Moore's Law Ending? No Problem
By Rob Aitken, Arm
EETimes (March 27, 2019)
An Arm fellow describes, "how I learned to stop worrying and love the end of Moore's Law."
At CES in January 2019, Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, said what most of us in the tech business had already considered and accepted: Moore’s Law, which predicts regular increases in the computing power of silicon chips, is dead.
Today, the smallest commercially produced chips have feature sizes that are a minuscule 7 nm. As transistors get closer to atomic scale, it’s getting harder to shrink them further. Many believe that today’s most advanced transistor design, the FinFET, can’t get below 5 nm without a major rethink—and that even 5 nm may be prohibitively expensive. That means, in turn, that it’s harder to double the density of transistors on a silicon chip every 24 months, as Moore’s Law predicts.
The death of Moore’s Law has major implications, as a slowdown in performance improvements could hit some computing applications hard. Horst Simon, Deputy Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, helps rank the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world twice a year. He notes that while year-over-year increases remain significant—annual performance growth hovers at around 1.6x per year—there has been a marked reduction from the 1990’s and early 2000’s when annual improvements regularly exceeded 2x.
E-mail This Article | Printer-Friendly Page |
Related News
Breaking News
- Arm revenues up 47%; shares fall
- Sondrel awarded new Video Processor ASIC design and supply contract for a leading provider of High-Performance Video systems
- X-Silicon Announces a NEW Low-Power Open-Standard Vulkan-Enabled C-GPU™ - a RISC-V Vector CPU Infused with GPU ISA and AI/ML acceleration in a Single Processor Core
- Softbank reported to be in talks to buy Graphcore
- VESA Elevates PC and Laptop HDR Display Performance with Updated DisplayHDR Specification
Most Popular
- Synopsys Enters Definitive Agreement to Sell its Software Integrity Business to Clearlake Capital and Francisco Partners
- Fabless semiconductor startup Mindgrove launches India's first indigenously designed commercial high-performance MCU chip
- sureCore announces successful tape-out of cryogenic IP demonstrator
- Siemens delivers end-to-end silicon quality assurance for next-generation IC designs with new Solido IP Validation Suite
- Announcing Availability of Silicon-Proven 12bit 1Msps SAR ADC IP Core for Whitebox Licensing with Royalty Free