[HN Gopher] The Unsustainability of Moore's Law
___________________________________________________________________
The Unsustainability of Moore's Law
Author : shadyboi
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-06-29 07:07 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bzolang.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (bzolang.blog)
| jama211 wrote:
| Moore's law has been unsustainable for 20 years, I remember
| Pentium 4's with 4ghz. But that hasn't seemed to matter in terms
| of real day to day performance improvements. This article makes
| some great points about the scaling cost and reduced market
| opportunity for there to be more than 2 or 3 makers in the
| market, but that's a trend we've seen in every market in the
| world, to be honest I'm surprised it took this long to get there.
|
| As interesting as this breakdown of the current state of things
| is, it doesn't tell us much we didn't know or predict much about
| the future, and that's the thing I most wanted to hear from an
| expert article on the subject, even if we can take it with a
| large pinch of salt.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The corollary is Wirth's Law:
|
| >software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is
| becoming faster.
|
| >Wirth attributed the saying to Martin Reiser, who in the
| preface to his book on the Oberon System wrote: "The hope is
| that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills.
| However, a critical observer may observe that software manages
| to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness."
|
| I wish that there would be more instances of developments like
| to Mac OS X 10.6, where rather than new features, the software
| was simply optimized for a given CPU architecture, and the
| focus was on improving performance.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Software optimized for a particular processor is today's
| tech. In the future we may see CPUs that alter themselves to
| better serve the needs of software. I can see a day where a
| "cpu" was actually a bunch of different processors connected
| via a FPGA so that the software could reconfigure the CPU on
| the fly.
| jama211 wrote:
| This doesn't hold with my experience, I remember how slow my
| old machines used to be - especially the ones with spinning
| hard disks. Not to mention early smartphones... I've had
| computers in my youth I used to turn on then go and make a
| coffee. Now it's practically instant.
| nottorp wrote:
| > Now it's practically instant.
|
| No it's not :)
|
| Phones do not shut down. Powering off and back on still
| takes forever.
|
| As for desktops, Windows at least keeps starting stuff in
| the background long after your UI gets displayed.
| jama211 wrote:
| Yeeeah dude you have some seriously rose tinted glasses
| on.
|
| My windows machine can go from completely powered off to
| a big application like a web browser fully open and
| operational on maybe 10-15 seconds, and yes, fully
| powered off. No way I'm making coffee in that time. Sure,
| windows might run stuff in the background, but it's so
| fast that stuff doesn't get in the way of me using the
| thing at all.
|
| As for phones, "forever" is a silly thing to say but even
| if I granted you that one off boot time, you have
| somewhat moved the goalposts as you talked about the act
| of using software in day to day usage. On my laptop I can
| genuinely open 10 apps, close 10 apps, and open 10 apps
| again all within 10 seconds, probably faster if I wasn't
| constrained by literal click actions. My computers
| growing up would grind to a halt if you tried to run like
| 3 things at once!
|
| There are always instances of inefficient software, but
| there was back in the day too, I remember generating a
| new map on civilisation 1 on my 286 and it taking 10
| hours. There is no way you can possibly say that on
| average software is slower today than it used to be, that
| statement in general is just completely false.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The improvements you describe come down to one thing:
| solid state drives. If we had them in the 90s, your
| software would've been starting up just as fast (or even
| faster) then. Meanwhile, once the software _did_ start,
| it ran faster and with fewer resources than software does
| today. It 's not rose colored glasses: software today
| truly is worse on average than software 20 years ago.
| nottorp wrote:
| > I remember generating a new map on civilisation 1 on my
| 286 and it taking 10 hours
|
| Humm. If my glasses are rose tinted, yours are black
| tinted. I've played quite a lot of civ 1, even on an xt
| with 8088, and i'm pretty sure map generation did not
| take 10 hours.
|
| Perhaps if you hacked yours to use larger maps...
|
| I'm also pretty sure civ 1 got to the menu on my 8088
| faster than Death Stranding 2 on my ps5. Although that
| might be my rose tinted glasses indeed. Civ 1 also didn't
| have a 29 Gb day one patch :)
| SlowTao wrote:
| The horrors of booting Windows 2000 on a Pentium 1.
|
| But there is something to be said about prior optimizations
| in limited resources. A few months back a friend was
| restoring a G4 iMac and I was astounded at how snappy the
| whole thing felt once the OS had finally loaded.
