Moore's Law was the observation that the number of transistors per die that was economical to produce doubles in about 18 months. As process technology advanced our yield increased and transistors shrank. Higher yield only gives factors of 2 to 10 in the number of good die (this is the economical part) and is a battle fought with each new process innovation. Transistor size has a hard limit in 2-D which is reached when we approach atom scale devices. I imagine that Front end gates with oxides 3 atoms deep might just be very hard to make economically. This then brings us to either (or) going 3-D which can give us a few Moore's Law cycles (2 layers, 4 layers ) or making the die larger. Making the die larger has been done in a number of instances. Tektronix's 2" square backsided imager comes to mind. I'm equating the thinning process for a backside device as the same in complexity as going from a ccd imager to a multi core cpu.
I can well imagine a 1024 core device, and 4 of those in a 1U box. Intel has an 80 core device in the lab. Sure there are heat, power, memory problems to overcome but that is the name of the game.
We have seen the power of CPU grow such that even windows is not able to bring the faster processors quite to their knees. Thus the drive to the Atom and its like. I can imagine a notebook with a 32 core cpu that has slower cores than the atom. Might just be a screamer.
The demise of Moore's Law in 10 to 15 years may happen. That is if you use the law as stated (transistor count). If you consider the power (MIPS,Flops etc) if a system then clustering waferscale devices gives us Moore's Law growth potential for the next 20 years. Plus there are new technologies to be discovered.
For me the demise of Moore's law is a function of economics. How will Intel get its money if the cost per core is $1 and 8 cores more than covers your desktop (1,000,000 notebooks with $32 cpu does not pay for a new fab). Making the Waferscale 1024 core cpu takes a lot of research money. Will the sales support it?
Regards, Ethan -- Ethan VanMatre - Research Systems Engineer - Computer Systems Manager Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction (CMOP) Oregon Health & Science University (503) 748-1157 e...@stccmop.org _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
