Give Moore's Law a rest and let the software engineers carry the performance load for a while....

By Tom Foremski - December 15, 2004

by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher.com


My good buddy Mark Osborne, editor of Semiconductor Fabtech has been in town this week and we’ve been at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) conference, which boasted record attendance of more than 2,000 of the world’s top chip experts.


Mark can tell fascinating stories about 157-nanometer lithography and how wet immersion litho is allowing chipmakers to move ahead on Moore’s Law. And, when I really need to get some sleep, I ask him for his opinion on low-k and hi-k dielectrics and can the industry make it to the 65 nm industry road map node, let alone 45 nanometer. I usually sleep like a log!

I'm being facetiuous here because I am as geeky as Mark, and I take great pleasure in such discussions. And, as a chemistry major, it’s familiar territory to some degree. The chip industry is all about chemistry, and the big chipmakers such as Intel were founded by chemistry graduates. And chemistry, or rather, the creation of new materials through precise chemical processes is more important now than ever before.

Producing the next generations of chips requires so many new materials, and so many new ways of working with those materials, that many chipmakers are falling behind their schedules. Or rather, they are falling behind on Moore’s Law.

Is that such a bad thing? I say let’s take a breather, catch up the materials science a bit, get more out of the current capital equipment investments, and, very importantly let the software developers carry the load for a bit.

The hardware developers are breaking their backs, scouring the periodic table for new chemical combinations (we are running out of elements!) so that Moore’s law can drive performance improvements of what is essentially sloppy software design!

Let me prove this to you. The new crop of video console games came out for the Xbox. This included games like Halo 2, the top selling Xbox game. I’ve played it some with my son, Matt. The game is better than the original, which came out nearly five years ago. The graphics are tremendously better, the characters are more life-like. Yet, the hardware platform is the same.

The hardware platform hasn’t seen anything of Moore’s Law in more than five years yet the game experience is incredibly improved. It’s the software that got better.

dk0937


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By Tom Foremski - December 15, 2004 | Permalink | Category: Tech Watch
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