|
| We forget how snappy iTunes was while using only 30MB of
| RAM.
|
| If you can combine the best of boths worlds, there could be
| something special there.
|
| Modern OS and software are very bloated but it is
| astounding how fast the hardware crunches through all that.
| But it could be better.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| God of war 2 was made on 300mhz cpu and 32mb of ram.
|
| We haven't been bound by moore's law because we just waste
| computing power because programmers are expensive. No one is
| trying to optimize nowadays except in very niche places. And
| when push comes to shove we just start wasting slightly less.
| Like adding a JIT to a script language 15 years too late.
| jama211 wrote:
| As someone who has met people whose entire job is to optimise
| games for consoles, this isn't true. It's ok to want to get
| the most out of hardware in terms of features too.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Can you point to a couple of games in the last few years
| that would make one exclaim "what kind of forbidden magic
| they did so they squeeze so much performance out of the
| platform"?
| SlowTao wrote:
| Doom... 8 years ago...
|
| Like seriously that they have just gone all in on higher
| end hardware for Doom Dark ages was kind of
| disappointing.
|
| Doom 2016 runs at almost 60fps on a Pentium 4!
|
| The one title that did impress me was 'Humanity'but that
| uses a heavily modifed Unreal 4 engine, but it all runs
| very smoothly on limited hardware because of some smart
| design choices.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| I think the future of compute will look much like today!
|
| Given the power and ubiquity of smart phones, most people don't
| need any other computer in their personal life. What can be
| done locally on a smart phone seems like it will be more
| constrained by battery life and physical size than anything
| else, and there will continue to be a mix of things that can
| run on-device and other more compute-hungry functions run in
| the cloud. I don't see smartphones being replaced or augmented
| by other devices like smart glasses - people want one device
| that does it all, and not one they wear on their face.
|
| The same is somewhat true for business use too, especially if
| compute-heavy AI use becomes more widespread - some functions
| local and the heavy work done in AI-ready datacenters. I'm
| mildly surprised that there hasn't already been a greater shift
| away from local compute to things like Chromebooks (ubiquitous
| in schools) since it has so many benefits (cost, ease of
| management, reduced need to upgrade), but maybe it will still
| come if the need to rely on datacenter compute increases.
|
| Even if we imagine futuristic power-sipping neuromorphic chips,
| I don't see that changing things very much other that
| increasing the scope of what can be done locally on a power
| budget.
| ksec wrote:
| The great thing about AI, it is finally a killer feature that
| is enjoyed and useful by every user worldwide. And the tech
| industry finally have an excuse to up sell 16GB as baseline,
| and perhaps even try to push 24 or 32GB Memory, along with GPU
| / NPU and CPU upgrade.
|
| For users, a few hundred dollar extra ( on top of the original
| purchase ) is a such a small number compared to the
| productivity gain over the usage span of the computer.
|
| AI alone not only increased the server hardware requirement but
| also user client requirement. It is basically the question
| everyone has been asking, what is after Smartphone? And to a
| degree it is AI. ( or LLM )
|
| This will easily push the whole Semi-Conductor Industry forward
| all the way to 2032 ~ 2035. We will be at 8A or 6A by then.
|
| PCIe 7? possibly PCIe 8? WiFi 9 which is a fixed version of
| WiFi 8. There are so many great Hardware improvement coming out
| all because of the demand of greater computing usage.
|
| Software side has been rather boring TBH. I really like the
| phase Allan Kay uses to describe modern days software are
| "reinventing the flat tire".
| SlowTao wrote:
| > The great thing about AI, it is finally a killer feature
| that is enjoyed and useful by every user worldwide.
|
| We must live in very different worlds. Most people I know
| absolutely hate it and are immediately put off by anything
| that tries to force it in.
|
| I am not AI but it needs to be used purposefully rather than
| just another check box to the feature set.
|
| Productivity gains for some, needless slop for others.
| saati wrote:
| That's Dennard scaling, Moore's law is not about clocks but
| components on an integrated circuit.
| CalChris wrote:
| Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be
| fit onto a silicon chip doubles.
|
| No. Moore's law is not about density. It's just about the number
| of transistors on a chip. Yes, density increases but so does die
| size. Anyways, in Moore's own word: The
| complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of
| roughly a factor of two per year.
|
| http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/moore-crammingm...
