On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 10:04:25PM +1100, Philip Sutton wrote: > I raised this issue with a colleague who said that he wondered whether this > extrapolation would work because of the dynamics of economic cost. He
There are several developments which will terminate Moore in semiconductor photolithography sometime soon (within a decade?). Each new generation fab is is getting considerably more expensive than previous. Current bane of chips is power density, which is a function of leak currents. However, there are alternative computation paradigms and fabrication methods, as well as achitecture tweaks, which do not have such hard limits. Whether these technologies will arrive on time to prevent a discontinuity in affordable integration density (what Moore is all about) is not yet obvious. Some interesting technologies are SWNT wires and transistors, other nanowire types, spintronics (MRAM and spintronic logic), reversible computing, quantum dot self assembly, and multilayer organic electronics. This is computing, but not as we know it, Jim. > argued that CPUs have been getting more expensive in absolute terms (not > relative to performance) as their capacity has increased and he thought that > this trend of CPU price increases would continue. He said he thought that > the > reasons that computers have been getting cheaper as whole systems has > come close to running its course leaving the rising price of the CPUs as the > dominant trend. He therefore thought that Moore's Law might run out of puff > - > not because of technology limits but because of cost escalations. Cost escalation is a technology limit. Moore's law is "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year" See moorespaper.pdf in ftp://download.intel.com/research/silicon/ . > Since I had no idea whether he was right (my subjective impression had been > that the long run trajectory for the price of computers was a long run > decline) I > thought I should ask whether anyone has a view on my colleague's argument. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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