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I don't want this to be a troll post. But I'm giving an opinion.

Why are some people in the computer field scared so about Moore's Law ending? Why is it so bad about the idea that once I get a new piece of technology, it is no longer obsolete as quicker? And, I would rather avoid a situation in the future where computers power surpasses human intelligence, thank you.

But why is the end of Moore's Law, as it applies to CPU power, a bad thing?

Which people in the computer field are scared about Moore's Law ending? It obviously can't hold true indefinitely.

Many websites and blogs are predicting the end of Moore's Law. I just did a search googling "Moore's law ending"

Yes, as I said it is obvious that it has to come to an end some time. But you said people were "scared" of this. I don't think they are.

iansjack wrote:But you said people were "scared" of this. I don't think they are.

I would venture to say most people I have a close association with aren't even aware of Moore's law, much less concerned about it. However, chip manufacturers would definitely be concerned about this, but could it be;

SeanMc wrote:Many websites and blogs are predicting the end of Moore's Law.

these people need to write about something. So not unlike media networks, that need to come up with some sort of content, they resort to "reality tv". These blogs and websites existence is usually predicated upon some sort of revenue stream that is either user supported or by advertisers. Historically, sensationalistic content has always drawn attention and a sites value is directly proportional to the number of visits.

inasjack wrote:Which people in the computer field are scared about Moore's Law ending? It obviously can't hold true indefinitely.

I believe it will hold true indefinitely, not as it applies to number of transistors/die or thier density, but maybe discrete purpose ICs.

Even Gordon had to revise his law, which really is more of a concept than anything else, to instead of doubling every year in 1965, to every second year by 1975. If in 2015 it's revised to every 10 yrs then we should be pretty safe for awhile.

TightCoderEx wrote:I believe it will hold true indefinitely, not as it applies to number of transistors/die or thier density, but maybe discrete purpose ICs.

Somewhere in roughly a century we'll have to have more transistors than atoms to keep up with Moore's law. I think we'll ditch it long before that happens.

Indeed. Exponential growth is a tough act to keep up.

SeanMc wrote:Why are some people in the computer field scared so about Moore's Law ending?

May be they are scared of an end of a happy life. There is an exciting new technology every now and then in a happy life. Life would be less happier if there will be no such stream of achievements.

Yeah, because your new iPhone wouldn't be faster than the previous one.

Nanotechnology is the solution though. So is quantum computing.

The end of Moore's Law is not synonymous with the end of technological innovation.

As stated other technologies will replace current.

But as for our current tech and Moore's Law, we hit a road block in pure CPU speed - check out the history of the Pentium 4, which Intel stated would reach 10GHz - but we supplemented speed with threw-put (CPU cores) in which we have been keeping fairly close to Moore's Law (we have 15 core, 30 thread CPUs from Intel (Not counting the Phi) and 16 core CPUs from AMD - and these numbers WILL keep growing)

Then to move from CPUs, look at the GPUs we have now with thousands of cores and gigabytes of memory (average 2-3GB)

Next improvement to the CPU should (IMO) take the concept of a GPU and have "worker / number crunching" cores to process FPU and Integer math quickly and in a paralleled way - and of course 16 or 32 CPU cores to handle them all. (Would also make software rendered graphics better again)

BASICFreak wrote:But as for our current tech and Moore's Law, we hit a road block in pure CPU speed.

Moore's Law as far as I remember states that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years. It doesn't say what those transistors should do. Afaik there isn't a standard size die to measure transistor count off.

With extensions, multi-core, big caches and stuff the transistor count has kept it's course. But it does make you wonder if it isn't a self fulfilling prophecy. In one way or another I think Moore's Law will stand long after I do.

And even if it would officially be declared obsolete...as a y2k-bug survivor... I know we'll manage.

What is the point of Moore's Law if the software itself isn't getting faster? Powerful hardware softens developers. The most obvious example - videogames. 11 years ago developers had to develop games for PS2 (300mhz CPU, 32 ram). And they had no fail option. They had to release ready-to-use on day one product.
What we have now? Projects with close to none optimization, day one patches, etc. Though I'm a little bit wrong here - it's not only because of powerful hardware, but also because of internet access.

Well, i think that,
when AI gets developed and done, it would probably upgrade itself how much it could.
At some point it will be so powerful that it could destroy the whole universe, or
it would help humans.
If it helps humans, i believe that average processor strength would be about (10^100)^(10^100) times bigger than it was.

iansjack wrote:But you said people were "scared" of this. I don't think they are.

I wouldn't say that necessarily. Maybe the word "scared" is a bit strong, but the semiconductor industry and the research behind it is putting quite the push behind extending it as far as they can. They have a vested interest to make it continue, and while people may not be scared about Gordon Moore's observations not holding accurate, they certainly are scared about the safety of the money they've put on that bet.

Back in ye olden days, the conventional notion was that you take a photomask of a circuit, sorta like a negative, and shoot UV light through it to knock out photoresist, which is a UV-photosensitive coating applied to the wafer. That imprinting of the pattern then allowed you to apply the various coatings to the wafer needed to make the transistors, such as N/P doping, dielectric and insulation, metallization, etc. After 30-40 exposure and treatment passes, you wiresaw and package the wafers and a new batch of x86 devices has seen their first sunlight.

This worked until the industry hit the point where they would be required to make features that are smaller than the wavelength of the light coming out of the source they were using, sort of like how the microwaves in your oven can't "see" out the holes of the mesh in the door. First it was 405nm UV lamps, then it was 248nm KrF lasers and then 193nm ArF lasers. Then we hit the point where we could no longer punch lower, so we began using specialized interference techniques when generating the photomask patterns to cause the light to cancel out and make the effective patterns. Getting to 22nm has been done with 193nm light. The electrical physics boys had joo-jooed the system and were painting really tiny lines with a much bigger paintbrush.

The issue is that even that can't continue, and the 22nm fabrication nodes really proved that. Hence, extreme ultraviolet, or EUV. EUV's been in the works for years and it's behind schedule, but it's finally starting to roll out. The premise here is that you need to imprint the wafers with 13.5nm light, which is interestingly enough a) emitted by no matter under normal conditions, and b) absorbed by >99.9% of all matter. The funny principle here is that the most efficient manner of generating EUV source for the lithographic steppers involves taking a sub-millimeter molten drop of tin in high vacuum and ramming it with 100kW of infrared laser power. The resulting plasma will emit EUV, and as of some conferences I attended in 2013, the record output was about 40W of light. Combine that with the fact that the whole situation must take place under high-vacuum pump-down so it's an order of magnitude slower, and you get a real piece-of-work solution.

All that is required in order to potentially hit 13nm or lower. I'd say the industry at large is probably afraid of some sort of end-of-Moore's-law boogeyman, seeing that they've put billions upon billions of dollars of research into technology with less than a 1% efficiency rating. When Moore's law begins to cross the threshold on the way out, a lot of people in a lot of places are going to have to sit down and think real hard about ways to survive in an industry that tends to sustain itself on the notion that "better stuff" will continue to be released year in and year out.