In Your Opinion, What's Going To Happen When The Physical Properties Of Silicon Can't Sustain Moore's

in your opinion, what's going to happen when the physical properties of silicon can't sustain moore's law anymore

nothing, for two reasons

first some background: moore’s law states that every year the number of components (transistors) on integrated circuits will double (due to engineering breakthroughs). it has proved to be somewhat correct. it occurs due to our ability to manufacture smaller and smaller transistors which has a few effects, discussed later. eventually we will hit a point where it no longer matters how small we can print transistors as the fundamental electrical characteristics of silicon break down

in the next couple of years, we will see chips from intel with transistors printed about ten nanometers apart. we approach the limits silicon can handle, theoretically, around ~1nm

in circuits this small, you start seeing tunneling effects which are phenomenons of quantum physics wherein the propagation delay of charge falls to zero, meaning stimulation of the source terminal of a transistor would elicit a response on the drain terminal without any time elapsing. electrons just “blink” from one end of the xsistor to the other. you’d think this would be a good thing, but it isn’t. anyone with advanced physics degrees or deep VLSI knowlege is welcome to chime in why.

anyway

the first reason is there is no alternative to silicon. we have poured billions into researching things like gallium arsenide as a replacement for silicon in integrated circuits. it doesn’t work as well as silicon. people will try to convince you otherwise and those people are crackpots

we have poured a lot of time & money into researching quantum computers and discovered that they are only superior for very specific tasks such as brute-forcing encryption keys and other things of that nature. they will also probably never cost a billion dollars each to manufacture, never need anything less than a power plant and vats of liquid helium to operate, etc etc

the logical “next step” might be optical computing. here, you fundamentally change the hardware paradigm from electrons traveling through traces cut in a mediating silicon substrate between transistors to photons traveling through ?? mediated by ?? between “phototransistors”. the underlying principle is that light, in some cases, travels faster than voltage propagates through conductors. i’m going to get a lot of asks saying “durr kremlin but the speed of light is constant and i took high school physics and blah blah blah” and that’s a discussion worth its own post

this kind of tech is far off. not in our lifetime, not in your children’s lifetime, not in your children’s children’s lifetime

the reason we make transistors smaller is so we can pack them together more closely. this reduces the distance charge must travel in the circuit, making the cycles of these circuits take less time to complete. smaller transistors also generally necessitate less impedance and operate correctly at lower voltages, meaning their operating frequency can increase without a corresponding drop in reliability

these are all nice things, but they are only one piece of the puzzle. how you lay out these transistors is a much more critical and relevant problem. taking a previous VLSI design and shrinking it only works to a point after which you must redesign the layout entirely. intel’s “tick-tock” release/development department follows this model. long before and long after we hit the fundamental limits of silicon, the problem will be laying out our CPU circuits in such a way that we can actually eek out the performance provided by smaller transistors. this is a much, much harder problem to solve than “how do i make the transistor smaller”

the second, more pragmatic reason is that CPUs are fast enough already. there are scarce few problems that can be solved with faster discrete processors that can’t be solved with a million slower ones linked together

the whole tiny-transistor thing is really more of a marketing phenomenon than anything else

More Posts from Theidlerhour and Others

theidlerhour

9 years ago

A Nigerian Student Has Achieved The Highest Grades At A Japanese University For The Past 50 Years, While

A Nigerian student has achieved the highest grades at a Japanese university for the past 50 years, while solving a mathematical equation which was unsolvable 30 years ago, in his first semester.

Ufot Ekong achieved a first in electrical engineering at Tokai University in Tokyo, scoring the best marks since 1965, CCTV Africa reported.

Ekong, from Lagos, also plays the saxophone, and runs a retail wears and accessories shop in Japan called Strictly African Japan.

The Nigerian speaks English, French, Japanese and Yoruba, his country’s native language, and paid his way through university himself.

He currently works for Nissan and has already patented two products, as well as making an electric car which reaches up to 128 kmph.

During his time at university, Ekong has won six awards for academic excellence.

Source

151K notes View Post

theidlerhour

9 years ago

Still image from Mexican science fiction-noir film La Pantera Negra.

Tags

to watch

1K notes View Post

theidlerhour

9 years ago

SEMENTINE

[adjective]

pertaining to sowing; of the time of seeding fields.

Etymology: ultimately derived from Latin semen, “seed of plants, animals or men; inborn characteristic; posterity; progeny; offspring,” figuratively, “origin, essence, principle, cause”.

[J. R. Slattum - Seed]

490 notes View Post

theidlerhour

9 years ago

Python: What if everything was a dict?

Java: What if everything was an object?

JavaScript: What if everything was a dict *and* an object?

C: What if everything was a pointer?

APL: What if everything was an array?

Tcl: What if everything was a string?

Prolog: What if everything was a term?

LISP: What if everything was a pair?

Scheme: What if everything was a function?

Haskell: What if everything was a monad?

Assembly: What if everything was a register?

Coq: What if everything was a type/proposition?

COBOL: WHAT IF EVERYTHING WAS UPPERCASE?

C#: What if everything was like Java, but different?

Ruby: What if everything was monkey patched?

Pascal: BEGIN What if everything was structured? END

C++: What if we added everything to the language?

C++11: What if we forgot to stop adding stuff?

Rust: What if garbage collection didn't exist?

Go: What if we tried designing C a second time?

Perl: What if shell, sed, and awk were one language?

Perl6: What if we took the joke too far?

PHP: What if we wanted to make SQL injection easier?

VB: What if we wanted to allow anyone to program?

VB.NET: What if we wanted to stop them again?

Forth: What if everything was a stack?

ColorForth: What if the stack was green?

PostScript: What if everything was printed at 600dpi?

XSLT: What if everything was an XML element?

Make: What if everything was a dependency?

m4: What if everything was incomprehensibly quoted?

Scala: What if Haskell ran on the JVM?

Clojure: What if LISP ran on the JVM?

Lua: What if game developers got tired of C++?

Mathematica: What if Stephen Wolfram invented everything?

Malbolge: What if there is no god?

3K notes View Post

theidlerhour

9 years ago

Indian rocket rises through the atmosphere carrying a billion dreams and hopes along with its payload.

1K notes View Post

theidlerhour

9 years ago

Destroy the idea that men should respect women because we are their daughters, mothers, and sisters. Reinforce the idea that men should respect women because we are people.

(via masalaoflife)

306K notes View Post

theidlerhour

9 years ago

I honestly don't mean for this to come across as ignorant or anything like that but I just seen your post about learning kanji's and they're Chinese characters? I didn't know Japanese used Chinese characters? I've only started learning mandarin but I never knew that Japanese used the same characters?

It’s not ignorant at all, please don’t feel that way! Years and years ago in Japan there was no comprehension of such characters, but some Japanese people were sent to China as scholars to basically learn everything about Classical Chinese and due to this there was a sudden (but still rather small) increase in Chinese literacy. It still took a while for Kanji to be fully incorporated into the Japanese language, and even the two other alphabets (hiragana and katakana) are said to be based off of the way in which Chinese was written during this time, in attempt to break down the language barriers between the two nations. Until these alphabets were used the Japanese didn’t have a writing system at all! This means that immigration and visitors from China and Korea in particular have had an influence on the way in which the Japanese language has evolved, and this is most likely why there are some similarities between Japanese and other languages you may study. Chinese and Japanese characters still have particular differences, so somebody who speaks Japanese/Chinese may briefly understand a text based on characters from their original tongue, but in general the strokes are sometimes varied and the pronunciation is completely different so they wouldn’t be able to read it fluently like one might expect (even if the character looks nearly identical.) Sorry if any of my information is wrong- this is just some general knowledge that I’ve picked up from my own research and studies!