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sharps_eng
-- and yes, I am aware of the difficulties of measuring the power consumption of ...
sharps_eng
To explain Energy to non-scientists you could try Cambridge University physics ...
Moore's Law enters the fourth dimension
Sehat Sutardja
11/22/2010 5:26 PM EST
Hidden behind the recent good news in the semiconductor industry is a developing crisis that I fear will spread across the entire electronics industry within a decade.
Moore’s Law is not really a law at all; as Dr. Moore himself regularly reminds us, it is merely a social contract between the semiconductor industry and its customers to keep technology moving forward at an exponential rate. There is no intrinsic reason why Moore’s Law must continue. In that case, why do we abide by it? Because whatever the financial costs of keeping up with Moore’s Law, the social costs of not doing so would be far greater.
For 50 years, ICs have been powering the world’s products and services, thereby driving the world economy. Moore’s Law doesn’t just describe the pace of innovation in the semiconductor world, but that of life in the modern world. What’s the price for this extraordinary pace of change? It may surprise you to learn that the answer is right in front of us.
The standard definition of Moore’s Law is that computer chips double in density every two years, but in fact it is much more complex. The law has several dimensions that can be described as different axes of change:
• Size (density). The amount of surface area you have to dedicate to a specific number of transistors gets smaller by the year.
• Performance. The same-sized chip will get ever more powerful in terms of memory storage, computation speeds, etc.
• Price. As you make chips smaller, the price will get cheaper; if you rearchitect your design to leverage the inherent speed gain of individual transistors, the price can be reduced even faster. Nevertheless, increasing performance has been the main focus for decades.
Over the past 20 years, the emphasis has been on increasing chip density while keeping the chip size relatively constant and maximizing performance and integration. More recently, the process of making more-complex individual processors with ever smaller transistors became prohibitively expensive. Faced with that new reality, the big processor companies shifted to multicore designs; it worked, but the cost was to abandon one of the three dimensions—size—probably forever.
The good news is that Moore’s Law is still intact. We can maintain the pace, but we are at a much greater risk of breaking down.
Or are we?
Let me suggest there is in fact a fourth dimension hidden in Moore’s Law that could keep it as strong as ever and may even extend its lifespan: efficiency. Efficiency explains how, in just 50 years, we could progress from building-sized corporate mainframes, requiring their own power grids and refrigeration, to laptops capable of even greater performance.
Several decades ago, efficiency wasn’t particularly interesting. We told ourselves that the average chip consumed just a few watts, and even as it gradually increased to 100 to 200 W individually, it was a minuscule amount compared with light bulbs and home appliances.
But by allowing our industry to become one of the biggest energy sinks on the planet, we have violated the social contract of Moore’s Law. This is unconscionable. We are in the semiconductor business to make the world a better place, not worse; to drive progress, but not at the environment’s expense.
Simply put, we have to initiate change and rethink Moore’s Law to include the long-ignored fourth dimension of efficiency. If we could take 20 percent of total semiconductor R&D and drive down total chip power consumption by 15 percent per year, we could have the average device running on just 20 percent of today’s electrical consumption by 2020. A personal computer would then use just 40 W, not the 200 W per hour consumed currently. That might sound challenging, but consider that today’s smartphones already consume less than 5 W for a full day of use.
Replace every chip in the world with these new low-power devices, and the global market would be able to carry five times as many electronic products as it does today—without adding any extra burden to the power grid.
What would we lose by diverting so much investment from power and price into efficiency? Almost nothing. The next generation of chips might take 18 months instead of 15; your next laptop might run at 2.4 GHz instead of 2.8 GHz; and the 30 percent price cut on the latest generation of iPod might happen next February instead of this November. Are you willing to make that small sacrifice? I think we all are.
What we need now is a new social contract, ratified by the entire chip industry, that agrees we will maintain the total energy consumption of the world’s semiconductor devices at the level it is today. Sound difficult? It is. But if you read about Moore’s Law in 1965 and were told that it would still be setting the pace in 2010, you would have thought it impossible.
