I remember reading articles like this a decade ago saying that transistors couldn't get any smaller because they were already the size of visible light. We've since switched to UV light per this article, and there's still much shorter wavelengths available. The size of the atoms that make up the wafer itself could be a potential problem too, but there's other materials we can switch to that are less susceptible to quantum tunneling. And that's not even touching true 3D chip design (right now it's a pile of layers that is essentially 2D).<p>Point being, there's many billions of dollars in revenue here at stake, and chip companies are doing their damnedest to solve these problems. They've solved every challenge so far, and there's no real reason that these latest challenges are fundamentally unconquerable in ways that the previous ones were not. An article highlighting the current challenges is useful, but one positing that they can't be overcome is sensationalist.
Now, I'm not even close to being able to weigh in on the physics side here... but my observation, as someone who has spent several hundred grand on servers in the last decade is that Intel is run by profit-maximizing professionals.<p>Look at how much better/faster/cheaper the intel stuff got after AMD's release of the hyper transport opteron.<p>and look at how much Intel tried to collect rent from their position of market dominance (say, by making us buy rambus and then FBDIMMs) before that.<p>AMD needs to step up their game.<p>There's another market force at work, too, and that is demand. On the consumer side of things, at least, there isn't any need for faster x86 computers, because Microsoft isn't doing it's job. It used to be that every three years, Microsoft would release another office suite that everyone needed, that ran like a dog if your computer was more than a year or two old.<p>I just upgraded my games box, a decade-old core2duo, to windows 10. Works fine (modulo spyware bullshit) - Microsoft has been focusing on the "mobile" market and has been putting a lot of effort into slimming down.<p>That, and (and I'm so shocked to say this) but it turns out that the people crowing about 'mobile is the future' were mostly right. When I was in high school, even my poor friends had desktops. Now, I know a <i>lot</i> of people, even technical people who only have laptops... and a lot of the people I went to high school with got rid of their desktops and now only have cellphones and tablets; nothing with a full keyboard and intel CPU at all.<p>If that trend continues, I would predict that we'll eventually switch our servers to whatever architecture the mobile devices use. AMD and Cavium and a handful of other companies have been talking about doing that with ARM, but so far there's nothing I can buy except at engineering sample prices.
10 years? It has already happened. Consumer chips haven't gotten much better in a decade. Most gains have been applied to power efficiency for mobile use. An unfortunate side effect is the that chip makers are learning that they can milk money for smaller improvements. I doubt we will ever return to the old <2yr Moore's law.<p>On the upside we might get lucky and some new innovations will come along an give us a quick bump. Tech like optical interconnects, 3D chip manufacturing, memristors, etc.
I have little experience with hardware but I've often wondered about this. Chip manufacturers seem to be trying to fit more and more into an amount of space that continues to shrink. Why not stay at, say, 1x1" and fill that space out? I'm sure there's a good reason why not, heat or density of the connections or somesuch. I'd love a more thorough explanation however, if anyone knows.
If you want actual industry discussion, I recommend SemiWki articles 1-5 by Scotten Jones.
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(my apologies on the link, but the direct one I tried did't work without login)
The issue isn't Moore's law (either speed or #transistors), the issue is cost per transistor. If that doesn't scale we aren't going to double the price we pay to get 2x more cores. Power/Cooling and the increasing cost of fabs has also put a dent in things.
Do you know more sources where I can read about IC manufacturing? Gwern's article [0] spurred my curiosity about the topic. EE senior here.<p>[0]<a href="http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law" rel="nofollow">http://www.gwern.net/Slowing%20Moore%27s%20Law</a>
Are gallium based chips completely non-viable or something? I thought they were the next big thing in chip materials that would let us get past the Moore's law restrictions in silicon?