Intel / Moore's law

ED E

CISC followed Moores for ages, now we're hitting up against a wall with 10 and 7nm.

Meanwhile NAND has taken off in its place, it'll do so until we max that out too. Then quantum computing can have its go.

Lose the tinfoil OP.

sbsquarepants

The first transistor was invented roughly 70 years ago, it was approximately the size of your hand. Intel now squeeze 100 million of them into a square millimetre, but you reckon they are dragging their feet?

huskerdu

srsly78 wrote: »

I spend all day running angstrom scale simulations to help reduce critical dimensions, am pretty gutted to hear that this was all invented in the 70s and we are just wasting our time

BTW: Samsung are ahead of Intel today.

I feel your pain. 20 years working in IC Design and some sneeering randomer on the internet knows more about it than we do. We've been found out.


The very fact that the OP is under the illusion that Intel are the world leaders in IC manufacturing is laughable.

Franz Von Peppercorn

El Tarangu wrote: »

Coke's disastrous 'New Coke' campaign came directly as a result of consumers preferring Pepsi over Coke in blind taste tests (Coke's own tests, I should add). Coke is more popular because of the iconic packaging, the 'holidays are coming' ads at Christmas, etc., more so than the taste.

Naw I like the taste although I stay off sugary drinks these days for the most part. Coke has a very definitive aftertaste which isn’t replicated anywhere else.

0lddog

The real villans here are the likes of Applied Materials Inc

( http://www.appliedmaterials.com/semiconductor )

EdEd

NIMAN wrote: »

Is it really a secret?

Surely its easy to take a few drops of cola, analyse the ingredients and discover the recipe?

No?

A big secret like the Abrakebabra taco sauce. Nobody will ever know.

dublinbuster

dublinbuster wrote: »

What the hell are you people using your computers for?
You will read about posters building a new PC, and looking for advice
"32gb RAM, might upgradeable to 64gb
10TB storage internal and 20TB on a network storage device
latest intel i9 overclocked to 5ghz
latest Gforce 9999 overclocked
all will be water cooled
i will mostly be using it for Netflix, Facebook and Farmville
do i have enough "horsepower"
can you recommend any improvements to my build?"

Serious question, what do you use your PC for, and do you even need the latest and greatest components to do what ever the hell you do?

Well, you need the extra grunt to run the PC after all the updates have been installed

astrofool

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

I’d presume manufacturing chips and processors is an industry where if you stood still for a second then your competitors would have you for lunch. Didn’t intel take their eye off mobile for 6 months and ARM destroyed them by licensing out their designs and architectures.

Not just that, you need to be planning 5-10 years in advance to have the billion dollar fab ready for when the technology is commercially viable to make the smaller chips, one mis-step can give your competitors an advantage, Global Foundries (used to be part of AMD) are actually ahead right now with their most advanced Fab, and Intel are playing catch-up due to a few mis-steps in their latest die shrink. Beyond smaller transistors, vertical stacking is now very popular, enabling transistors to be stacked upwards as well as outwards, and allowing Moore's law to continue for a while yet.

touts

Readingthis thread I suddenly feel like Joe Duffy must every day of the week (except without the pay to go with it)

Dempsey

huskerdu wrote: »

I feel your pain. 20 years working in IC Design and some sneeering randomer on the internet knows more about it than we do. We've been found out.


The very fact that the OP is under the illusion that Intel are the world leaders in IC manufacturing is laughable.

While their ic designs are not best in market, their fabrication processes certainly are the market leader and have been for a long time

10000maniacs

If Moores law continued on after 1998, the processor speeds would be up in the terra hertz. But it has remained at 4 Giga Hertz for 20 years. Ok we have multi core and multi pipeline architectures to give more performance. but the bottom line is there is no real estate on silicon left, and there has not been since 1998.

Franz Von Peppercorn

10000maniacs wrote: »

If Moores law continued on after 1998, the processor speeds would be up in the terra hertz. But it has remained at 4 Giga Hertz for 20 years. Ok we have multi core and multi pipeline architectures to give more performance. but the bottom line is there is no real estate on silicon left, and there has not been since 1998.

That’s not true. Moore’s law is number of transistors not speed and the multi cores indicate more transistors.

Are Am Eye

But sure Moore himself is in on the whole thing.

Are Am Eye

You're just pushing the bottle neck further out.
Unless everything is going to run at light speed.

Bacchus

Are Am Eye wrote: »

You're just pushing the bottle neck further out.
Unless everything is going to run at light speed.

Well photonics is one of the areas being researched for quantum computing... so you're not far from the truth there

Snickers Man

People have known that Moore's Law is a self fulfilling prophecy and has been exploited as such for decades. And not just by Intel; by everyone who manufactures silicon ICs for a living.

Also, i think Moore himself predicted very early on that it would cease to be relevant sometime between 2015 and 2020, (ie now) as the incremental improvements in process technology (which is essentially what the Law is concerned with) would have reached their physical limits by then.

