Posted on 12/11/2002 7:48:14 AM PST by 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.
Have they tried "Depends"?
I suspect that sometime in the next ten years, economics will force a look at multiple processors. We have already off-loaded video and sound processing. The most pressing current need is for a high performance disk storage system for PCs.
I hope we move away from the idea that everything has to run on a single chip.
Subscribe to Maximum PC and you will see home-brew PCs running overclocked and using active water cooling of CPU, memory, and video chips. One I saw had a water pump, a huge radiator and multiple fans to blow air thru the radiator. The box was clear plastic as was the water tank. I thought it'd look better with some goldfish swimming in the tank.
The possibilities of a leak make me wince.
--Boris
Yeah; IBM thought the world could use maybe two of its early mainframes.
New technologies will get us past this bump in the road. You ain't seen nuthin' yet...in terms of speed or capacity.
Eventually your PDA will contain more raw computing power than every single computer currently on the planet.
--Boris
100% correct, my friend. For the vast majority of PC users, speed has outstripped the need for speed and is now merely a gamer's brag. And the market has indeed matured, and with such maturity, the expansion now is in the direction of digital control of convenience.
For instance, all those "homes of the future" you saw on various TV reports with virtually everything in them being computer-controller are now going to become much more common, as ordinary devices become microprocessor-controlled. New micropchip applications are being marketed to take advantage of manufacturing capacity now that the PC market is mature.
We just bought a small electric space heater for the living room - a nifty device to take the occasional chill out of the room. These ceramic space heaters normally come with a thermostat and a blower knob. No more. THIS one is microchip-controlled with an LCD display AND a REMOTE CONTROL. It's only a very small step from there to an entire houseful of these heaters, all controlled by one remote (radio signals over house wiring). That would then give you the ultimate in zoned heating, with each room as its own zone.
Dishwashers are now all microchip. Ranges and many fridges are, too. Once you make the appliances WORK under chip control, it's only a very small step to network them. The company that comes up with the easiest-to-use networking method will make a nice piece of change in the Chipping Of Convenience.
I used to laugh at the ridiculous number of things that went to chip control, but it's no longer funny. There is an actual good reason for it, which is the use of capacity to expand marketing targets.
5 years from now, we'll see chip control of virtually anything that plugs in. Power tools, lamps, toasters, you name it.
Michael
Moore's law shows the folly of projecting exponential growth. Nothing can continue to double forever. Exponential growth is a popular tool for scaremongers such as population explosion, oil shortages, and even global warming. Of course the electronics world was gonna run into physical limits to Moore's Law.
Get memory speed back up to equal that of the processor, and we can really move forward again.
I've even heard bragging about an L3 cache for goodness sake!! Talk about headed in the wrong direction.
I don't know. I mean if you have to load the dishwasher anyways, is it really that much harder to press the button to start it. I just don't see people lining up to automate their homes. It is easier to turn on the light when you enter the room than it is to try to find the remote to turn on the light. The area of growth will be in home entertainment, not automation.
Yeah, but instead of just Solitaire, Windows now comes with Freecell, Hearts, Minesweeper, and Spider Solitaire. Progress ain't cheap.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.