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posted by cmn32480 on Monday July 25 2016, @06:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-good-thigns-must-come-to-an-end dept.

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

After more than 50 years of miniaturization, the transistor could stop shrinking in just five years. That is the prediction of the 2015 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which was officially released earlier this month.

After 2021, the report forecasts, it will no longer be economically desirable for companies to continue to shrink the dimensions of transistors in microprocessors. Instead, chip manufacturers will turn to other means of boosting density, namely turning the transistor from a horizontal to a vertical geometry and building multiple layers of circuitry, one on top of another.

For some, this change will likely be interpreted as another death knell for Moore's Law, the repeated doubling of transistor densities that has given us the extraordinarily capable computers we have today. Compounding the drama is the fact that this is the last ITRS roadmap, the end to a more-than-20-year-old coordinated planning effort that began in the United States and was then expanded to include the rest of the world.

[...]

This final ITRS report is titled ITRS 2.0. The name reflects the idea that improvements in computing are no longer driven from the bottom-up, by tinier switches and denser or faster memories. Instead, it takes a more top-down approach, focusing on the applications that now drive chip design, such as data centers, the Internet of Things, and mobile gadgets.

Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/transistors-will-stop-shrinking-in-2021-moores-law-roadmap-predicts


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by jmorris on Tuesday July 26 2016, @12:00PM

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday July 26 2016, @12:00PM (#380257)

    You buy the myth that Java has ever, or ever can, approach native speed but look down on 'code monkeys.' Uh huh. Yea, lets listen to your advice.

    And to get to the root of your argument, the overly complex, not understandable by humans, CPU is the root of the power consumption problem. It is the end product of trying to throw another billion transistors into trying to squeeze another couple of percent out of a single core after you hit the thermal wall and can't crank the clock again without water cooling. It is going to go because it is another dead end, just like the P4. The future is performance per watt and performance per square millimeter of die. so more cores can be stuffed in before it melts.

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