Bryan Cantrill

For other QCon blog posts, see QCon live blog table of contents

Moore’s law

• Not about speed, # transistors, density or per dollar
• Not coined by Moore
• Came from paper in 1965 – “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits:
• Term coined in 1971 when Carver Mead was talking to a journalist
• Moore also predicated home computers and computers onboard cars. Predicting 40 years out accurately is hard.
• Predicted lower costs
• In 1975, Moore updated the law to be a doubling of transistor density every two years. Meant to be a way of motivating engineers.
• An Intel executive said 18 months (vs 2 years) and that got quoted all over.

Implications

• Apps don’t get twice as fast.
• Hit memory wall
• Moore’s Law could add more caching, but that can only get so far
• Need Symmetric Multi Processing to increase throughput
• Speculative execution tried to pre-execute code and then became a security issue
• Cost matters. It’s not about increasing speed at any cost

End of Moore’s Law

• Samsung trying to 3 nanometer.
• Many unsolved problems
• A silicon atom is .2 nanometers.
• This is the end. Can’t physically make smaller. 3 nanometers is only 15 atoms across
• 7 nanometers might be the smallest size at a reasonable cost.

Beyond Moore’s Law – Quantum

• Quantum computer is surprisingly really
• Need large refrigerator. Must be close to absolute zero
• Problem domain is very limited
• Scale is tiny
• Don’t yet have ability to scale qbits
• Quantum computing may be relevant one day for the enterprise, but not any time soon

Beyond Moore’s Law – Specialized Compute

• Bitcoin mining
• GPGPU for ML/DL (machine learning/deep learning)

Beyond Moore’s Law – 3D

• Heat and cost problems
• Intel working on (Foveros)
• Not a way to get “back on track” for Moore’s law

Beyond Moore’s Law – 2.5D

• Smaller chiplets that are integrated on a larger die through silicon
• Can be different types and sizes
• Intel investing in this as well.

Beyond Moore’s Law – Alternate Tech

• Carbon nanotubes, phase change memory, etc
• History indicates won’t be able to compete on economics
• If/when break through, change industry
• Flash memory is only example of a break through like this

Beyond Moore’s Law – Wright’s Law

• Cost of manufacturing an aircraft dropped 10-15% which volume doubled
• Learning curve effect
• Possible chips will get cheaper again as product goes up.

My impressions

This was great! He has amazing energy. It was a topic that was interesting and general interest. (I missed some of this because I was excited and communicating about being a Java Champion!). The state of the art and future is cool to hear about!