The semiconductor industry is all about doing the impossible. Now is the moment for this generation of chip makers to take up the next challenge.
Sehat Sutardja, is chairman, president and CEO of Marvell Technology Group.
Moore’s Law is not really a law at all; as Dr. Moore himself regularly reminds us, it is merely a social contract between the semiconductor industry and its customers to keep technology moving forward at an exponential rate. There is no intrinsic reason why Moore’s Law must continue. In that case, why do we abide by it? Because whatever the financial costs of keeping up with Moore’s Law, the social costs of not doing so would be far greater.
For 50 years, ICs have been powering the world’s products and services, thereby driving the world economy. Moore’s Law doesn’t just describe the pace of innovation in the semiconductor world, but that of life in the modern world. What’s the price for this extraordinary pace of change? It may surprise you to learn that the answer is right in front of us.
The standard definition of Moore’s Law is that computer chips double in density every two years, but in fact it is much more complex. The law has several dimensions that can be described as different axes of change:
• Size (density). The amount of surface area you have to dedicate to a specific number of transistors gets smaller by the year.
• Performance. The same-sized chip will get ever more powerful in terms of memory storage, computation speeds, etc.
• Price. As you make chips smaller, the price will get cheaper; if you rearchitect your design to leverage the inherent speed gain of individual transistors, the price can be reduced even faster. Nevertheless, increasing performance has been the main focus for decades.
Over the past 20 years, the emphasis has been on increasing chip density while keeping the chip size relatively constant and maximizing performance and integration. More recently, the process of making more-complex individual processors with ever smaller transistors became prohibitively expensive. Faced with that new reality, the big processor companies shifted to multicore designs; it worked, but the cost was to abandon one of the three dimensions—size—probably forever.
The good news is that Moore’s Law is still intact. We can maintain the pace, but we are at a much greater risk of breaking down.
Or are we?
Let me suggest there is in fact a fourth dimension hidden in Moore’s Law that could keep it as strong as ever and may even extend its lifespan: efficiency. Efficiency explains how, in just 50 years, we could progress from building-sized corporate mainframes, requiring their own power grids and refrigeration, to laptops capable of even greater performance.
Several decades ago, efficiency wasn’t particularly interesting. We told ourselves that the average chip consumed just a few watts, and even as it gradually increased to 100 to 200 W individually, it was a minuscule amount compared with light bulbs and home appliances.
But by allowing our industry to become one of the biggest energy sinks on the planet, we have violated the social contract of Moore’s Law. This is unconscionable. We are in the semiconductor business to make the world a better place, not worse; to drive progress, but not at the environment’s expense.
Simply put, we have to initiate change and rethink Moore’s Law to include the long-ignored fourth dimension of efficiency. If we could take 20 percent of total semiconductor R&D and drive down total chip power consumption by 15 percent per year, we could have the average device running on just 20 percent of today’s electrical consumption by 2020. A personal computer would then use just 40 W, not the 200 W per hour consumed currently. That might sound challenging, but consider that today’s smartphones already consume less than 5 W for a full day of use.
Replace every chip in the world with these new low-power devices, and the global market would be able to carry five times as many electronic products as it does today—without adding any extra burden to the power grid.
What would we lose by diverting so much investment from power and price into efficiency? Almost nothing. The next generation of chips might take 18 months instead of 15; your next laptop might run at 2.4 GHz instead of 2.8 GHz; and the 30 percent price cut on the latest generation of iPod might happen next February instead of this November. Are you willing to make that small sacrifice? I think we all are.
What we need now is a new social contract, ratified by the entire chip industry, that agrees we will maintain the total energy consumption of the world’s semiconductor devices at the level it is today. Sound difficult? It is. But if you read about Moore’s Law in 1965 and were told that it would still be setting the pace in 2010, you would have thought it impossible.
