03.10.2020 02:54 AM
Preparing for the end of Moore's Law
*It was never really a "law" and more of a social expectation by the stakeholders. Why did they double it all the time? Because everybody said they could double it. Also, Moore's Law has been "dying" for a long time now… the place where it's really dying is inside the PC, which is no longer the dominant platform of computation.
After all, if you want your computing power to double, you can just go to somebody's cloud and temporarily hire twice as much power. It's not like the ability to compute has been delimited. No, it's the expectation of improvement" that is delimited – things don't "naturally" get "better" any more. The "power user" has become the client of Big Tech. That's what the death of Moore's Law means culturally.
*As this article points out, there are at least a hundred different, clever ways in which the technical performance of computers can still be made to improve. There's even stuff like quantum computing which is barely describable as computation. But nobody is ready for a world where powerful computers don't matter much, because the fix is effectively in; no matter how much extra computation is deployed, the stakeholders know how to deploy that power in their own interests. At least, they think they do.
The Revolution has eaten its young
(…)
Nonetheless, Intel — one of those three chipmakers — isn’t expecting a funeral for Moore’s Law anytime soon. Jim Keller, who took over as Intel’s head of silicon engineering in 2018, is the man with the job of keeping it alive. He leads a team of some 8,000 hardware engineers and chip designers at Intel. When he joined the company, he says, many were anticipating the end of Moore’s Law. If they were right, he recalls thinking, “that’s a drag” and maybe he had made “a really bad career move.”
But Keller found ample technical opportunities for advances. He points out that there are probably more than a hundred variables involved in keeping Moore’s Law going, each of which provides different benefits and faces its own limits. It means there are many ways to keep doubling the number of devices on a chip — innovations such as 3D architectures and new transistor designs.
These days Keller sounds optimistic. He says he has been hearing about the end of Moore’s Law for his entire career. After a while, he “decided not to worry about it.” He says Intel is on pace for the next 10 years, and he will happily do the math for you: 65 billion (number of transistors) times 32 (if chip density doubles every two years) is 2 trillion transistors. “That’s a 30 times improvement in performance,” he says, adding that if software developers are clever, we could get chips that are a hundred times faster in 10 years.
Still, even if Intel and the other remaining chipmakers can squeeze out a few more generations of even more advanced microchips, the days when you could reliably count on faster, cheaper chips every couple of years are clearly over. That doesn’t, however, mean the end of computational progress….
https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2020/03/preparing-end-moores-law/