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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 03 2019, @07:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the moore-of-a-guideline dept.

Intel's Senior Vice President Jim Keller (who previously helped to design AMD's K8 and Zen microarchitectures) gave a talk at the Silicon 100 Summit that promised continued pursuit of transistor scaling gains, including a roughly 50x increase in gate density:

Intel's New Chip Wizard Has a Plan to Bring Back the Magic (archive)

In 2016, a biennial report that had long served as an industry-wide pledge to sustain Moore's law gave up and switched to other ways of defining progress. Analysts and media—even some semiconductor CEOs—have written Moore's law's obituary in countless ways. Keller doesn't agree. "The working title for this talk was 'Moore's law is not dead but if you think so you're stupid,'" he said Sunday. He asserted that Intel can keep it going and supply tech companies ever more computing power. His argument rests in part on redefining Moore's law.

[...] Keller also said that Intel would need to try other tactics, such as building vertically, layering transistors or chips on top of each other. He claimed this approach will keep power consumption down by shortening the distance between different parts of a chip. Keller said that using nanowires and stacking his team had mapped a path to packing transistors 50 times more densely than possible with Intel's 10 nanometer generation of technology. "That's basically already working," he said.

The ~50x gate density claim combines ~3x density from additional pitch scaling (from "10nm"), ~2x from nanowires, another ~2x from stacked nanowires, ~2x from wafer-to-wafer stacking, and ~2x from die-to-wafer stacking.

Related: Intel's "Tick-Tock" Strategy Stalls, 10nm Chips Delayed
Intel's "Tick-Tock" is Now More Like "Process-Architecture-Optimization"
Moore's Law: Not Dead? Intel Says its 10nm Chips Will Beat Samsung's
Another Step Toward the End of Moore's Law


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @09:31PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @09:31PM (#862915)

    My guess as to what is going on at intel is they are just hubristically throwing money at a bunch of stuff without a real plan. The accountants/marketers have too much power there so they are falling behind and incapable of collectively dealing with this fact.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @11:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 03 2019, @11:47PM (#862971)

    But let's just redefine Moore's Law!

    Instead of making better chips, we'll just get you to buy twice as many. Bang double the compute power!!

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:11AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:11AM (#862980)

    but otherwise correct. In the past the marketers could basically sell the customer whatever they wanted and engineering had to fix it, but Intel cut too many corners on employee bonuses and ensuring any kind of work-life balance between the 1980s and the 2000s, finally culling enough people that the smart and motivated ones left for greener pastures, particularly if they weren't on the management track (there were salary caps on engineers and while you could get bonuses or stock options above that, you had to be considered both a 'real rock star' employee and discreet to get them.)

    Evidence: A relative is worn out husk from working there.

  • (Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:15AM

    by Rupert Pupnick (7277) on Thursday July 04 2019, @12:15AM (#862983) Journal

    Accountants generally hate spending on R&D.