate >something between 10 and 100 watt of heat that you need to remove. since your >idea explicitly attempts to use today's technology, that would mean that you >also generate 1e8 times more heat. 1GW, that's about what an atomic power plant >delivers... now that will need one hell of a cooler :-) >ok, so you say you will go to lower voltages in the future, as we have done in >the past. but there is a limit there too, which is given by the band gap of >silicon. you can't go lower than that, and we are already quite close IIRC. > >>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). >> >>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? > >because you are increasing the distances again. and many tasks are not easily >parallelizable (e.g. chess...) > >>I would be very surprised if chips fail to follow Moore's law for the next 30 >>years. > >i would be very surprised if they do. the main drivers of moore's law over the >years have been miniaturization, miniaturization and miniaturization. and that >is very definitely going to end in the near rather than in the far future. >moore's law is an empirical observation. the laws of physics are a bit more >solid than that :-) > >you can bet your money on quantum computers, DNA computers or other fancy stuff. >IMO that's the only hope for moore's law in around 10 years time or so. and i >certainly won't bet my money on that kind of sci-fi stuff! Read this (if you have not read it already): http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
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