| flomo wrote:
| > Gordon Moore always emphasized that his "law" was
| fundamentally rooted in economics, not physics.
|
| Effectively, it was always more of a "marketing law" than an
| engineering one. Semiconductor chips only had 18-36 months to
| reap big profits, so Intel tried to stay ahead of that curve.
| Symmetry wrote:
| That's a common misconception. Moore's 1965 paper was about
| economics but when the phrase "Moore's Law was coined in 1975
| it was referring to Dennard Scaling as a whole.
|
| https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-is-moo...
| ggm-at-algebras wrote:
| More parallelism. Less clock. More l1 cache per CPU and less disk
| stalls. Are there plenty of tricks in the sea, when clockspeed
| goes flat?
|
| Dual ported TCAM memory isn't getting faster and we've got to
| 1,000,000 prefixes in the internet and ipv6 are 4 times bigger.
| Memory speed is a real issue.
| SlowTao wrote:
| The question is at what cost? Cache hasnt scaled down for a
| long while now, it is part of why it takes up so much die space
| nowadays.
|
| Dont mistake technical viability for economic viability.
| phkahler wrote:
| I'm wondering if cache is due for a one time doubling of line
| length. Apple did it, but they seem to be unique in that.
| on_the_train wrote:
| There are a lot of people working on all the mentioned problems -
| and on many many more.
|
| Re garage invention: lithography is probably too big an issue for
| that. It's important to keep in mind that we're currently
| producing a _lot_ of transistors with today 's tech. Any
| alternative would have to match that (eg stamping technologies).
|
| (I work on lithography optics)
| kryptiskt wrote:
| An alternative doesn't have to match all capabilities of the
| current tech. It "only" has to be competitive in one niche, a
| la The Innovator's Dilemma. Then it can improve and scale from
| that beach head, like when CMOS went from low-power
| applications to world domination.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| Current GPUs have a comparable number of transistors (92.2
| billion in the current NVidia Blackwell according to
| https://chipsandcheese.com/p/blackwell-nvidias-massive-gpu) to
| the number of neurons in human brains (about 90 billion according
| to Wikipedia). Brains consume less energy and do more, though
| transistors beat them on density. This suggests there are
| alternative pathways to performing computation that will scale
| better.
| jojobas wrote:
| It takes many transistors to replicate a single neuron, they
| work very differently in terms of speed, there is no direct
| comparison.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| Let me restate. The article is musing about medium terms
| difficulties on the current pathway for producing
| computation. I'm musing that perhaps we are on the wrong
| pathway for producing computation.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| This only applies to functions of the brain which we wish
| to replicate on computers, not to those computers already
| outperform us on.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| Agreed.
| mettamage wrote:
| Is there also a law for how much more difficult it becomes to
| sustain Moore's law?
|
| Ultimately, there's a cap. For as far as I know, the universe is
| finite.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > as far as I know, the universe is finite.
|
| I don't think we know that. We don't even know how big the
| universe really is - we can only see so far. All we have is a
| best guess.
|
| There may also be a multiverse out there (or right beside us).
|
| And, _creating_ universes might be a thing.
|
| ... I don 't expect Moore's law to hold _for ever_ either, but
| I don 't believe in creating unnecessary caps.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I think you could very easily give a cap that hinges on our
| current understanding of basic physical limitations, and it
| would arrive surprisingly soon.
| mandmandam wrote:
| That's the thing about Moore's law - it has assumed from
| the beginning that our 'current understanding of basic
| physical limitations' is incomplete, and been proven
| correct on that front many times over.
| adrianN wrote:
| Our understanding of basic physical limits seems
| reasonably good and hasn't changed for a couple of
| generations. Our understanding of engineering limitations
| on the other hand is not so good and subject to frequent
| change.
| Teever wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow. can you elaborate on that?
|
| As I understand it Moore's Law doesn't address any sort
| of fundamental physical limitations other than perhaps an
| absolutely limit in terms of some fundamental limit on
| the smallness of an object, it's just an observation of
| the doubling of transistor density over a consistent
| period of time.
|
| It seems more like an economical or social observation
| than a physical one to me.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I was using OP's terminology, pointing out that people
| (including Moore himself) have been warning of an
| imminent cap on Moore's law since at least 1975. Getting
| into fine detail of what constitutes a 'fundamental
| physical limit' as opposed to an engineering challenge
| wasn't really the point, though I personally believe that
| our understanding of physical limits will develop
| further.
