[HN Gopher] Intel's Take on the Next Wave of Moore's Law
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Intel's Take on the Next Wave of Moore's Law
Author : rbanffy
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-12-06 14:45 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| FfejL wrote:
| Nice to see an article address what Moore actually said
| (transistor count doubles every 24 months) and not what people
| often thinks Moore said (performance doubles every 24 months).
| Retric wrote:
| It started out as every 12 months in the original 1965 article
| which lasted for about a decade before being updated to 18
| months, and relatively recently people started talking 24
| months.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Yup, Moore's law should have always been a regression
| trendline
| Animats wrote:
| All that chip stacking. How do you cool it? What's the yield?
| This is packaging, not higher density transistors.
| rbanffy wrote:
| A lot of it is just two layers - the chip and the interconnect
| below. If you have a chip that generates a lot of heat, you can
| stack another one that generates less heat on top of the hot
| one and use it as a heat spreader (a lot of mobile chips are
| like that). Also memories have only a small part of them being
| used at any given time, so they are a good fit for tall stacks
| (current flash memory does that too)
| zasdffaa wrote:
| Not sure if relevant but dram refreshes continuously.
| Arrath wrote:
| >How do you cool it?
|
| 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.
| mook wrote:
| > I've wondered whether little micro-filament heat pipes
| sandwiched right into the chips might be possible
|
| Maybe; there's https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-
| exploring-on-chip-sem... from about a year and a half ago.
| Arrath wrote:
| Interesting, thank you!
|
| 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.
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHdEqWpexH0
| Coffeewine wrote:
| I don't know about production chips with such things
| integrated, but it's certainly been tried. The below article
| is from 2008.
|
| https://www.eetimes.com/ibm-git-demo-3d-die-with-
| microchanne...
| netr0ute wrote:
| > How do you cool it?
|
| That's the million dollar question that we're trying to solve
| right now.
| bmicraft wrote:
| Cooling is probably less of a problem than many people think.
| Modern cpus are (or rather would be) very efficient, if you
| don't push them to the very end of their frequency-power
| bathtub curve, but the latest generations of desktop cpus are
| basically stock overclocked. They can achieve 80% of their
| performance at 40% the power. That basically means you could
| double performance by 2.5x-ing silicon for the same power/heat.
| pdimitar wrote:
| This somehow sounds like specialized CPUs to me.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I'm amazed that we got as far as we have. It takes a well
| composed assembly of hundreds of machines, many costing USD
| 300,000,000 to operate as a "Fab".
|
| 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.
| gyulai wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Why does Boomers' retirement lead to a
| credit crunch?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Imagine a country of a hundred 18 year olds. They all get
| jobs on the same day, and start putting savings into the
| bank. The bank takes those deposits and loans them out to
| various productive (profit producing) enterprises.
|
| 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.
| belval wrote:
| Baby boomers life savings are still mostly in retirement
| funds being used to finance various ventures to get a
| reasonably good ROI. As the generation ages, the more money
| will be taken out of those accounts with fewer people to put
| their new earned money in the fund. Thus causing a credit
| crunch.
|
| 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_Unite
| d_Sta...
|
| Compare that to the Canadian pyramid:
| https://www.populationpyramid.net/canada/2020/
| staticman2 wrote:
| Investing in typical stocks doesn't directly fund anything,
| you buy the stock from some other private party. No funds
| go to the company itself.
|
| If you believe you can predict stock market returns from
| demographics you should form a hedge fund.
| wwwtyro wrote:
| I guess I'm skeptical. This sounds more like an optimization of
| current technology than something along the lines of vacuum tubes
| -> transistors.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Yes, that's how Moore's law has worked for 60 years:
| incremental advancements. The past 15 years have actually
| involved far more radical step changes than the 45 years prior.
| ilaksh wrote:
| This seems false to me. For example, electromechanical to
| relays, to tubes,transistors, integrated circuits, highly
| parallel ICs are all paradigm shifts rather than incremental,
| and yielded multiple orders of magnitude rather than
| incremental improvements in price/performance.
|
| 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.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Moore's Law (formulated 57 years ago) by definition applies
| to dense ICs. It's true, there were a bunch of advancements
| before the invention of ICs, but those were 60-80 years
| ago.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Correct. These are relatively incremental improvements. And I
| would argue that recently they are more relevant in GPUs anyway
| due to the scalability.
|
| 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.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > You could even imagine something like a ubiquitous
| transparent P2P background computing grid as a big shift in
| software that could matter.
|
| That's not really Moore's law, though; it's changing how you
| use the transistors rather than how many you get.
| smoldesu wrote:
| That's honestly what we need right now. There is a plethora of
| new optimizations available (big.LITTLE, chiplets, 3D stacking,
| et. al) and neither Intel, AMD or Apple are using them all.
| There are also ISA optimizations still on the table for both
| x86 and aarch64, so the _real_ race over the next 5 years will
| be seeing which company is able to compile these optimizations
| in a meaningful way.
| djexjms wrote:
| Yeah. After reading the article, I have to agree. But I'm no
| expert in this area. It seems like it could certainly help. If
| I had to guess, things like ECRAM and reconfigurable analog
| computing chips will have more of an effect than this (assuming
| they can be made to work).
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