I used to joke that we’d run out nanometres before we run out of Moore’s Law. Well, it’s happened. Now we’re in the Angstrom Age, apparently. Yet the dimensions that determine logic density remain at least an order of magnitude larger than 1nm and are likely to stay this way for a while, possibly for good.
At the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) last week, AMD CEO Lisa Su pointed to how increasing cost and slowing progress in physical scaling is changing not how they design their processors but the architecture of the high-performance computers some of them go into. To some extent the metric has gone back to performance rather than scaling, in much the same fashion as the end of the 1990s when Intel used Moore’s Law as a proxy for speed and not just logic density.
”Moore's Law has slowed down, it is becoming much, much harder to get density, performance, as well as efficiency,” Su said. “We've been increasing the performance on the...