|
| We don't know what we don't know - there's always the
| potential of radical technology coming from an upending
| of things which were 'established' for decades or
| centuries previously; that's just the nature of science.
| layer8 wrote:
| In contexts like these, "universe" means the observable
| universe, which is finite in size. Also, creating universes
| (in the usual models) conserves energy, so you don't actually
| gain anything by that.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Landuaer's principle govern's how efficient computation can be,
| but we might have to transition to something other than
| transistors to hit that limit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle
| gosub100 wrote:
| if you want to be a "universe-alist", the mass of all those
| transistors would collapse into a black hole before you ran out
| of space.
| kristianp wrote:
| > Roughly every five years, the cost to build a factory for
| making such chips doubles, and the number of companies that can
| do it halves.
|
| So we may have Apple and NVidia as the only ones that can afford
| to build a fab. Edit, correction, Microsoft is the current number
| 2 company by market cap.
| mepian wrote:
| They can't afford to tank their margins like that, investors
| would be rather unhappy.
| blululu wrote:
| None of these companies know how to build a fab. The most they
| could do is invest in TSMC building one as a Joint Venture.
| kristianp wrote:
| You're kind of agreeing with me. According to the article, at
| some point in the future a new fab will require a joint
| venture between a tech giant and a chipmaker.
| Symmetry wrote:
| > In a transistor, the voltage of the gate lying on top of the
| channel controls the conductivity of the channel beneath it,
| either creating an insulator or "depletion region", or leaving
| the silicon naturally conductive.
|
| That's... not how this works at all. Eventually the depletion
| region where the positive or negative charge carriers (for p or n
| doped silicon) deplete far enough and then at the threshold
| voltage inversion happens when the opposite sort of charge
| carrier start to accumulate along the oxide and allow conduction.
| By surrounding the channel there's less space for a depletion
| region and so inversion happens at lower voltages, leading to
| higher performance. Same as people used to do with silicon on
| oxide.
|
| The Wikipedia article has nice diagrams:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSFET
| kurthr wrote:
| What's interesting is that with modern GAA and nanosheet
| transistors at the "1-2nm" scale (really ~6-12nm gate length)
| is that there are only about 50-100k silicon atoms.
|
| That means that the channels are inherently intrinsic. You
| can't really have doping when there's statistically less than
| an atom. There's a nice review from 2023.
|
| https://semiengineering.com/what-designers-need-to-know-abou...
|
| https://www.semiconductor-digest.com/the-shape-of-tomorrows-...
|
| This is more recent with pretty pictures.
|
| The key is that all increases in transistor count are now based
| on either stacking layers in the silicon (like flash scaling),
| stacking die with chiplets (we're already at 12-16 die for HBM)
| or scaling beyond the reticle limit (there's a lot of
| investment in larger substrates right now). None of these help
| cost scaling and all have huge yield challenges.
|
| Moore's law really ends when the investors and CFOs decide it
| does. The generative AI boom has extended that for a while.
| markhahn wrote:
| from a strict ML perspective, stacking, chiplets, multi-
| reticle are not going to help.
|
| that is, ML is about periodic shrinks producing squared
| improvements to device density at iso-area, and thus costs.
| if you have to change equipment, ML (in this narrow sense) is
| out the window. if you have to spend linear resources to
| stack die or chiplets, that's also not ML-compatible (because
| linear, not 1/(shrink^2))
|
| vertical flash is interesting because it appears to scale
| surprisingly well - that is, extra layers don't seem to
| exponentially degrade yield. I'm not sure any of that applies
| to logic, though.
| avereveard wrote:
| > Roughly every two years, the density of transistors that can be
| fit onto a silicon chip doubles. This is Moore's Law.
|
| that... isn't the moore law, it is about count / complexity, not
| density. and larger chips are a valid way to fullfill it.
|
| https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/Technology_ov...
|
| https://www.eng.auburn.edu/~agrawvd/COURSE/E7770_Spr07/READ/...
| layer8 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44412083
| avereveard wrote:
| even if it were, that isn't about transistor density, but
| power density, which is not the same as
|
| > the density of transistors that can be fit onto a silicon
| chip doubles
|
| the whole article takes off from a flawed and fantasious
| misinterpretation and argue against that self created
| windmill
| b0a04gl wrote:
| the law delivered enough headroom that systems moved on. once
| compute got cheap to rent and scale ,there was less pressure to
| push frequency or density every cycle. so focus shifted. the
| gains kept coming ,just not in the same shape.
