[extropy-chat] diffraction limit

Brent Neal brentn at freeshell.org
Mon May 31 11:37:36 UTC 2004


 (5/31/04 10:05) Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

>Given that we have working spintronics and molecular transistors the article
>says that certain (accustomed) ways of things won't work. Well, duh. Many
>people tried to prematurely bury Moore, so far unsuccessfully.
>
>Moore's law will tank eventually, but I'm putting that limit at about mole amount
>of switches (not transistors) -- a litre of circuitry, or so.


Please do remember that "Moore's Law" is not a natural phenomenon, but rather an industry consensus on the progress they expect to make. There is nothing sacred about it, nor is there any particular reason why we -have- to continue to follow it at its 18-24 month doubling rate.

There are many reasons to expect that rate constant to lengthen, or even for the exponential growth curve to fail. The one I think is most compelling is what some wags call "Moore's Third Law,"  which is that the cost to build a new fabrication facility doubles roughly every 36 months.  That's a pretty strong limiting factor, IMO.  The arguments about "the end of CMOS" I don't put much stock in, since I'm pretty confident we'll find something else. The question is, will whatever we settle upon be cheap enough to be marketable within one "Moore's Law period?"

There's also the fact that the current top end of CPUs have begun to exceed the needs of the average user. Without a CPU-intensive "killer app," to drive top end sales, chip manufacturers will start either trying to lower costs to go downmarket or to put in more bells and whistles to make the product attractive.  One of these bells is the low power consumption technology Intel is putting into their M series chips - since laptops are where the growth in personal computing is currently. (Of course, if they'd done a better job reading their tea leaves back in 2001, they wouldn't be frantically trying to find ways to hack their chips for low power consumption now.)

B
-- 
Brent Neal
Geek of all Trades
http://brentn.freeshell.org

"Specialization is for insects" -- Robert A. Heinlein



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