Peak Silicon?

hy/

I've tried to make that point before, but it seems they can still make CPUs faster and faster with more transistors as long as they can hold down the power. The last some years the power has been the main focus of semiconduc tor processes.

Then there is always the ability to integrate more of the system on a singl e chip and who doesn't want more memory?

But to get to the article you cite, their premise is actually that there ha s been a 24% "drop" in semi sales from October to April. First, there are very clear seasonal variations in sales which are not factored out by this comparison. Sales are only down 14% year over year. But even that is not a very useful comparison which is clear after looking at the chart provided . The sales trend for the last 15 years puts the current figure right on t rack for growth. Rather it is the 2017 and 2018 years which were an except ional spurt!

This is the same thinking that local governments had during the tax revenue crash where they moaned and groaned that their windfall wasn't lasting. S eems even in 2008 they couldn't see back a very few years to understand how to balance their budget.

--

  Rick C. 

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Yes,,that dip near 2009 is unusual, but the growth trend popped back on track afterwards. And..that spurt of increased growth from mid 2016 to peak near mid

2018 was unusual and the idiots had the gall to complain when that increased growth stopped and "reset" to normal in 2019.

Not really. Semi mfg is expensive. Its fate is closely tied with the availability of financing. 2008 crash, 2009 parts shortages. I remember

26-52+ week lead times, from most mfgs, back in 2010.

Tim

--
Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
Electrical Engineering Consultation and Design 
Website: https://www.seventransistorlabs.com/

We could use more. But we're in the timezone now where computers over 10 years old can still be perfectly capable. The urgency that used to exist has largely gone.

NT

"Tim Williams" wrote in news:qdfhr4$ebc$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Trump tarrifs... What effect will stupid crap like that have?

Note: rhetorical.

Sounds like the Mexico thing may work out. That argument was "If you stop pushing immigrants across our border, we won't destroy your economy."

China next.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Many stock market players LOVE charts, sometimes to the death. But that chart by itself is fairly clear.

There may be another kind of Moore's Law: we just don't need all those

Until the next great must have application comes along that requires an order of magnitude performance increase to work there will be a hiatus. Existing designs are plenty fast enough for all office and consumer uses which means there is no compelling reason for upgrading any more.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

I'd like Spice to run 1000x faster, and have parts value sliders, so I can tune things on a screen like I can on my bench. But that would be used rarely, and I have no other need for more compute power. Not many people do.

Most "computing" is done on phones nowadays.

With hard drives so cheap, and storage going to the cloud, people don't need enormous amounts of flash or dram.

Truly real looking 3D gaming might need a lot of compute power, but only for a few crazies. And gaming could be powered by servers too.

One EUV wafer scanner now costs $150e6, and uptime is bad. The "collector" (a huge megabuck multilayer mirror) has to be replaced often as it loads up with tin debris.

A chip development with mask sets can cost a billion dollars. We are close to End Times of silicon IC development.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

t-why/

One reason why I don't bother with getting faster Internet access is becaus e the browsers are so slow. Also there are video playback issues that some times suck up available CPU resources and freeze my cursor. Perhaps that i s an issue with Netflix, but a faster CPU would resolve it I expect.

Faster spread sheet calculations would also be welcome. I have plenty of f ilter design files that recalculate very slowly when anything is changed.

So, no, PCs are not fast enough for all purposes.

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  Rick C. 

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There may be another kind of Moore's Law: we just don't need all those

No computer will ever be fast enough to compensate for lazy thinking. Any resource perceived to be plenty will get wasted until it's no longer enough. Seems to be a law of nature.

Jeroen Belleman

"The world will only need seven computers."

And, that was probably true when 'computer' was a suite of rooms filled with vacuum tubes.

With respect to peak silicon, the acreage of silicon per kilobuck is high for photovoltaics, low for CPUs. Silicon isn't mainly for computers, unless one measures in Yuan Renminbi, instead of kg.

How much more would you be willing to pay for that? Super computers are available although the user interface is more batch oriented.

Renting time on a faster remote CPU cluster might be one way out.

Gaming is one of the few things that really does push the envelope and they are the driving force for multiple datastream rendering engines that can be subverted to do scientific processing or cryptocurrency.

Looks like the bottom may have dropped out of the latter bubble economy.

We are hitting the physical limits on dimensions to have enough atoms for classical logic. I don't expect Moore's law to hold for much longer.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

There may be another kind of Moore's Law: we just don't need all those

There are some graphics driver bugs that do this sort of thing but only on certain quite elderly versions of the OS. Last time I saw 100% multicore CPU utilisation with nothing useful happening was on Vista.

I have a pretty grotty internet connection with 5Mbps on a good day but I can stream full HD quality TV when it is working properly. On a bad day internet radio is unreliable. Quad HD is out of the question here.

You need to redesign the spreadsheet algorithm then or set it to manual recalculation. I have done some very large scale things in spreadsheets and have never really had that much bother with the speed. Disabling screen updating and automatic calculation makes a very big difference.

Not for all purposes but when used correctly they are well capable of doing everything that a typical home or office user requires.

--
Regards, 
Martin Brown

but-why/

I think you are missing the point. The spreadsheet is doing what it is sup posed to do, but it is slow to do all the required calculations. A faster CPU would be useful. The point of using computers is to save human effort. To say the solution to a slow CPU is to add back human effort to "optimiz e" the algorithm is admitting the CPU is too slow and compensating for it b y tossing it back in the human's lap. In these cases, unless the method is completely revamped, I don't think there is a more efficient approach. Th e approach I picked gave me insight into the problem so I could more effect ively think about it. So it would be hard to optimize it before I wrote th e initial spreadsheet.

And I suppose "correctly" means in a way that "the CPU is fast enough"? Th at's a rather circular argument. I also don't see a point in limiting the user group to "home or office" use. PCs are much less often used in the ho me these days. Cell phones are much more common. Office is the main marke t and that includes what I do with PCs.

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  Rick C. 

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Yes, "can" cost, but "can" also cost 200k USD and mask cost less than 50k (0.35um process). Samples for less than 10k USD (MOSIS)

Cheers

Klaus

An Nvidia gaming card has a lot of compute power. That, and a reasonable fee for software, might be affordable.

We tried running Spice on an Amazon cluster. It wasn't any better than using a fast local computer.

But really, I can live with my Dell PC, Windows 7, and LT Spice as-is. I don't really need more CPU power, more DRAM, more hard drive storage or speed. 300 mbits seems like plenty of internet speed.

I inherited a hammer that is at least 60 years old. That works fine too. An HP35 is maybe the best scientific calculator.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics