Moore's law
For those working in the rapidly advancing field of computer technology, it is a significant challenge to make plans for the future. This is true whether the goal is to plot your own career path or for a giant semiconductor corporation to identify optimal R&D investments. No one can ever be completely sure what the next leap in technology will be, what effects from it will ripple across the industry and its users, or when it will happen. One technique that has proven useful in this difficult environment is to develop a rule of thumb, or empirical law, based on experience.
Gordon Moore co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and was later the chairman and CEO of Intel. In 1965, Moore published an article in Electronics magazine in which he offered his prediction of the changes that would occur in the semiconductor industry over the following ten years. In the article, he observed that the number of formerly discrete components such as transistors, diodes, and capacitors that could be integrated onto a single chip had been doubling approximately yearly and the trend was likely to continue over the subsequent ten years. This doubling formula came to be known as Moore's law. This was not a scientific law in the sense of the law of gravity. Rather, it was based on observation of historical trends, and he believed this formulation had some ability to predict the future.
Moore's law turned out to be impressively accurate over those ten years. In 1975, he revised the predicted growth rate for the following ten years to doubling the number of components per integrated circuit every two years rather than yearly. This pace continued for decades, up until about 2010. In more recent years, the growth rate has appeared to decline slightly. In 2015, Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO, stated that the company's growth rate had slowed to doubling about every two and a half years.
Despite the fact that the time to double integrated circuit density is increasing, the current pace represents a phenomenal rate of growth that can be expected to continue into the future, just not quite as rapidly as it once progressed.
Moore's law has proven to be a reliable tool for evaluating the performance of semiconductor companies over the decades. Companies have used it to set goals for the performance of their products and to plan their investments. By comparing the integrated circuit density increases for a company's products against prior performance, and against other companies, it is possible for semiconductor executives and industry analysts to evaluate and score company performance. The results of these analyses have fed directly into decisions to build enormous new fabrication plants and to push the boundaries of ever-smaller integrated circuit feature sizes.
The decades since the introduction of the IBM PC have seen tremendous growth in the capability of single-chip microprocessors. Current processor generations are hundreds of times faster, operate on 32-bit and 64-bit data natively, have far more integrated memory resources, and unleash vastly more functionality, all packed into a single integrated circuit.
The increasing density of semiconductor features, as predicted by Moore's law, has enabled all of these improvements. Smaller transistors run at higher clock speeds due to the shorter connection paths between circuit elements. Smaller transistors also, obviously, allow more functionality to be packed into a given amount of die area. Being smaller and closer to neighboring components allows the transistors to consume less power and generate less heat.
There was nothing magical about Moore's law. It was an observation of the trends in progress at the time. One trend was the steadily increasing size of semiconductor dies. This was the result of improving production processes that reduced the density of defects, hence allowing acceptable production yield with larger integrated circuit dies. Another trend was the ongoing reduction in the size of the smallest components that could be reliably produced in a circuit. The final trend was what Moore referred to as the "cleverness" of circuit designers in making increasingly efficient and effective use of the growing number of circuit elements placed on a chip.
Traditional semiconductor manufacturing processes have begun to approach physical limits that will eventually put the brakes on growth under Moore's law. The smallest features on current commercially available integrated circuits are around 10 nanometers (nm). For comparison, a typical human hair is about 50,000 nm thick and a water molecule (one of the smallest molecules) is 0.28 nm across. There is a point beyond which it is simply not possible for circuit elements to become smaller as the sizes approach atomic scale.
In addition to the challenge of building reliable circuit components from a small number of molecules, other physical effects with names such as Abbe diffraction limit become significant impediments to single-digit nanometer-scale circuit production. We won't get into the details of these phenomena; it's sufficient to know the steady increase in integrated circuit component density that has proceeded for decades under Moore's law is going to become a lot harder to continue over the next few years.
This does not mean we will be stuck with processors essentially the same as those that are now commercially available. Even as the rate of growth in transistor density slows, semiconductor manufacturers are pursuing several alternative methods to continue growing the power of computing devices. One approach is specialization, in which circuits are designed to perform a specific category of tasks extremely well rather than performing a wide variety of tasks merely adequately.
Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are an excellent example of specialization. Original GPUs focused exclusively on improving the speed at which three-dimensional graphics scenes could be rendered, mostly for use in video gaming. The calculations involved in generating a three-dimensional scene are well defined and must be applied to thousands of pixels to create a single frame. The process must be repeated for each subsequent frame, and frames may need to be redrawn at a 60 Hz or higher rate to provide a satisfactory user experience. The computationally demanding and repetitive nature of this task is ideally suited for acceleration via hardware parallelism. Multiple computing units within a GPU simultaneously perform essentially the same calculations on different input data to produce separate outputs. Those outputs are combined to generate the final scene. Modern GPU designs have been enhanced to support other domains, such as training neural networks on massive amounts of data. GPUs will be covered in detail in Chapter 6, Specialized Computing Domains.
As Moore's law shows signs of beginning to fade over the coming years, what advances might take its place to kick off the next round of innovations in computer architectures? We don't know for sure today, but some tantalizing options are currently under intense study. Quantum computing is one example of these technologies. We will cover that technology in Chapter 14, Future Directions in Computer Architectures.
Quantum computing takes advantage of the properties of subatomic particles to perform computations in a manner that traditional computers cannot. A basic element of quantum computing is the qubit, or quantum bit. A qubit is similar to a regular binary bit, but in addition to representing the states 0 and 1, qubits can attain a state that is a superposition of the 0 and 1 states. When measured, the qubit output will always be 0 or 1, but the probability of producing either output is a function of the qubit's quantum state prior to being read. Specialized algorithms are required to take advantage of the unique features of quantum computing.
Another possibility is that the next great technological breakthrough in computing devices will be something that we either haven't thought of, or if we did think about it, we may have dismissed the idea out of hand as unrealistic. The iPhone, discussed in the preceding section, is an example of a category-creating product that revolutionized personal communication and enabled use of the Internet in new ways. The next major advance may be a new type of product, a surprising new technology, or some combination of product and technology. Right now, we don't know what it will be or when it will happen, but we can say with confidence that such changes are coming.