Business | Technology
Chips fail to keep pace with progress
Dubai Computer have steadily gotten faster over the years, but the companies that make the brains of today's computer are now facing a different issue: are those computers getting faster quickly enough?
- By Scott Shuey, Chief Business Reporter
- Published: 16:20 April 22, 2008
- Steve Furniss. He believes the old Moore's Law is not working anymore, and what the computer industry needs is a new paradigm.
- Image Credit: Ahmed Ramzan/Gulf News
Dubai Computer have steadily gotten faster over the years, but the companies that make the brains of today's computer are now facing a different issue: are those computers getting faster quickly enough?
Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley-based company that saw revenues of $13 billion in 2007, says the answer is no. Steve Furniss, Sun's vice-president of global sales and services, says the advent of Web 2.0 and other business applications are causing growth on a scale that "is beyond everyone's comprehension", and the processing speeds of chips are failing to keep up with demand.
At issue is Moore's Law, which has guided the microprocessor industry for more than 40 years. The law says, roughly, that the number of components on an integrated circuit will double approximately every 18 months to two years. The result for end users is that the computers they buy today are twice as fast as the computer they purchased two years ago. But that's not good enough anymore, Furniss says.
"We have a problem," he says. "Moore's Law is no longer scaling to the speed of the application. It's quite an interesting phenomenon right now… so doubling every 18 months is not fast enough. So we have to change that."
Leading that change is Sun's chief technology officer Greg Papadopoulos, who recently announced that Sun had been awarded a $44 million contract from Pentagon to study the use of lasers to replace the wiring that normally connects chips. Sun is hoping the technology will improve processing speeds and increase power efficiency.
Furniss says Sun will find a way of applying that technology for customers.
Disagreement
Not everyone agrees with Sun, however, including the two biggest producers of microprocessors, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
"Moore's Law has been proclaimed dead about 10 times in my 35 years in the industry," says Craig Barrett, who recently visited Dubai. "As near as I can tell, it's alive and well."
Barrett would know. Moore's Law is named for Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, whose observations were first published in 1965. Moore predicted then that by 1975 as many as 65,000 components would be placed on a single silicon chip, although by 1978, the 8086 microprocessor, which was the brains of the first IBM-PC, contained only 29,000 components.
By 2006, microprocessors contained more than 300 million.
Barrett doesn't just disagree with the assertion that Moore's Law is dead, he says the law is still driving the industry. Unlike 20 years ago, Barrett says, chip manufactures cannot simply increase the clock speed of computers. Clock speed is the rate at which a computer processes information.
But increasing clockspeed can be somewhat analogous to adding more cylinders to a car engine — it may make the car go faster, but fuel efficiently would greatly suffer.
"You'd love to be able to crank up the clock speed," he says. "We can crank up the clock speed. You just don't like the bottomline results, which is the leakage current and power dissipation."
Current leakage and power dissipation both lead to increased heat in computers, which can cause damage or drive up costs from having to cool the machines.
So for now, Barrett says Intel "is really driven by Moore's Law to take advantage of the increased number of transistors we can but down with each generation."
Both Intel and AMD also say the issues lies with the software developers, who haven't adapted their software to take advantage of new hardware technology.
Inside a server
Gautam Srivastava, AMD's general manager for the Middle East and Pakistan, says to understand the issue you need to know a little about how servers work, or, more accurately, how often they don't.
Srivastava says that servers spend, on average, 70 per cent of their lifetime in an idle state, or, simply put, doing nothing. Even when they are doing work, they are not running to their full capacity.
Two of the key design changes in recent years has been the development of multicore processors and hyper threading, which allow computer to multitask more efficiently.
However, the development of software has yet to catch up with the advancements in hardware. Both are required to maximise the efficiency of today's microprocessors.
"It's like when we went from 32-bit computing to 64-bit computing, " he says. "Hardware lead and software followed."
However, Furniss says that software driving demand for greater processor speeds is already optimised for multicores and multithreaded technology, which is way Sun is looking for new technology, like lasers, to increase speed.
“We will find innovative ways of creating the ability to scale faster than Moore's Law," he says.
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