The Moore Law is Dead : are the conclusions at which it reaches the SIA, which stands for Semiconductor Industry Association, which brings together several companies that produce processors such as Intel, AMD, IBM and Micron, as we read in Nature. The co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore , shaped this law, taken from an empirical observation, in 1965.
The Moore’s Law says that “The complexity of a chip , measured for example by the number of transistors per chip, doubles every 18 months. ” But lately the extreme miniaturization and rising costs led to a slowdown in the exponential growth of chip power and therefore the number of transistors inside.
Let me be clear, manufacturers of chips have deliberately chose Moore’s Law . With each evolution of chip software engineers produce new applications behind the times, consumers are demanding better performing, and device manufacturers start again the race to produce the next generation of chips. Since 1990, in fact, the semiconductor industry releases a roadmap every two years to coordinate the hundreds of manufacturers and suppliers who are “in line” with the law.
The first trouble have appeared during the 2000s, when he began to see a production process below 90 nanometers . The electrons were moving too fast in increasingly miniaturized silicon circuits. The heat was too much: the producers so they decided to re-design processors with multiple cores, as well as limiting the speed of the electrons.
the main problem was the heat, which will reach fundamental limits with the increase in density of transistors in the next 10 years. Paul Gargini , the head of the ISA and former director of Intel’s technology strategy, “even with super aggressive efforts will reach the limit of 2-3 nanometers, where the components will be the size of 10 atoms.”
transistors at that point will be unreliable because governed by quantum uncertainties and, unfortunately, today there is no successor to silicon. “More than Moore” might be the new electronic industry roadmap: instead of producing ever more powerful chips to give birth later solutions to capture these powers, you could reverse it, placing the software in the middle and work backwards to figure out what are the features that should have a chip to take advantage of certain power requirements.
the end of progress? No, but “Innovation will continue, but will be more nuanced and complicated,” said Daniel Reed, computer and vice president of research at the University of Iowa. The solutions would be many and all into question, such as quantum computing, the neuromorphic computing, or go directly to new spintronic materials cited recently by Intel 2D graphene-like compounds, but none of these has proven faster than silicon.
But it is not only the change of Moore’s Law itself, has changed the computing industry . We passed suddenly from the desktop world to the cabinet, with a change of priorities: chips that need to manage both the sensors and connectivity. Besides that the chips will always do less work, charged instead of the data center or remote servers of technology companies.
There will be a new road map that will give importance to energy efficiency, especially for the smart of ” Internet of things “sensors, they will need technologies that can survive without batteries, using the energy from ambient heat and vibration.
But there is also optimistic air. Shekhar Borkar , head of advanced research on Intel microprocessors, says literally that Moore’s Law is approaching the end, because the exponential growth in the count of transistors can not continue, but from the point of view of consumer “this law says that the value for the user is doubling every two years, and with several new features we should ensure this.”
in short, the semiconductor industry soon abandon the usual “rush” caused by the law Moore: now things could get a lot more interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment