ARM Pioneer Sophie Wilson Also Thinks Moore’s Law is Coming to an End
Some limits were hit a decade ago.  The Pentium 4 (2004) clocked at 3.8GHz max.  Most Intel processors today are slower than that. Intel&#x27;s fastest offering is a little over 4GHz.<p>The article says that 28nm will dominate for another decade, even though 14nm fabs exist.  Having to use extreme ultraviolet (really soft X-rays) for lithography runs costs way up.  EUV &quot;light sources&quot; are insanely complex, involving heating falling droplets of metal to plasma levels with lasers. It&#x27;s amazing that works as a production technology.  The equipment looks like something from a high energy physics lab.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that we hit the limit of photons before the limits of atoms or electrons.<p>Another problem with all this downsizing is electromigration. Every once in a while, an atom gets pulled out of position by the electric field across a gap. Higher temperatures make it worse. Narrower wires make it more of a problem. This is now a major reason ICs wear out in use.<p>Getting rid of the heat is another problem. High performance CPUs are already cooling-limited. This is also why 3D IC schemes aren&#x27;t too useful for active components like CPUs.  Getting heat out of the middle of the stack is hard. Memory can be stacked, if it&#x27;s not used too hard.<p>There&#x27;s no problem making lots of CPUs on a chip, if the application can use them.  Things look better server-side; you can use vast numbers of CPUs in a server farm, but it&#x27;s hard to see what 20 or 100 CPUs would do for a laptop.<p>Drastically different architectures may help on specialized problems.  GPUs have turned out to be more generally useful than expected. There will probably be &quot;deep learning&quot; ICs; that&#x27;s a problem where the basic operation is simple and there&#x27;s massive parallelism.<p>For ordinary CPU power per CPU, we&#x27;re close to done.