Tag Archives: Moore Law

Computers

Breaking Moore's Law: How chipmakers are pushing PCs to blistering new levels

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There’s no two ways around it: The PC is slowing down with age.

That may be a bit harsh—computers are faster and smaller than ever before—but processor performance simply isn’t advancing at its past breakneck pace. At one time, 50 to 60 percent leaps in year-to-year performance were commonplace. Now, 10 to 15 percent improvements are the norm.

Luckily, five-plus-year-old computers can still tackle everyday tasks just fine, so the performance slowdown isn’t a huge issue. Plus, it’s nice not having to replace your PC every other year during a down economy. But technology doesn’t advance by sticking to the status quo. The future needs speed!

Fortunately, the biggest names in PC processors aren’t satisfied with the status quo. Chip makers are working furiously to solve the problems posed by a slowing Moore’s Law and the rise of the power wall, in a bid to keep the performance pedal to the metal.

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From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2033671/breaking-moores-law-how-chipmakers-are-pushing-pcs-to-blistering-new-levels.html#tk.rss_all

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

This Tiny Chip Will Stake a Big Claim on the Internet of Things

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By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool

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The Internet of Things is about to get a little smaller. Make that a lot smaller — so small you could put it on a pill and become a thing on the Internet yourself.
Freescale Semiconductor

unveiled a new
ARM Holdings

-based microcontroller chip last month, dubbed the Kinetis KL02,
that has everything necessary on board to produce, track, record, and analyze the essential information that device creators might need in a package smaller than your pinky toenail. That’s it over to the left — all 1.9 millimeters by 2 millimeters of it.

Freescale’s hardly the first chipmaker to step into the Internet of Things arena. A number of chips are already working in a number of devices, from wearable fitness trackers to the upcoming Google Project Glass, making the Internet feel more like a part of your body. Texas Instruments has gotten small and simple with bare-bones Wi-Fi chips that could pair with Freescale’s microcontroller to transmit information — if only they were a little bit smaller. No one has come up with something this small yet, and there’s a reason Freescale believes that the tiny new Kinetis micro-controllers could be used to track users’ health from inside their own bodies:


Source: Freescale Semiconductor.

The drawback to this chip, which Freescale claims is 25% smaller than any other ARM-based microcontroller, is that it might actually be too small to pair with existing Wi-Fi chips — Freescale doesn’t include wireless connectivity on the Kinetis, for obvious reasons. For comparison (although there’s no real sense of scale, unfortunately), this is TI‘s flagship Internet of Things Wi-Fi chip:


Source: Texas Instruments.

It may be a little tough to compare the size between pictures (just how small is that washing machine?), but TI‘s product description places the size of this chip at 16.3 millimeters by 13.5 millimeters. That’s almost 60 times the surface area of Freescale’s mini-microcontroller. Intel has also been working on tiny Wi-Fi chips for years, but the greatest obstacle to scaling down in a manner approaching other chips is the continued use of analog components, which aren’t subject to the same Moore’s Law miniaturization processes governing transistors. Intel unveiled what it called “the first complete Wi-Fi digital

Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Computers

The end of Moore's Law is on the horizon, says AMD

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Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku believes Moore’s Law has about 10 years of life left before ever-shrinking transistor sizes smack up against limitations imposed by the laws of thermodynamics and quantum physics. That day of reckoning for the computing industry may still be a few years away, but signs of the coming Moorepocalypse are already here. Just ask chip maker AMD.

The company’s Chief Product Architect John Gustafson believes AMD’s difficulties in transitioning from 28-nanometer chips to 20-nanometer silicon shows we’ve reached the beginning of the end.

“You can see how Moore’s Law is slowing down,” Gustafson recently told the Inquirer. “We’ve been waiting for that transition from 28nm to 20nm to happen and it’s taking longer than Moore’s Law would have predicted…I’m saying you are seeing the beginning of the end of Moore’s law.” A processor’s nanometer measurement tells you the size of the smallest transistors on a given chip.

Doomsday predictions about the end of Moore’s Law are nearly as old as the famous observation posited by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965. In his 2011 book Physics of the Future, for example, Kaku predicted the end of Moore’s Law could turn Silicon Valley into a “rust belt” if a replacement technology for silicon isn’t found.

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at PCWorld

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

IBM Takes Another Step Toward a Post-Human World

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By Alex Planes, The Motley Fool

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First there was Deep Blue, then Watson, and now… SyNAPSE? IBM scientists revealed last week that they’d developed a nanofluidic circuit, which is a fancy term for a transistor which operates in ways that mimic the human brain. This is huge news on two fronts: it not only opens up new potential applications for artificial intelligence, it also offers the possibility of finally breaking free of Moore’s Law as transistors continue to approach the scale of individual atoms.