| frognumber wrote:
| > Another possibility that has long been on my personal list of
| "future articles to write" is that the future of computing may
| look more like used cars. If there is little meaningful
| difference between a chip manufactured in 2035 and a chip from
| 2065, then buying a still-functional 30-year-old computer may be
| a much better deal than it is today. If there is less of a need
| to buy a new computer every few years, then investing a larger
| amount upfront may make sense - buying a $10,000 computer rather
| than a $1,000 computer, and just keeping it for much longer or
| reselling it later for an upgraded model.
|
| This seems improbable.
|
| 50-year-old technology works because 50 years ago, transistors
| were micron-scale.
|
| Nanometer-scale nodes wear out much more quickly. Modern GPUs
| have a rated lifespan in the 3-7 year range, depending on usage.
|
| One of my concerns is we're reaching a point where the loss of a
| fab due to a crisis -- war, natural disaster, etc. -- may cause
| systemic collapse. You can plot lifespan of chips versus time to
| bring a new fab online. Those lines are just around the crossing
| point; modern electronics would start to fail before we could
| produce more.
| skissane wrote:
| > Nanometer-scale nodes wear out much more quickly. Modern GPUs
| have a rated lifespan in the 3-7 year range, depending on
| usage.
|
| I recently bought a new MacBook, my previous one having lasted
| me for over 10 years. The big thing that pushed me to finally
| upgrade wasn't hardware (which as far as I could tell had no
| major issues), it was the fact that it couldn't run latest
| macOS, and software support for the old version it could run
| was increasingly going away.
|
| The battery and keyboard had been replaced, but (AFAIK) the
| logic board was still the original
| chii wrote:
| > it couldn't run latest macOS, and software support for the
| old version it could run was increasingly going away.
|
| which is very annoying, as none of the newer OS versions has
| anything that warrants dumping hardware to buy brand new to
| run them with! With the exception of security upgrades, which
| i find dubious for a company to stop creating (as they would
| need to do so for their newer OS versions just as well, so
| the cost of maintaining security patches ought to not be
| much, if at all), it is definitely more likely to be a dark-
| pattern to force hardware upgrades.
| speed_spread wrote:
| That's not just a dark pattern, it's the logical conclusion
| to Apple's entire business model. It's what you get for
| relying on the proprietary OS supplied by a hardware
| manufacturer. It's why Asahi Linux is so important.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And then he still couldn't use the third party software
| he says he depends on...
| Narishma wrote:
| I'm not sure I agree. Open source software also regularly
| drops support for old hardware and OSes.
| em3rgent0rdr wrote:
| "regularly" is doing a lot of work here. When Linux drops
| hardware support, we are talking about ancient hardware.
| An example of a regular drop: Linux 6.15 just a month ago
| dropped support for 486 (from 1989)!
| SlowTao wrote:
| Pretty much, you can still get modern distros that
| support 32bit PowerPC.
| teddyh wrote:
| Open source software drops hardware support only when
| there are nobody left who volunteers to support that
| hardware. When does this happen? It happens when there
| are not enough users left of that hardware.
|
| As long as there are enough users of some hardware, free
| software will support it, because the users of that
| hardware want it to.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Is "regularly" every 2-4 years, or longer? What are your
| options? With Apple you have none. It's really not a
| comparable situation.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| You mean besides the fact that they completely transitioned
| to a new processors and some of the new features use
| hardware that is only available on their ARM chips?
|
| Also he said that software from third parties also don't
| support the older OS so even if Apple did provide security
| updates, he would still be in the same place.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Depending on how much has changed in the interval,
| backporting security fixes can be completely trivial, very
| difficult, or anywhere in between. There may not even be a
| fix to backport, as not all vulnerabilities are still
| present in the latest release.
| lizknope wrote:
| I've got 3 Macbooks from 2008, 2012, and 2013. Apple dropped
| MacOS support years ago. They all run the latest Fedora Linux
| version with no problems.
|
| The screen on the MacBookPro10,2 is 2560x1600 which is still
| higher than a lot of brand new laptops. The latest version it
| will run is 10.15 from 2019. I know Apple switched to ARM but
| most people don't need a new faster computer. I stopped
| buying Apple computers because I want my computer supported
| more than 6 years.
