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.
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