Let’s back up and explain some of these terms in more detail. SyNAPSE, a backronym of “Systems for Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics,” is actually a DARPA program that was initiated to develop brain-like computers. IBM has taken the lead on this project, but research teams from several top universities, as well as HRL Laboratories — a jointly-owned research arm of General Motors and Boeing — have also contributed to the project. IBM introduced “cognitive computer chips” in late 2011 as part of the SyNAPSE program, but last week’s nanofluidic advancement hasn’t been officially mentioned in conjunction with that program. That doesn’t mean it won’t make an ideal technological adaptation to push SyNAPSE further forward.

The nanofluidic circuit was described by bothThe Atlantic Wire:

The new so-called nanofluidic circuit works a little bit like a network of streams. A charged fluid moves over the surface of the circuit changing its properties (e.g. flipping a switch “on” or “off”) with the positively and negatively charged atoms in the fluid. Like the synapses of the brain, the ions operate in three dimensions, a game changer in terms of efficiency and uncharted territory in terms of computing.

And by The New York Times‘ tech blog:

The advantage of the new method is that it is both nonvolatile — it requires only a small amount of electricity to change the materials from one state to another, and they then remain in that state — and is potentially reversible, meaning that it could be used to build a device like a transistor. …

“We could form or disrupt connections just in the same way a synaptic connection in the brain could be remade, or the strength of that connection could be adjusted,” [IBM Fellow] Dr. [Stuart] Parkin said.

Efficiency would be the key advancement here in terms of chip making. The reason why ARM Holdings has long dominated mobile processor architecture has to do with its early lead in terms of energy efficiency. Battery life has always been a limiting factor in mobile computing, and any chip design that can minimize battery drain without sacrificing performance is likely to be in high demand. Parkin followed up with VentureBeat after IBM published the paper on this nanofluidic process in Science:

We are using tiny currents of ions of atoms generated by these electrical signals to change the state of matter of this oxide material. It is a means to build low-energy, highly efficient devices by …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

News, Politics, Government

Moore's Law vs. Wright's Law

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By Jim Handy, Contributor

MIT recently announced that a team of MIT and Santa Fe Institute researchers put a number of forecasting methodologies to the test to find that two in particular stood out.  The results have been published in an online paper titled: Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress. Researchers at MIT and the Santa Fe Institute have found that some widely used formulas for predicting how rapidly technology will advance — notably, Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law — offer superior approximations of the pace of technological progress. Of the two, Wright’s Law was found to be slightly more accurate than Moore’s Law. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest

Business, Finance, Occupation & Industry

Ultratech, Inc. Announces Participation in March Conferences

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By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

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Ultratech, Inc. Announces Participation in March Conferences

SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Ultratech, Inc.  (NAS: UTEK) , a leading supplier of lithography and laser-processing systems used to manufacture semiconductor devices and high-brightness LEDs (HB-LEDs), today announced that it will present at the 25th Annual Roth Conference on Monday, March 18, 2013, at 1:00pm PT in Laguna Niguel, CA. To listen to the audio webcast of the presentation during or after the event, please visit http://ir.ultratech.com/. The replay will be available for 30 days after the event.

Ultratech will also participate in Sidoti’s Seventeenth Annual Emerging Growth Institutional Investor Forum in New York on March 18, 2013.

About Ultratech: Ultratech, Inc.  (NAS: UTEK) designs, manufactures and markets photolithography and laser processing equipment. Founded in 1979, the company’s market-leading advanced lithography products deliver high throughput and production yields at a low, overall cost of ownership for bump packaging of integrated circuits and high-brightness LEDs (HB-LEDs). A pioneer of laser processing, Ultratech developed laser spike anneal technology, which increases device yield, improves transistor performance and enables the progression of Moore’s Law for 32-nm and below production of state-of-the-art consumer electronics. Visit Ultratech online at: www.ultratech.com.

(UTEK-F)

Company Contact:
Ultratech, Inc.
Bruce R. Wright, 408-321-8835
Senior Vice President and CFO
or
Investor Relations Agency:
The Blueshirt Group
Suzanne Craig, 415-217-4962
suzanne@blueshirtgroup.com
Melanie Friedman, 415-217-4964
melanie@blueshirtgroup.com

KEYWORDS:   United States  North America  California  New York

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS:

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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Science & Technology

Researcher finds Moore's Law and Wright's Law best predict how tech improves

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Researchers at MIT and the Santa Fe Institute have found that some widely used formulas for predicting how rapidly technology will advance—notably, Moore’s Law and Wright’s Law—offer superior approximations of the pace of technological progress. The new research is the first to directly compare the different approaches in a quantitative way, using an extensive database of past performance from many different industries. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Phys.org