|
| I do have 3 newer computers but these old Macbooks are kept
| at various relative's houses for when I visit and wnat my own
| Linux machine. They have no problems running a web browser
| and watching videos so why replace them?
| sapiogram wrote:
| > Modern GPUs have a rated lifespan in the 3-7 year range,
| depending on usage.
|
| That statement absolutely needs a source. Is "usage" 100% load
| 24/7? What _is_ the failure rate after 7 years? Are the
| failures unrepairable, i.e. not just a broken fan?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I've never heard of this and I was an Ethereum miner. We
| pushed the cards as hard as they would go and they seemed
| fine after. As long as the fan was still going they were
| good.
| SlowTao wrote:
| So Intel used to claim a 100,000+ hour life time on their
| chips. They didnt actually test them to this because that
| is 11.4 years. But it was basically saying, these things
| will last at full speed way beyond any reasonable life
| time. Many chip could probably go way beyond that.
|
| I think it was about 15 years back they stopped saying
| that. Once we passed the 28nm mark it started to become
| apparent that they couldnt really state that.
|
| It makes sense, as parts get smaller they will get more
| fragile from general usage.
|
| With your GPUs yeah they are probably still fine but they
| could already be half way through their life time, you
| wouldnt know it until failure point. Add in the silicon
| lotto and it gets more complicated.
| bgnn wrote:
| One thing to realize is the lifetime is a statistical
| thing.
|
| I design chips in modern tech nodes (currently using 2nm).
| What we get feom the fab is a statistical model of device
| failure modes. Aging is one of them. When transistors
| gradually age they get slower sue to increased threshold
| voltage. This eventually causes failure at a point where
| timing is tight. When will it happen varies greatly sue to
| initial conditions, exact conditions the chip was in(temp,
| vdd, number of on-off cycles, even the workload). After an
| agong failure the chip will still work if the clock freq is
| reduced. There are aging monitors on-chip sometimes which
| try to catch it early and scale down the clock.
|
| There are catastrophic failures too, like gate insulator
| breakdown, electromigration or mechanical failures of IO
| interconnect. The last one is orders of magnitude more
| likely than anything else these days.
| karmakaze wrote:
| _Every now and then, I get a heartfelt chuckle from HN._
|
| By 'Modern' they must mean latest generation, so we'll have
| to wait and see. I was imagining not using an RTX 5090 for 7
| years and find it doesn't work, or one used 24x7 for 3 years
| then failing.
| deuplonicus wrote:
| Just look at warranties, gotta go to Quadro series for
| industrial warranty lengths.
| wmf wrote:
| Yeah, chip aging is at max temperature, max current, and
| worst process corner. And it's nonlinear so running at <10%
| duty cycle could reduce aging to almost nothing.
| bgnn wrote:
| Electromigration and device aging are huge issues. I can't
| imagine a modern GPU having a lifetime longer than 3 years at
| 100C temperature.
|
| Though, it can be solved with redundancy at the cost of
| performance.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| This is just untrue, and you've provided no citation, either.
|
| The silicon gates in GPUs just don't wear out like that, not at
| that timescale. The only thing that sort of does is SSDs (and
| that's a write limit, which has existed for decades, not a new
| thing).
| Symmetry wrote:
| Electromigration tends to get worse with small sizes but also
| higher voltage and temperatures. I could see a GPU wearing
| out that quickly if it were overclocked enough, but stock
| consumer GPUs will last much longer than that.
| markhahn wrote:
| electromigration is real, but is it relevant?
|
| since electromigration is basically a matter of long, high-
| current interconnect, I guess I have been assuming it's
| merely designed around. By, for instance, having hundreds
| of power and ground pins, implying quite a robust on-chip
| distribution mesh, rather than a few high-current runs.
| SlowTao wrote:
| Wouldnt it depend on work loads? My GPU that kicks into high
| gear for maybe 2-3 hours a week will probably do decades of
| use before chip degradation kicks in. The power capacitors
| will give out long before the silicon does.
|
| But it someone is running an LLM 24 hours a day, might not go
| for as long.
|
| We are flying blind, both on those claiming short life span
| and those who are not.
| colonial wrote:
| > Modern GPUs have a rated lifespan in the 3-7 year range,
| depending on usage.
|
| I seriously doubt this is true. The venerable GTX 1060 came out
| 9 years ago, and still sees fairly widespread use based on the
| Steam hardware survey. According to you, many (most?) of those
| cards should have given out years ago.
| markhahn wrote:
| you're thinking of what, electromigration?
|
| what is the age-related failure mode you're referring to?
|
| or are you merely referring to warranty period? (which has more
| to do with support costs, like firmware - not expected
| failures.)
