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.

[dc27]

You are so right. I have been working with magnetic storage for 10 years. I have been hearing that magnetic storage will be dead any year now for 10 years.

[Willie Green]

I like BRIGHT light personally. 100 Watts of liberty.

Light intensity is measured in lumens, not watts.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Thanks! So why don't the mainstream PC makers pick up on the input technology??

They honestly don't need to:  design the average system well enough and it will virtually 'cool itself'.  Personally, I've never seen a heat problem on a mid-range Dell, HP or Compaq type system.

The problem of noise is enough of an issue to motivate intelligent heat solutions and if you use a mainstream stock PC as it was intended you'll never have a heat problem.

Where intake fans become an issue is on the high-end, high-speed machines - where you're sacrificing quiet for performance.  Or on workgroup servers with dual-processors and hard disk RAIDs.

As for the dust...well...everything has to be cleaned at some point.  PCs as well.  Just keep them off the floor and out of the "wood sanding shed" and you usually don't have to clean it but once every year or so.

[Bush2000]

The market is never saturated at the high end. Companies will continue to invest in ever-faster processors as a means of improving their productivity. That will never change.

[Bush2000]

PCs are indeed moving toward liquid cooling, as weird as that sounds.

[tm22721]

programmers take advantage of super hardware in order to write sloppy apps

Ding Ding We have a winner !

Object oriented programming has made interactive apps into bloatware. When in doubt, make another class object or another periodic thread. Layer after layer of subroutine calls just to access a single parameter. Encapsulation run amuck.

Memory and processor time are cheap until you run out of them.

BUMP

[Bush2000]

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

I agree. Chipmakers like Grove would prefer if they weren't slaves to Moore's law. But competition requires that they do. He's in denial. Human ingenuity is boundless.

[Bush2000]

Object oriented programming has made interactive apps into bloatware. When in doubt, make another class object or another periodic thread. Layer after layer of subroutine calls just to access a single parameter. Encapsulation run amuck. Memory and processor time are cheap until you run out of them.

Huh? Those kinds of generalizations are, simply put, silly. Object oriented programming isn't any less efficient or bloated than procedural programming. The primary reason for bloatware is feature bloat -- trying to pack ever more features into the same applications year after year. Word and Excel are written in C, not C++. And, despite that fact, their footprints have grown steadily over the years due to feature-adds.

[Dead Dog]

But power is what gets the green weenies panties in a bind. It was a gaff man, a joke.

[Revolting cat!]

But you need a fine grained OS that supports many light weight threads which is going to be the next move in OS technology.

Yep, and VMS did that 15 years ago!

[expatpat]

3D doesn't help the heat problem, in fact it makes it worse.
The circuits in the middle of the sandwich have trouble getting rid of their generated heat.

[Willie Green]

The market is never saturated at the high end.

Well, I've already stated that there is always room for technological improvement and advancement.
That holds true for any product.
I simply think that the mass market has shifted and will never return to the frantic gold-rush days of the '90s.
Frankly, I don't know why so many feel obligated to state that there's always a need for something a little better. Sheesh, that's obvious.
But hyperventilating about it ain't gonna reinflate the bubble.
I suppose the constant drumbeat of the hucksters simply inflicted permanent brain damage on the Nintendo addicts.

[expatpat]

Trouble is: Grove's remarks apply to memory chips just as well as to processor chips.

[jpl]

The near future of I.T. isn't in processors, it's in the much-needed areas of expanding the broadband industry and wireless networking.

[Mr. K]

Once, After a frustrating day of programming, I decided to liquid cool my PC with the remainder of my JOLT cola. The college was not amused and I almost didn't graduate under a cloud of suspicion...

[Bush2000]

LMFAO! Ah, yes. Jolt is supposed to cool you -- not your computer. ;-p

[TheJollyRoger]

Home-based chip controls allow another key ability: power management. The imbedded controllers in each device can cause your hot water heater to wait until the 'fridge compressor is idle before heating up the water...thereby reducing your peak power demands...and lowering your utility bills.

The next step in the same vision would be to LAN every house on the block to help reduce peak power loads for EVERYONE. The utility reserve capacity demands are lessened, the utility bills for the LAN'ed homes are lower, and the greens get to brag about lower atmospheric emissions.

I love it when a plan comes together (Mr.T).

[krb]

I love it when a plan comes together (Mr.T).

That was Hannibal.

[anymouse]

Another classic quote of management hubris, like the IBM quote about only a need for a few hundred computers in the World. This is more a statement of Intel waning as the premier processor maker. When AMD releases the "Hammer" it is going to nail Grove's sorry hide to the wall.

[The KG9 Kid]

Quit yo jibba jabba.