Influent | Technology in Motion

At the Hot Chips chip design conference at Stanford University last week, chip researchers spelled out some of the toughest computing problems of the future and the solutions to deal with them. Pioneers and visionaries talked about running into technological brick walls, and about ways to get around them. But they warned that the ever-increasing cost of making the newest chips will have an impact on the entire food chain of electronic products where chips are used.

Moore’s Law Slowdown — Researchers on a panel said they think that the law observed in the 1960s by Intel Chairman Emeritus Gordon Moore — who predicted accurately that chips double their chip capacity every 18 months — which has held true since the 1960s is past its prime. Now it’s getting harder and harder to deliver performance improvements without generating excessive power. The days of easy gains through manufacturing advances are coming to an end, and chip makers and designers have to turn to more exotic and creative techniques just to stay on the Moore’s Law treadmill. That means that it’s going to cost more money to make relatively modest gains in chip performance. With the current recession, that will just making things harder on chip makers whose ranks have thinned dramatically in the past few years. Here’s a comparison every gamer can understand: If Moore’s Law meant that chip capacity would double every three years instead of every two years, we would be stuck playing games on a device that was no more powerful than a Nintendo 64, a video game console that came out in 1996.

Read full article from VentureBeat -  The coolest and scariest things coming in the chip industry’s future.