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > One of my concerns is we're reaching a point where the loss
| of a fab due to a crisis -- war, natural disaster, etc. -- may
| cause systemic collapse.
|
| This is absolutely ridiculous. Even if Taiwan sank today we
| really don't need those fabs for anything critical. i strongly
| suspect we could operate the entire supply chain actually
| necessary for human life with just z80s or some equivalent.
| orefalo wrote:
| factor in power usage reduction, and it still works
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Has "Moore's Law" been consistent since it reared its head, or
| has it been constantly tweaked to suit the narrative of it still
| being correct?
| WillAdams wrote:
| It was good up until 1975:
|
| https://www.livescience.com/technology/electronics/what-is-m...
|
| since then, there have been some adjustments, but it still
| holds as a prediction of a general trend since as noted in that
| article:
|
| >One reason for the success of Moore's prediction is that it
| became a guide -- almost a target -- for chip designers.
|
| but as noted:
|
| >The days when we could double the number of transistors on a
| chip every two years are far behind us. However, Moore's Law
| has acted as a pacesetter in a decades-long race to create
| chips that perform more complicated tasks quicker, especially
| as our expectations for continual progress continue.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| I've always wondered what the classic Moore's-law curve looks
| like when you take the FLOPs per constant dollar, totaled across
| the whole R&D/manufacturing/operation process. Sure, you can keep
| investing more and more into increasingly cutting-edge or power-
| hungry processes, but at some point it isn't worth the money, and
| money will generally be the ultimate limiting factor. Not that
| we'll ever really get these numbers, alas.
| cubefox wrote:
| The author makes a related point:
|
| > How small or fast or efficient a transistor can be made in a
| lab is of absolutely no relevance if they can't be mass-
| manufactured at a price anyone is willing to pay.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Lowering the cost makes many more things economically viable.
| (I'm not talking about the fabs here, I'm talking about the
| customers.) If a new step drops the FLOPS per dollar to the
| customer, it may create sufficient demand volume to pay for the
| R&D and the fab, even if those costs are enormous.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Well, yeah. Moore's "law" is subject to the actual laws of
| physics, and the linearity of advances in transistor density over
| time is due to humans making it so - human chosen targets for
| each next generation, but as we come up against the laws of
| physics and cost of battling them then of course this linear
| trend will become an asymptote.
|
| Clearly what is driving advances in compute nowadays is not
| single-chip transistor density but instead multi-chiplet
| datacenter processors and much higher level multi-chip
| connectivity such as TPU pods and AI datacenter designs.
| cubefox wrote:
| One point the article doesn't make explicit: The exponential
| decrease in transistor size ([?]Moore's law) was historically
| only valuable because it also caused
|
| 1) exponentially decreasing cost per transistor and
|
| 2) exponentially decreasing power consumption per transistor.
|
| However, in recent years 1) has generally weakened. At some
| point, the price per transistor will no longer decrease for
| smaller process nodes, and even start to increase. Then making
| smaller transistors could only be justified for power constrained
| chips that benefit from 2). But even this has only limited value.
|
| So at some point, producing chips with smaller transistors will
| no longer make economic sense, even if transistor size could
| technically still be decreased at a similar rate as in the past.
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| I've been reading posts with equally daunting arguments since
| 1992 on Usenet.
|
| As the article points out, Moore's Law was principally about the
| number of features. Today, the "Intel ISA" portion of one of
| their CPU cores is dwarfed by caches and vector & machine
| learning processing facilities devoted to that same core. Off-
| chip memory access and other I/O is still a huge factor for why
| we don't have 10 GHz processors yet. These days we are devoting
| silicon resources to slowing things down - due to previous
| performance designs that turned out to have flaws (SPECTRE,
| Meltdown, etc).
|
| The features per nm just keep on a-coming.
| brookst wrote:
| Yeah I feel like this article should have (1990)
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Every obstacle he talks about does seem daunting, and yet I had
| the same reaction: "haven't we been hearing this for decades?"