So complaining about Moore's Law now is like having a theological discussion about the merits of Thor or Zeus.

Mind you, I'm just waiting for jmcc to jump on here and tell us none of us has any clue and he's the only person in the country with any credibility at all to be passing comment on this topic.

whiskeyman

Speaking of Moore's Law, have you heard of Coles Law?













It's thinly sliced cabbage, carrots and green onion, seasoned with mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar dressing.
Goes nice with chips!

Antar Bolaeisk

It's not even a law, it's more of an observation but I guess Moore's Observation doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

AllForIt

This is all a bit high brow tech for AH.

And how come no one has mentioned Qualcomm?

Arciphel

I guess you are all just talking about Moore’s First Law, ye better get Googling about Moore’s Second Law...

super_furry

Sure it's all coming out of that contraption the have up in Roswell.

Microwaves? Microchips? Sky Plus? Pogs? All off that crashed spaceship.

Arciphel

Arciphel wrote: »

I guess you are all just talking about Moore’s First Law, ye better get Googling about Moore’s Second Law...

That also explains why there are fewer fabs in the world now than ever before, talk about putting eggs in one basket!

10000maniacs

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

That’s not true. Moore’s law is number of transistors not speed and the multi cores indicate more transistors.

Stop waffling.
The dynamic (switching) power consumption of CMOS circuits is proportional to frequency. Historically, the transistor power reduction afforded by Dennard scaling allowed manufacturers to drastically raise clock frequencies from one generation to the next without significantly increasing overall circuit power consumption.
Since around 2005–2007 Dennard scaling appears to have broken down. As of 2016, transistor counts in integrated circuits are still growing, but the resulting improvements in performance are more gradual than the speed-ups resulting from significant frequency increases. The primary reason cited for the breakdown is that at small sizes, current leakage poses greater challenges, and also causes the chip to heat up, which creates a threat of thermal runaway and therefore further increases energy costs.

I remember the tech commentators in the 1970's talking about Moore's law and saying the limits will soon be reached and we'll stop when we start to develop "hairy smoking golf balls!"

Spudmonkey

Ubbquittious wrote: »

They have been 'almost as small as they can be' for ages now and every time Intel magically pulls another rabbit out of their arse as the competition catches up. Even if it's finite they would have been better off financially smearing the progress out over 50 years instead of 5

The time taken to certify a new process is getting longer because of the geometries involved. Currently the cutting edge is 7nm with research going into 5nm. As one of the previous posters said you then start running into issues with quantum tunnelling. There are probably ways of mitigating the effects but they aren't free and probably erode any gains you get from going to a smaller gate width.

Going to even smaller geometries than this is going to require a quantum leap (excuse the pun) to something which hadn't even been thought of yet. This is something that's more likely going to come from a university research department than Intel and would take longer still before it even becomes mainstream.

Topgear on Dave

Deleted User wrote: »

That also explains why there are fewer fabs in the world now than ever before, talk about putting eggs in one basket!

Are there? They are fewer but certainly much bigger than before and more productive.

China has started building capacity big time too.

Topgear on Dave

Topgear on Dave wrote: »

Are there? They are fewer but certainly much bigger than before and more productive.

China has started building capacity big time too.

I still remember well the panic caused when the only factory on the planet that made the glue used in memory cards was damaged by an earthquake in Japan in 1995.
It coincided with the launch of windows 95, RAM rapidly became as valuable as gold!

Thieves were breaking into secure locations to rob computers of the stuff.

Capt'n Midnight

10000maniacs wrote: »

it has remained at 4 Giga Hertz for 20 years. Ok we have multi core and multi pipeline architectures to give more performance. but the bottom line is there is no real estate on silicon left, and there has not been since 1998.

Sky dishes have been running at over 10GHz since 1989.

But silicon is relatively cheap and easy to fabricate. You can use it as a base to build other semiconductors on, if you want to.

Intel have been focusing on lower power in laptop processors. But the laptop makers have just reduced battery sizes so it doesn't translate into longer battery life. So today's entry level laptops have gotten lighter but not much faster in recent years.

AllForIt

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Sky dishes have been running at over 10GHz since 1989.

Radio frequencies have noting to do with processor frequencies...or are you being funny? The frequency of visible light is 750 trillion hertz ever since the big bang.

Capt'n Midnight

AllForIt wrote: »

Radio frequencies have noting to do with processor frequencies...or are you being funny? The frequency of visible light is 750 trillion hertz ever since the big bang.

The point is that clock frequency on CPUs hasn't gone up much in ages, even though sizes are much smaller and interconnects are shorter.

10 years ago you could buy 3 GHz CPU's in 90 nanometre. Today it's 10nm with 7nm in production and we aren't getting many more gigahertz.

210-GHz in 2001 I want my superfast CPU now :mad: