Moore's Law to Hit a Brick Wall at 18nm
Moore's Law to Hit a Brick Wall at 18nm
Posted 06/16/2009 at 1:00pm
| by Paul Lilly
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Intel co-founder Gordon Moore once predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 to 24 months, a prediction which has been famously dubbed Moore's Law. But according to market research firm iSuppli, the move to 18nm will signal the end of Moore's Law.
"The usable limit for semiconductor process technology will be reached when chip process geometries shrink to be smaller than 20nm, to 18nm nodes," said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst, semiconductor manufacturing, for iSuppli. "At those nodes, the industry will start getting to the point where semiconductor manufacturing tools are too expensive to depreciate with volume production, i.e., their costs will be so high, that the value of their lifetime productivity can never justify it."
So when exactly will it happen? According to iSupply, in the year 2014. In 2007, Gordon Moore said his prediction could be upheld for at least another decade. Five years from now, one of them is going to be wrong.
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megamegaprocessor
August 30, 2010 at 11:46pm
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joo19
April 08, 2010 at 11:11pm
Appreciate the info, it’s good to know
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Blaze589
June 16, 2009 at 9:35pm
It's a good thing that Intel is doing research on Silicon Photonics or laser based CPUs'.
http://www.podtech.net/home/1128/intels-laser-enabled-chips-could-be-silver-bullet
mesiah
June 16, 2009 at 9:06pm
It's kind of funny that today this article is released saying that moores law will soon come to an end due to manufacturing costs/limitations below 18nm when yesterday you posted an article about how toshiba has made a breakthrough and we will be seeing 16nm ahead of market estimates.
compro01
June 17, 2009 at 10:30am
Toshiba is doing that for flash memory, which are substantially less complex circuits than CPUs, IIRC, and they also don't need to run nearly as fast. the faster you go, the more power CMOS eats and the more heat you need to deal with.
mesiah
June 17, 2009 at 8:14pm
You are right, I overlooked the fact that the previous article was in reference to flash memory. But it just goes to show that noone can predict what kind of manufacturing breakthroughs we are going to have in the next 10 years.
jwalch.hawk
June 16, 2009 at 7:33pm
It has always killed me that this is revered as Moore's "Law"... It should really be Moore's Hypothesis Which Just Happens To Have Been Approximately Right Thus Far. Or whatever. The point is that there's no real scientific reason the hypothesis *should* be true... It's more a self-fulfilling prophesy than it is anything else.
Anyway, I agree with the other comments pointing out how it's impossible to know what could be the case in five years. You might as well just go polish your crystal ball if you want to predict transistor sizes that far into the future.
EDIT: It seems that link below to the Halfhill article goes on that rant for me.
FrancesTheMute
June 16, 2009 at 3:36pm
how many times have we heard this? Seems like once a year we hear that Moore's law will end when X happens, and then it happens and they're like "oh, well we found a way to get around that, now Moore's law will not apply when Y happens..."
Mosher
June 16, 2009 at 3:13pm
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/white_paper_the_memristorthis previous article seems to show that by 2015 we will have much smaller capacitys than that.(unless I am not understanding how the memristor works prperly)
nmanguy
June 16, 2009 at 3:03pm
That's still five years away from now. Who knows what crazy stuff will be invented by then.
What would you have done in mid 2004 if someone said that people would be able to buy quad core, 45 nm computers with videocards that have power measured in terraflops, storage measured in Terrabytes, etc.
comptech08
June 16, 2009 at 1:35pm
didnt people think it was going to get debunked before? But has not. Just never know till it happens.
seinjunkie
June 16, 2009 at 1:16pm
Huh? I thought you guys debunked Moore's Law. Or Tom Halfhill did it for you. Either way, it's been broken for a while.
foamcup
June 16, 2009 at 1:27pm
Try reading the article you linked to.
Moore's law describes component integration on integrated circuits that are economical to manufacture. It doesn't describe clock frequency or other aspects of processor performance. Actually, Moore's article doesn't mention microprocessors at all, because they weren't invented until six years after his article appeared.
Which what this little article is about, anything smaller than 18nm is not economical to manufacture. Not about the speed or anything.
seinjunkie
September 20, 2009 at 8:56pm
I was actually referring to the debunking of its truth:
Myth: Moore's law is uncannily accurate. Fact: Moore's law is way off. If the original 12-month period had held true since 1965, today's chips would have more than 27 trillion transistors. The 24-month revision predicts 37 million. Actual progress: Intel's Prescott Pentium 4, a relatively economical chip, has 129 million transistors.
But very nice of you to call me an "R-tard" without bothering to understand it yourself.
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