Intel’s Take on the Next Wave of Moore’s Law
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
It wasn’t until the mid 1980s that PC compatibles reached a place where you could buy a new computer that was exponentially better than the computer you bought 2 years ago but that was gone around 2005. Until then the smaller transistors were really faster and consumed less power but since then you mostly have more of them and moderate improvements in power consumption.
Performance double every 24 months isn't the modern take anymore. In the past 3 years all major PR has twisted the word "Moore's Law" to just meant transistor improvement.
The more transistors you put on a chip, the less expensive each transistor is, but the higher the risk of defects, so there's always an optimum amount as your fabrication processes improve.
> The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000.
> I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.
https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/...
And how are they achieved?
One thing that has correlated well with Moore's Law still is exponential cost to open a new fab, and fewer companies chasing the latest node. As Moore's Law slows, and possibly eventually ends, the end is going to be caused by economics, not just physics.
- Cost of the Saturn V development program: $6.417bn then / $35.4bn in 2020 dollars
- Cost of TSMC's Arizona fab: $12bn now
- The Saturn V program launched a handful of humans into space for $0.185bn then / $1.23bn now per launch.
TSMC's fab may cost a lot, but it produces a very large number of chips and, most importantly, it's reusable. The most density- and performance-sensitive applications use the newest fabs first, but the fabs are not thrown out immediately after a newer process is developed. Instead, the older fabs start making cheaper chips that don't need leading-edge performance. All of that up-front cost is amortized over a decade of continuous use.
If investors had poured money into rockets instead of chip fabs, we wouldn't have had everyone going to space. The investors would have just lost their shirt. Space has inherent costs we can't engineer around (e.g. fuel) and getting there is primarily a scientific endeavor rather than a consumer good. Keep in mind, there's nowhere to go[0] in space once you get there, except back to Earth.
Meanwhile, chips are something everyone needs now, and owning a fab is still a profitable venture even when the R&D costs go up - at least, for as long as the manufacturing technology works and people are willing to pay a premium for better chips. It's not purely an R&D arms race.
[0] I am leaving the possibility of terraforming Mars out of this, as that has enormous problems on its own.
GPUs, however, are exciting. ChatGPT is cool now. Real time voice recognition is cool. But can they run on your phone? Seems like people will probably make improvements on the algorithmic side to these things, but we could really use improvements on the GPU side as well. When GPUs are twice as powerful as they are today, I think we'll notice.
Replace GPUs with CPUs. The future is CPUs with built in tensor cores, which is the way Apple is going.
It's only a matter of time before tensor cores are ubiquitous
I feel like this is an understatement. Improvements in compilers and hardware have made software developers incredibly lazy.
I think we are leaving the era of "twice as fast" and entering the era of "half the power" meaning half the heat and twice the battery life. Wearables will continue to gain in popularity as they become more convenient. AR will be made possible by powerful, low watt SOCs.
I've wondered whether little micro-filament heat pipes sandwiched right into the chips might be possible, all plumbed into a heat exchanger on the side of the die that can be directly cooled, facilitating the extraction of heat from deep within the stacked chips.
Maybe; there's https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-exploring-on-chip-sem... from about a year and a half ago.
Direct water cooling huh. With channels right in the silicon I imagine water purity is just that much more important.
God help you if the water gets gunked up with disintegrating gasket material[0] and blocks some of those channels off, or even worse, conductive stuff.
https://www.eetimes.com/ibm-git-demo-3d-die-with-microchanne...
That's the million dollar question that we're trying to solve right now.
A major issue is the vast quantity of state machine dependent programs, like videogame servers, more simply coded data processing generally.
Games and other simulations generally are often single threaded since they're engineered as iterative processes rather than parallel expressions due to possible conflicts in state propagation.
The kids will be shocked to learn there was a brief time period when mainstream CPUs looked like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slot_1#/media/File:Pentium_II_...
The next really significant boost is likely something like optical transistors, memristors, analog computing, bio-electrical computing, or anything that is highly divergent from the current base concept.
I mean, if the organization of the current basic idea of silicon and the software can align with a compute-in-memory paradigm, I guess that would be more than incremental in a way. But the lady seems to be talking about doing that in still kind of a half-assed way as far as that part.
That's 5 orders of magnitude in cost over 56 years, with the only "paradigm shift" being "we can now fit the whole functionality on 1 IC".
To resume "Moore's Law" at the pace it once was, we need some of the truly new paradigms to mature. Ideas like memristors or optical transistors.
You could even imagine something like a ubiquitous transparent P2P background computing grid as a big shift in software that could matter.
But for hardware, the next paradigm that brings a few orders of magnitude boost to the baseline is going to actually be a.. different paradigm.
That's not really Moore's law, though; it's changing how you use the transistors rather than how many you get.
The coming credit crunch as Boomers retire will make this type of investment much more difficult in the future.
We're at the end of an era.
Demographic problems are a bit of an everything problem though.
EDIT: My answer above is somewhat wrong because of how much immigration the US is getting, the pyramid actually looks fine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
Compare that to the Canadian pyramid: https://www.populationpyramid.net/canada/2020/
If you believe you can predict stock market returns from demographics you should form a hedge fund.
Of course it does, buying a company's stock raises it's value, making it easier for a company to raise money by issuing more stocks instead of financing itself through taking on debt.
> If you believe you can predict stock market returns from demographics you should form a hedge fund.
Believing that the market is impacted by demographics does not really give you an alpha to use when investing, slower growth in the next ~30 years is just a trend.
How often does this happen?
Many companies are buying back stock (i.e. doing the exact opposite of this) Since the topic is intel, please explain when Intel last issued new stock and why they couldn't simply end dividends instead. (Giving money to their investors is the exact opposite of raising money).
"Believing that the market is impacted by demographics does not really give you an alpha to use when investing"
If you think stocks will be impacted by demographics you should be able to tell us what the correct price to earning ratio is of the S&P giving demographic a, b, or c and we should be able to trade based on that information when the S&P is mispriced.
If you can't do that, your ideas are not provable or disprovable and are not particularly compelling.
Time passes. The hundred all turn 65 on the same day, and retire. The savings rate whipsaws, since nobody is depositing money anymore, and is instead withdrawing it. The bank can no longer make loans. Credit crunch.