End of Moore's law?

[Shankar Viswanathan]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Rich Braun <richb-RBmg6HWzfGThzJAekONQAQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> There are two other key factor:  cost and competition in the computer
> manufacturing business.  With each new generation of microchips, the doubling
> of performance comes with it a doubling of cost--of the factories required to
> make them.  Intel now has to pay roughly a billion dollars to build a fab
> plant.  (This compares to $15 to $50 million for factories at the time of
> Kurzweil's predictions.)

That's an excellent point -- the reasons I think Moore's law will slow
down a bit in the near future are two fold:
  1. It is getting much harder to shrink transistor sizes as we go to
22nm and beyond. It will take extra R&D to reliably manufacture chips
at those feature sizes
  2. The cost involved in upgrading all the fab equipment to the next
generation is > $1bn as Rich points out. So companies will want to
amortize that cost over a larger number of chips, which means they may
keep around that equipment longer.

> What about corporate buyers?  I personally believe that industry innovations
> since the first TRS-80 came out 30+ years ago have been led primarily by
> consumers.  That trend continues today:  graphics adapters and subsystems are
> front-and-center where the action is, not just today but for the past few
> years.  VMware and its cousins can only go so far to drive demand on the
> corporate side.  At my own workplace, demand is coming not from our internal
> requirements but from--*consumers* who want to download more and more video.

Spot on again! AMD's next gen "Fusion" chips (and Intel's future chips
too) will have graphics on the same die: so we'll now have multiple
CPU cores, DRAM controller, I/O subsystem (PCIe links) and graphics
all on a single piece of silicon. By "graphics" I mean not only the 3D
engine, but also dedicated units for media decode and encode too --
all meant to improve media performance at much lower power levels (you
want to be able to watch 2 full HD movies without plugging in, don't
you?).

Shankar
(Disclosure: I work for AMD, but views above are my own)