Throwing computing into reverse
Michael P. Frank · IEEE Spectrum · 2017
For More Than 50 Years, computers have made steady and dramatic improvements, all thanks to Moore's Law- the exponential increase over time in the number of transistors that can be fabricated on an integrated circuit of a given size. Moore's Law owed its success to the fact that as transistors were made smaller, they became simultaneously cheaper, faster, and more energy efficient. The payoff from this win-win-win scenario enabled reinvestment in semiconductor fabrication technology that could make even smaller, more densely packed transistors. And so this virtuous circle continued, decade after decade. . Now though, experts in industry, academia, and government laboratories anticipate that semiconductor miniaturization won't continue much longer-maybe 5 or 10 years. Making transistors smaller no longer yields the improvements it used to. The physical characteristics of small transistors caused clock speeds to stagnate more than a decade ago, which drove the industry to start building chips with multiple cores. But even multicore architectures must contend with increasing amounts of "dark silicon," areas of the chip that must be powered off to avoid overheating.