Moore's law in danger (doubling of CPU circuits each year)

[Ayashoka]

Moore's law -circuits on chips would double every year is coming under danger from 'thermal noise'

Physicsweb - news article

As the transistor size shrinks it allows more transistors to be fitted on a chip, increasing f.e. speed. This happens on the nano-m scale.  But when the circuit size is shrink to a too small  size the circuits suffer from thermal noise, or else said heat interference.  The thermal noise interferes with the functioning and induces false bits in the proccesor, creating errors.  It would only come into play under 40nm, which according to the site will be reached in 6 years time.

[Loki1]

GOOD, it will force computer makers to look elsewhere for performance gains such as getting the rest of the computer up to speed ie.: HD speed/access, memory, bus, I/O and video.

Do we really need more CPU speed?  If so redesign the CPU so that it is more efficient (ie 64/128 bit and other tricks to enhance performance).

Loki :-D

[System]

They keep saying that we're at the end of Moore's law, and then they find ways around the problems. Last week I read about some company in Japan researching the use of diamond (I assume artificial/man-made, not the natural stuff as that's too small/expensive) as substrate material, as it would do much better with the thermal issues. There's also research being done into stacking transistors, similar to stacking seperate dies together but it would be all on the same single die. There's also the optical chip research out there, to replace electricity with light. I don't see anything to be worried about.

[KennyR]

Electronic chips should be on their way out anyway. Quantum computers are the future.

[Glaucus]

GOOD, it will force computer makers to look elsewhere for performance gains such as getting the rest of the computer up to speed ie.: HD speed/access, memory, bus, I/O and video.

Good point, but high CPU Mhz sell compters!  But I'm not too worried about this, they'll probably come up with new materials that will help solve these kinds of problems.  Nano technology is the next big thing with billions of dollars in research grants (mostly by the US government & military).  As for HD speed, look forward to SerialATA as the next big thing in HD performance, 8X AGP is already out for video...  What I think they really need to focus on is higher bandwidth networking solutions for the home consumer market.  Cable modem is fast but I'd like to see T1 speeds (so I can set up a battlefield 1942 server with up to 64 players!   ;-) )

  - Mike