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I agree that this article hits pretty hard against a lot of assumptions about how our machines are working.

I also feel like the author is trying to say something about how imperative scalar (meaning 'operates on one datum at a time') languages are causing more trouble than they're worth. Sophie Wilson said something similar in her talk about the future of microprocessors [1]. This implies that declarative and functional semantics would be more amenable to parallelization, as the author mentions in the article, as well as allowing the compiler more freedom to deduce a suitable 'reordering' of operations that would better fit the memory access heuristics the machine is using.

[1] https://youtu.be/_9mzmvhwMqw?t=26m30s

It is hard (read expensive) to go under 14nm.

Sophie Wilson talks about it much better then i could. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9mzmvhwMqw

> when Moore's Law hits physical limits?

It already did. Sophie Wilson said [0] its 28nm for ever. Scaling further makes no economic sense (unless you really need the space, e.g. in Smartphones).

[0] https://youtu.be/_9mzmvhwMqw?t=34m4s

⬐ obsurveyor

Are you talking about something different here? Kaby Lake is 14nm.

⬐ sqeaky

We have a really small sample size and forever is a long time.

⬐ strictnein

> It already did. Sophie Wilson said [0] its 28nm for ever.

That's not quite what her slide said. It's that the transistors on 14nm are _currently_ more expensive than those at 28nm, although that may change.

And then she states that only some things will make sense to do at less than 28nm. But a lot of the really big players are already at 14nm or will be there very shortly. Apple, Intel, Samsung, AMD and Nvidia are at 14nm now, either for their newest products or ones to be introduced later this year.

⬐ deepnotderp

fwiw, 14/16nm is now cheaper than 28nm due to wafer price cuts and improved yields

Moore's law has been dead for a while now. Most of the chip in your phone is powered off because otherwise it would burn up. Highly recommend watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9mzmvhwMqw

⬐ socmag

Really thanks for posting this video. Very cool to see Sophie Wilson talking so elequently and with obvious authority on a subject I and many others deeply care about. Great!

⬐ DennisP

True, but even without Moore's Law, using neuromorphic chips instead of general-purpose CPU/GPUs would likely be much more efficient. In the meantime it makes sense to use large server farms to emulate candidate neuromorphic architectures.

⬐ dquail

Interesting. I've yet to hear a Moores law is dead argument, so perhaps I should watch the video before commenting further. But the fact that most of the chip is turned off, doesn't falsify the fact that most of it still exists. Cooling it properly is a separate problem independent of computation no?

⬐ tekni5

The talk mentions that there is a physical law to how many cores you can add to a CPU before it becomes useless, even with parallel computing.

⬐ tekni5

Very fascinating talk, and easy to understand.

Have there been any solutions proposed, in particular to the limitations of adding extra cores.

⬐ politician

This is an enlightening talk about the current state of the industry.

Tldr: We're looking at 28nm process forever leading to boards containing specialized SoCs. Heat and sequential logic remain the most difficult challenges.

⬐ csixty4

Queued it up for this weekend. I'm sure I could listen to Ms. Wilson talk about CPUs for hours. To have been designing chips in those early days and still making them today must be as mind-blowing to her as the advances in software have been for us programmers.