The semiconductor industry is all about doing the impossible. Now is the moment for this generation of chip makers to take up the next challenge.
Sehat Sutardja, is chairman, president and CEO of Marvell Technology Group.
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pjduncan
11/23/2010 10:47 AM EST
"already consume less than 5 W for a full day of use"
Of all publications to confuse power with energy... a bit of proofreading would be nice.
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iniewski
11/23/2010 10:59 AM EST
The need for low power consumption is pretty obvious and discussed in hundreds of publications...what seems to be new here is a proposal for a social contract not to increase the power/energy levels by the entire semiconductor industry...that sounds noble but very difficult to execute in real world unless somehow regulated by governments...another approach would be to educate consumers not to increase power/energy levels at the individual levels...let's make a little survey here: who would be willing to commit to that goal at their home? Kris
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pixies
11/23/2010 2:03 PM EST
The problem is that the energy saving can only be felt in large scale but the performance improvement is noticeable on each individual device. Therefore the more energy efficient devices will be hard to market. For example, an new iPhone twice as fast is instantaneously noticeable to the user but a 30% increase in battery time is much less sexier even though a 30% energy saving may be a huge deal to the society.
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Duane Benson
11/23/2010 3:42 PM EST
I would assert that efficiency has already been added into Moore's Law. That's how we've been able to create more powerful laptops with increasing battery life. That's why we have the Atom chip. ARM is doing a great service in this regard by continuing to increase computing power while keeping power consumption low.
The competition with ARM will keep Intel focused on continuing to lower the electrical power per unit of computing power requirements. The consumer demand for longer battery life will keep everyone going in that direction. The simple limitations in cooling will keep desktop processors moving down in that scale.
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Pablito
11/23/2010 6:10 PM EST
I agree with Sehat. Yes, technology provides lower power every generation, but then we use that up for more features & more performance (through more gates, aka multi-core). Even though every generation does more for less power, our appetite for "more" means overall energy consumption is rising and we are cooking the planet. I hope he succeeds despite the obstacles.
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The GTG
11/24/2010 11:41 AM EST
I agree with Mr. Sutardja comments, we are facing a greenhouse effect that will decide the lives of our children. Since everything is semiconductor at the end of the day it is a logical place to start.
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iniewski
11/24/2010 1:15 PM EST
To @Pablito, @The GTG: I think we all agree to live in a better world ;-)...but the problem is how to do it...just saying let's go with low power dissipation of electronics is not going to accomplish much...we need credible plan on how the society might move in that direction...the other view is of course that this process will self-regulate itself...on technology side power dissipation in microprocessors is limited by cooling capability, in cell phones by batteries etc...Kris
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Code Monkey
11/24/2010 3:48 PM EST
My house uses over 50 kWH in the summer. So if I don't use my computer (the LCD monitor backlight probably generates the most heat) all day, that will drop to 49 kWH. 2% doesn't seem very unconscionable.
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nexogen
11/25/2010 3:38 AM EST
I think you can correlate Moore's law to other things that also increase exponentially, such as: Earth population, monetary debt, number of biological species(yes, evolution is exponential), communications/the internet, probably some things in economics, actually entropy itself is increasing exponentially because, probably, of a law of the universe or something far greater than human society anyway. We can barely understand things like global warming(which by the way doesn`t exist - it`s just sun activity) let alone control it. I agree with the OP in some way but I think we cannot control it, it`s just the way nature works.
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ProEngineer
11/25/2010 10:51 AM EST
An understanding of energy versus its rate of transfer/consumption is fundamental to properly characterizing the World's energy problems and engineering the right solutions. Without the right scientific/engineering foundation, we will keep making mistakes that waste our resources and create new problems rather than solve existing ones.
