I don't know about that. They were talking about line widths of 40 atoms. Another four years (factor of seven improvement) takes you to 6 atoms; another four years (factor of 7 improvement) takes you to one atom. At that point you're not talking about a "carbon nanotube" any longer - it's just a row of carbon atoms, and you still can't improve it any further.
I mean, yes, there will be process improvements. The article talked about 28 atoms as the next step. But there are fundamental limits, and they aren't very far away...
(I could be overstating the case here, in that transistor density may scale as the square of the line width, rather than linearly with it. The point about fundamental limits still stands, however.)
There will always be a hard limit, but one thing I could see us looking back on and finding weird is that we have a single layer of transistors. If we could build more complex 3D structures I'd expect we could see vast improvements.
Not part of Moore's Law but there are also
1. Significant storage improvements, and bringing the storage closer to the processing (or the other way around) which massively improves the overall speed.
2. Better chip design. Not knocking the current designers, but it'd be foolish to assume we have the theoretical optimum chip designs.
3. Cost. Sure, you're not going to improve every use case but what if my motherboard was just a big layer of cpus with non-volatile huge caches because it cost pennies? Particularly when we hit some larger limits, we'd be likely to see that current best design being produced by lots of people and getting cheaper and cheaper.
Along with 3. comes more custom designed chips. If we can get the cost of design and fabrication down, we can speed things up by having a bunch of chips for specific functions.
Comments
I don't know about that. They were talking about line widths of 40 atoms. Another four years (factor of seven improvement) takes you to 6 atoms; another four years (factor of 7 improvement) takes you to one atom. At that point you're not talking about a "carbon nanotube" any longer - it's just a row of carbon atoms, and you still can't improve it any further.
I mean, yes, there will be process improvements. The article talked about 28 atoms as the next step. But there are fundamental limits, and they aren't very far away...
(I could be overstating the case here, in that transistor density may scale as the square of the line width, rather than linearly with it. The point about fundamental limits still stands, however.)
There will always be a hard limit, but one thing I could see us looking back on and finding weird is that we have a single layer of transistors. If we could build more complex 3D structures I'd expect we could see vast improvements.
Not part of Moore's Law but there are also
1. Significant storage improvements, and bringing the storage closer to the processing (or the other way around) which massively improves the overall speed.
2. Better chip design. Not knocking the current designers, but it'd be foolish to assume we have the theoretical optimum chip designs.
3. Cost. Sure, you're not going to improve every use case but what if my motherboard was just a big layer of cpus with non-volatile huge caches because it cost pennies? Particularly when we hit some larger limits, we'd be likely to see that current best design being produced by lots of people and getting cheaper and cheaper.
Along with 3. comes more custom designed chips. If we can get the cost of design and fabrication down, we can speed things up by having a bunch of chips for specific functions.
Afaik the main problem with 3D structures is heat dissipation, which limits this approach somewhat. But nanotubes might help with this as well maybe.
Maybe we should copy the brain design? Fold it and put cooling liquid around?