- 2072
- Computer Power - How small can they get? It’s true that the pace of accelerating
computer power is slowing. Contemporary
chip design has cut the space between the component parts of a chip down to a
dozen or so nanometers. Heat and power
issues are the new design and device killers. So, when it comes to risk / reward business
decisions, there are considerable economic rewards to be had in getting heat
and power right.
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----------------------------- 2072
- Computer Power - How small can they get?
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-
- In
1965, when computer technology was in its infancy, a pioneering computer
engineer named Gordon Moore wrote a paper that shocked technologists at the
time. Moore’s theory was that the power of computers would double every 12
months while the cost of that technology would fall by 50% over the same time.
And so, for 40 years, what became known as Moore’s Law remained pretty
rock-solid.
-
- But
these are hard days for Moore. Last year Intel, the computer-chip maker that
Moore cofounded, said the rate at which they were doubling processing power had
slowed to 30 months. In May 2017, the MIT Technology Review ran the headline
“Moore’s Law Is Dead.”
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- It’s
true that the pace of accelerating computer power is slowing. It’s also true
that this slowdown is a problem: Many of the next-generation products we’ve
been promised depend on faster, more powerful, less expensive chip hardware,
and their progress has been modeled off the assumption that Moore’s Law will
hold true. Advances in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, self-driving
cars, medical and genetic engineering, and even the newest smart phones will be
delayed significantly if the exponential incline continues to erode—or stops
altogether.
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- But to misquote Mark Twain, the report of its
death may be greatly exaggerated.
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- Moore’s
Law isn’t dead. But it isn’t looking good, either. And if it’s going to be
resuscitated, engineers and product designers "have to" adjust where
they look for new breakthroughs.
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- “Have
to” isn’t a suggestion—it’s physics. Computer engineers have squeezed better
performances from chips for years by shrinking their size, but this strategy
has run its course. In chip design, we’re smacking our heads against the walls
of physics and geometry: It is incredibly difficult, as a practical matter, to
get smaller.
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- Contemporary
chip design has cut the space between the component parts of a chip down to a
dozen or so nanometers. For non-engineers, you could cut the thinness of a
single sheet of paper, which is about 0.1 millimeters thick, into 100,000
nanometers: The spaces inside chips are now roughly the size of 1/8,000 of a
sheet of paper.
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- And, while it’s possible to shrink those sizes
further, down to about seven nanometers, the industry estimates that just
developing a prototype of a 7nm chip would cost $100 million, and there are
only three companies on the planet capable of even attempting it: Taiwan
Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Samsung, and Moore’s Intel. The
latter just announced it was putting $9 billion into the 7nm processer, which
will take at least four years to develop.
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- At
7nm, we’re done. There just isn’t more juice to squeeze from smaller spaces. So
after that, getting better performance from our computing technology will come
down to how well we can innovate in two other areas: heat management and power
density.
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- Heat
and power issues are design and device killers. They are also fatal to
innovation. Locked in by size limits and handcuffed by heat and power issues,
we’re at a virtual standstill.
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- To
have any chance of regaining the pace of advancing computing power, we must
push the boundaries of heat management. Think of it this way: To get faster
cars, we need more powerful engines and better tires. But right now, nearly
everything we do to make the engine better blows out the tires.
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- To
get faster cars, we need more powerful engines and better tires. But right now,
nearly everything we do to make the engine better blows out the tires.
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- Heat
issues have already stalled some computer-engineering advances such as stacking,
a design solution by which parts of a computer system such as the processer,
the memory, and the power source are stacked atop one another. This shortens
the distance commands and power must travel within a machine, saving energy and
increasing processing speeds.
-
- But,
while stacked components are faster,
they generate more heat together than they do apart. Their proximity severely
limits engineers’ ability to maintain workable, safe temperatures. As a result,
chip makers Qualcomm and Intel have already ditched the stacking idea. No one
has true stacking of memory on logic and unless someone comes up with a thermal
solution noone’s going to use it.
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- Old
heat dissipation technologies relied on copper and aluminum tubes and plates to
conduct and spread out heat. But those tubes and plates are heavy, which makes
them inefficient in products such as laptops, cell phones, and cars. They are
also rigid and inflexible, which makes them design nightmare, like designing a
sleek, sexy smartphone around a copper plate.
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- The
good news is that because heat technology is blocking progress on overall
computer performance, it‘s evolving quickly. The heat solutions of tomorrow
will likely include gels, pastes, and newly designed flexible fibers instead of
heavy, rigid materials. For example, NASA is currently testing a new, light,
flexible heat-dissipation material that looks and feels like velvet.
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- If
heat issues have hobbled Moore’s Law, power density issues have downright
crippled it.
Power density is the amount of power that
can be drawn from a set amount of space. Greater power density provides more
power for longer periods of time from a battery of the same size. To return to
the race car analogy, if computer processing is the engine and heat management
is the tires, power density is the fuel.
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- As
the Samsung Galaxy 7S Note can tell you, even the slightest mistakes balancing
greater power demands and tighter design specifications can be catastrophic. Our computers and other electronics have been
getting faster and stronger, requiring more and more power in less and less
space, but, our battery technology is only inching along. As the Samsung Galaxy
7S Note can tell you, even the slightest mistakes balancing greater power
demands and tighter design specifications can be catastrophic.
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- The
energy density issue has been a giant stop sign for any next-generation
computer products that move, such as robotics, drones, space exploration
devices, and electric vehicles. For those realms, power density is everything.
For more casual consumers, the lack of power-density improvement is why it
feels like your cell phone battery drains so quickly, because it does.
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- To
complicate matters even further, energy density and heat management are related
problems. Storing energy, charging batteries, and drawing power all generate
heat. So every time engineers push one boundary, something on the other side
gets a tad more complicated. That is the
reason they call it engineering.
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- Engineers
will make Moore’s-Law-type strides in heat management and power density very
soon. One of the reasons is because the incentives to overcome these technical,
engineering, and design challenges are consumer driven. Customers want
batteries that last longer and laptops that don’t get too hot; they prioritize
thinner, lighter products over processing power. So, when it comes to risk / reward business
decisions, there are considerable economic rewards to be had in getting heat
and power right.
-
- Another
cause for optimism is that the innovation slowdown has created slack in the
capacity chain, which means that for every step forward we take in thermal or
energy technology, we may unlock a corresponding advancement elsewhere.
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- When
that happens, the rush of new products and technologies will be fast and
furious, reinstating and destroying Moore’s Law at the same time. Technological
progress may not be linear, as Moore predicted, but it just might end up being
even more exciting.
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------------------------- Thursday, April 19,
2018 --------------------------------
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