Intel's Grove warns of the end of Moore's Law

The Inquirer ^ | 12/11/2002 | Paul Hales

[GeneD]

One of the major technical headaches facing chipmaker Intel is the leaking of current from inactive processors, company chairman Andy Grove told an audience at International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco yesterday.

"Current is becoming a major factor and a limiter on how complex we can build chips," said Grove. He said the company’ engineers "just can’t get rid of" power leakage.

The problem of leakage threatens the future validity of Moores Law. As chips become more powerful and draw more power, leakage tends to increase. The industry is used to power leakage rates of up to fifteen per cent, but chips constructed of increasing numbers of transistors can suffer power leakage of up to 40 per cent said Grove. In chips made up of a billion transistors may leak between 60 and 70 Watts of power, he warned. The power is largely dissipated as heat causing cooling problems for powerful chips.

While Intel is seeking ways to design chips with multiple cores with improved design and better insulators, Grove suggested that Moore Law regarding the doubling of transistor densities every couple of years will be redundant by the end of the decade. Chip makers will have to make more efficient use of the transistor in order to deliver ever increasing performance, he suggested.

Grove also addressed the diminished likelihood of an upturn in the chip industry in the near future. "Over the course of the past year (the industry) has been bounding along on the bottom," he said, but he warned that the threat of a "war" on Iraq doesn’t bode well for the future employment rate in the US and a may spark a consequent "meltdown" in some South American economies.

The industry "was operating, in retrospect, way ahead of the underlying demand," he said in his keynote speech to the conference. "The excess of the latter 1990s was so much bigger than previous excesses," he confessed.

Grove also later warned that the trend of migrating chip manufacturing to far eastern fabs could shift the balance eastwards. "It is easy to project," he said, "that the interdependence becomes more one-sided, with an adverse impact on our educational system because so much of the university funding comes from industry. There is a spiral there in the wrong direction."

The trend also carried "huge" implications for defence, he warned.

[Dark Knight]

This is why I love FR

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/803862/posts

Silicon vs. cheaper organic substitute

Don't bet the farm on the end of Moore's Law!


DK

[brbethke]

Hence the water and liquid nitrogen cooled supercomputers.

We use fluorinert. It's safer for circuitry than water and easier to handle than cryogenic coolants.

[Moonman62]

The hypesters are gonna hafta find a different mantra to chant. Y2K is OVER.

The capitalists will find new opportunities to create and expand markets. It's your type of attitude that keeps us from reaching full employment.

[Willie Green]

New technologies will get us past this bump in the road. You ain't seen nuthin' yet...in terms of speed or capacity.

Oh there'll always be a future market for improved microprocessors and chips.
It's just that they've reached that phase in the product life cycle where Intel may want to evaluate other strategies for product differentiation.
They've already gone from a sensible numbering system to glitzy, sexy, but meaningless, names for their chips.
Perhaps adding a choice of bold designer colors is an option. They could even get into some licensing arrangements with Disney to put Mickey's image on their product. That's always a big seller.

[Willie Green]

It's your type of attitude that keeps us from reaching full employment.

Yep, I exert tremendous influence over the market.

I'm a consumer.

[js1138]

IBM just announced a new, extremely small transistor. And, of course, there are movements towards molecular transistors. And even quantum computers that can store multiple "bits" in a single particle. Reminds me of core memory, which I studied in the Army a few decades ago. A single magnetic core could store multiple states, depending on how you read it.

[brbethke]

Yeah. What this article is really announcing is that Intel has hit a major roadblock on their chosen path of one monolithic, overclocked, proprietary "Intel inside" chip. There are still plenty of other ways to improve system performance; for example, by improving bandwidth to memory.

[Dead Dog]

Grove also later warned that the trend of migrating chip manufacturing to far eastern fabs could shift the balance eastwards. "It is easy to project," he said, "that the interdependence becomes more one-sided, with an adverse impact on our educational system because so much of the university funding comes from industry. There is a spiral there in the wrong direction."

The trend also carried "huge" implications for defence, he warned.

Grove is the first CEO I've ever heard mention defence implications or any adverse effects of outsourcing.

[SauronOfMordor]

Chips are two dimensional. The future of Moore's law will be in figuring out a way to go three-dimensional.

Stacking layers will multiply the heat-dissipation problem. One approach might be to start getting away from wiring (with it's parasitic capacitance problems) and interconnect chips via on-chip laser. Then you could arrange a set of chips into a cube (or N-sided polyhedron), and have each of the six sides be able to communicate thru the inside of the cube via light-beam

[Psycho_Bunny]

The good ones do and Negative vs. Positive pressure systems has been a topic of conversation since the invention of the internet.  There are many good sites that deal only with the subject of PC cooling.

Lian Li makes an excellent 2-in/3-out aluminum case.  Several other companies have taken to copying their design.

And input filters have been around forever but, they tend to be nominal because the better the filter, the less the air flow.

The case below is a Lian Li 65...you can see the rear fan and the intake for the Enermax power supply.  There is a blow hole fan just out of sight, next to the power supply.  Down at the bottom front you can see part of one of the hard drives lying on it's side.  It's one of four that are positioned behind the dual-intakes/filter.

 

[Wolfie]

Guess it wasn't much of a "Law" then, was it?

[Dead Dog]

"Bigger, better, faster" has reached the point of diminishing returns on investment for most consumers.

That is just what Boeing started preaching after contracting the McDonnell parasite from the carcass of Douglas. There will always be a market for bigger, better, faster. We have by no measure run out of uses for faster computers.

[SauronOfMordor]

And even quantum computers that can store multiple "bits" in a single particle.

The current issue of Electronic Engineering Times reports extreme power-consumption problems with quantum chips, with researchers not even close to anything practical.

[js1138]

I've built two Lian Li PCs. Finally I don't have to sacrifice blood to get everything put together. And they have changed my perception of the word "thumbscrew".

[ctdonath2]

But remember: those water, liquid nitrogen, and $500-per-gallon-liquid-hydrocarbon cooled supercomputers of the past are now cheap laptop computers cooled by itty bitty little fans. There is (even if unwritten) a law of reduction in thermal diffusion required per megahertz over time.

What runs hot now will run cool later.

Reports of the death of Moore's law are greatly exaggerated.

[Willie Green]

We have by no measure run out of uses for faster computers.

Nor have we surpassed the need for more energy efficient lightbulbs.

[aShepard]

Thanks! So why don't the mainstream PC makers pick up on the input technology?? Too expensive for the extra cooling fans???

I would think that clean components would allow the air to get to the heat source much more efficiently without the layer of insulating dust.

[lepton]

Chips are two dimensional. The future of Moore's law will be in figuring out a way to go three-dimensional.

Esp[ecially since one of the big reasons for putting everything on one chip is that the clock speeds are making the effective distance throught the transistor arrays an obstacle as well - enough so that putting little transmitters to send clock from one side of the chip to the other is being considered.

[lepton]

They've already gone from a sensible numbering system to glitzy, sexy, but meaningless, names for their chips.

That was a trademark issue. One cannot trademark numbers.

[Dead Dog]

I don't need them, and until priced drop, I won't contribute to the demand for them. I like BRIGHT light personally. 100 Watts of liberty.