|
| The most persuasive argument is the one that he puts in the
| beginning; at the current rate, we are fast approaching the
| point where there are no companies left who can afford a new
| fab.
| timewizard wrote:
| > is still a huge factor for why we don't have 10 GHz
| processors yet
|
| You're on air cooled silicon. You were never going past 4GHz in
| this configuration. This was an understood limit well before we
| hit it.
| vorgol wrote:
| The last sentence should be first, to put things in context:
|
| > We're entering the post-Moore era, I'm busy designing chips
| (and maybe a fab) for this new world. I'd be happy to talk to
| investors.
|
| We were told in uni in the early 2000s that post-Moore era was
| just few years from then.
| kloop wrote:
| When people not super into hardware say Moore's Law, they mean
| Dennard Scaling.
|
| Which did roughly end in the mid 2000s. That's why we've spent
| so much time parallelizing in the past 20 years rather than
| just expecting increases in single threaded perf
| chillingeffect wrote:
| So tired of people getting this wrong. Moore's law is about
| NUMBER of transistors, NOT DENSITY!
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
|
| It tells us more about market and ppl's hunger for
| apps/cabilities than fabrication and physics, although
| fabrication quality is indirectly related through cost.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Moore's law assumes photolithography of some form. There are
| other ways to make chips, and some of them might become viable
| for mass production soon. Those methods place individual atoms,
| so smaller features isn't a problem.
|
| I'm waiting somewhat impatiently for AtomicSemi to make some
| announcements.
| markhahn wrote:
| ugh, "scraping the bottom of the barrel" makes me think this is
| motivated.
|
| especially after describing all the other desperate scaling
| techniques in the past - and that history argues for the need
| (almost manifest destiny in the ML sense) to do these things.
| timewizard wrote:
| > This makes a valuable asset that would otherwise be
| prohibitively expensive affordable to a much larger portion of
| the population.
|
| They just have to deal with less efficiency and higher
| maintenance costs. You have not discovered a free lunch, sorry.
| Symmetry42 wrote:
| RE: inversion and speed Totally fair critique--but HeartMOS(tm)
| doesn't just slow down to save energy. It reengineers inversion
| to enable both adiabatic flow and GHz-class speed.
|
| Here's how:
|
| S-Well = Symmetric Inversion CMOS n/p wells are asymmetrical by
| default--different V<sub>th</sub>, different m. That imbalance
| kills any attempt at clean energy recovery. HeartMOS fixes this
| with a balanced doping profile (p+ base, tilted retrograde n/p
| implants) to hit matched threshold voltages and drive currents.
| That's symmetric inversion--engineered for resonance.
|
| Fast, Not Fragile Instead of RC step waves (CMOS square pulses),
| HeartMOS runs trapezoidal ph/!ph waveforms at 6GHz, 8-phase
| pipelined. Think smooth clock rails, not bang-bang toggling. Less
| dV/dt = less heat = no thermal throttling. It's not just
| efficient--it's sustainable at scale.
|
| Bottom line: Adiabatic [?] slow. Asymmetric inversion = slow.
| Symmetric = harmonic = fast.
| Symmetry42 wrote:
| RE: inversion and speed Totally fair critique--but HeartMOS(tm)
| doesn't just slow down to save energy. It reengineers inversion
| to enable both adiabatic flow and GHz-class speed.
|
| Here's how:
|
| S-Well = Symmetric Inversion CMOS n/p wells are asymmetrical by
| default--different V<sub>th</sub>, different m. That imbalance
| kills any attempt at clean energy recovery. HeartMOS fixes this
| with a balanced doping profile (p+ base, tilted retrograde n/p
| implants) to hit matched threshold voltages and drive currents.
| That's symmetric inversion--engineered for resonance.
|
| Fast, Not Fragile Instead of RC step waves (CMOS square pulses),
| HeartMOS runs trapezoidal ph/!ph waveforms at 6GHz, 8-phase
| pipelined. Think smooth clock rails, not bang-bang toggling. Less
| dV/dt = less heat = no thermal throttling. It's not just
| efficient--it's sustainable at scale.
|
| Bottom line: Adiabatic [?] slow. Asymmetric inversion = slow.
| Symmetric = harmonic = fast.
|
| Patent Pending - "HeartMOS(tm) -- Symmetric Semiconductor Device
| with Co-Optimized Doping for Reversible Computing"
| https://sites.tufts.edu/tcal/publications/hotgauge/
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