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gatorfan
11/25/2010 11:04 AM EST
Moore's law survives because it benefits consumers while also benefiting producers through economies of scale. Efficiency as defined in this article as power consumption is not always a perceived benefit to consumers. It works in the context of mobile devices because it correlates directly to functional use. But to wall powered devices there is no perceived benefit because power is cheap and there is no convenience premium to be had for a lower power solution. While noble, until the market forces shift driven by the need to reduce the power of the plug-in computer, it's not going to go anywhere. Why would someone pay for an efficiency factor that does not benefit them?
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prabhakar_deosthali
11/26/2010 2:04 AM EST
I think more energy can be saved by building Environment friendly buildings that use more natural light and ventilation than those Air conditioning plants and artificial lighting. More energy can be saved by reducing those night sports activities where millions of units are consumed for those flood-lit football, rugby and cricket stadiums, more energy can be saved by reducing the working hours of those heavily lit shopping malls . Compared to all these energy-guzzlers I think all that energy consumed that electronics will be a minuscule part of the world's energy consumption.
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iniewski
11/26/2010 9:55 AM EST
@prbhakar_deosthali, I agree, there is lots of other way of saving the energy...but we need a mechanism to hae them implemented and incentives to do so...how exactly would you shut down night sport activities? government regulations? I think the only real mechanism is energy costs, let energy be more expensive and people will make some behavioral modifications...as for now energy is too cheap, my electricity bill is $40 a month, to little to bother saving! Kris
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Baolt
11/26/2010 9:12 PM EST
I wonder what is the end-limit of Moore's so called 4th D. power efficiency space where we use semi conduction abilty of such metals to act as switch which is basically energy consuming process. Perhaps we might be in need of switching to other technical solutions where we can control circuits with cold-electronics. Not?
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Peter House
12/2/2010 8:27 AM EST
Let's use Super DST (Daylight Savings Time) to turn off all the stadium lighting. Set our clocks ahead by twelve hours. We work at night where the office buildings use less HVAC energy and the same lighting energy as during the day. All sports would then be played during the day where no stadium lighting would be required. As a bonus, we would be in the same Time Zone as China making the semiconductor business even more efficient. A true win-win-win.
It will take the government to make it happen - where can that go wrong? :)
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jnhong
12/2/2010 9:59 AM EST
Quote: "Simply put, we have to initiate change and rethink Moore’s Law to include the long-ignored fourth dimension of efficiency."
AMD championed multi-core processing over 10 years ago, driven by power density issues, among other things. Intel reached the same barrier, as power and energy densities went higher than electric lamps, skillets, and rocket nozzles. While performance is still the main metric used to judge processors, reaching even higher performance was achievable only by spreading out the power consumption across the die, and capping the power density. Ultimately, this is MIPS per Watt.
ARM architecture is clearly showing high efficiencies, but Intel architecture remains the choice for high-performance. More performance means more functionality. People do low-power when their needs have been met first, or there is a physical or monetary constraint. In low-cost applications, ARM is already proving this.
The USERS of computing devices choose if they want performance or low power or low cost. If Marvell can deliver the best combination of all three, the world will beat a path to their door -- or so the saying goes...
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sharps_eng
12/3/2010 5:25 PM EST
To explain Energy to non-scientists you could try Cambridge University physics professor David Mackay, whose free PDF ebook is very readable and easy to grasp.(www.withouthotair.com).
My house uses 13-20kWh daily, the computing baseload is about 300W (8kWH/day) so ditching the server and desktops and going exclusively on-line would save 30-50% of our electricity bill.
Natch, I can't run those CAD and EDA tools on an iphone, but a laptop is fine and doesn't run all the time.
BTW its funny in a wry way to see the fat boys finally noticing and indeed courting the Cinderella of efficiency, after decades ignoring all common-sense protest in the name of market forces...
Could frugality ever be fashionable?
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sharps_eng
12/3/2010 5:29 PM EST
-- and yes, I am aware of the difficulties of measuring the power consumption of older computer non-PFC power supplies, but I'm just using the little meter box the power company sent us for free....
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