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Moore’s law was a socially constructed project
Moore’s law was a socially constructed project that depended on the coordinated actions of many independent companies and groups of individuals to last for as long it did.
All products evolve, but what was it about Moore’s law that enabled microelectronics to evolve so much faster and for longer than most other products?
Moore’s observation, made in 1965 based on four data points, was that the number of components contained in a fabricated silicon device doubles every year. The paper didn’t make this claim in words, but a line fitted to four yearly data points (starting in 1962) suggested this behavior continuing into the mid-1970s. The introduction of IBM’s Personal Computer, in 1981 containing Intel’s 8088 processor, led to interested parties coming together to create a hugely profitable ecosystem that depended on the continuance of Moore’s law.
The plot below shows Moore’s four points (red) and fitted regression model (green line). In practice, since 1970, fitting a regression model (purple line) to the number of transistors in various microprocessors (blue/green, data from Wikipedia), finds that the number of transistors doubled every two years (code+data):
In the early days, designing a device was mostly a manual operation; that is, the circuit design and logic design down to the transistor level were hand-drawn. This meant that creating a device containing twice as many transistors required twice as many engineers. At some point the doubling process either becomes uneconomic or it takes forever to get anything done because of the coordination effort.
The problem of needing an exponentially-growing number of engineers was solved by creating electronic design automation tools (EDA), starting in the 1980s, with successive generations of tools handling ever higher levels of abstraction, and human designers focusing on the upper levels.
The use of EDA provides a benefit to manufacturers (who can design differentiated products) and to customers (e.g., products containing more functionality).
If EDA had not solved the problem of exponential growth in engineers, Moore’s law would have maxed-out in the early 1980s, with around 150K transistors per device. However, this would not have stopped the ongoing shrinking of transistors; two economic factors independently incentivize the creation of ever smaller transistors.
When wafer fabrication technology improvements make it possible to double the number of transistors on a silicon wafer, then around twice as many devices can be produced (assuming unchanged number of transistors per device, and other technical details). The wafer fabrication cost is greater (second row in table below), but a lot less than twice as much, so the manufacturing cost per device is much lower (third row in table).
The doubling of transistors primarily provides a manufacturer benefit.
The following table gives estimates for various chip foundry economic factors, in dollars (taken from the report: AI Chips: What They Are and Why They Matter). Node, expressed in nanometers, used to directly correspond to the length of a particular feature created during the fabrication process; these days it does not correspond to the size of any specific feature and is essentially just a name applied to a particular generation of chips.
Node (nm) 90 65 40 28 20 16/12 10 7 5 Foundry sale price per wafer 1,650 1,937 2,274 2,891 3,677 3,984 5,992 9,346 16,988 Foundry sale price per chip 2,433 1,428 713 453 399 331 274 233 238 Mass production year 2004 2006 2009 2011 2014 2015 2017 2018 2020 Quarter Q4 Q4 Q1 Q4 Q3 Q3 Q2 Q3 Q1 Capital investment per wafer 4,649 5,456 6,404 8,144 10,356 11,220 13,169 14,267 16,746 processed per year Capital consumed per wafer 411 483 567 721 917 993 1,494 2,330 4,235 processed in 2020 Other costs and markup 1,293 1,454 1,707 2,171 2,760 2,990 4,498 7,016 12,753 per wafer |
The second economic factor incentivizing the creation of smaller transistors is Dennard scaling, a rarely heard technical term named after the first author of a 1974 paper showing that transistor power consumption scaled with area (for very small transistors). Halving the area occupied by a transistor, halves the power consumed, at the same frequency.
The maximum clock-frequency of a microprocessor is limited by the amount of heat it can dissipate; the heat produced is proportional to the power consumed, which is approximately proportional to the clock-frequency. Instead of a device having smaller transistors consume less power, they could consume the same power at double the frequency.
Dennard scaling primarily provides a customer benefit.
Figuring out how to further shrink the size of transistors requires an investment in research, followed by designing/(building or purchasing) new equipment. Why would a company, who had invested in researching and building their current manufacturing capability, be willing to invest in making it obsolete?
The fear of losing market share is a commercial imperative experienced by all leading companies. In the microprocessor market, the first company to halve the size of a transistor would be able to produce twice as many microprocessors (at a lower cost) running twice as fast as the existing products. They could (and did) charge more for the latest, faster product, even though it cost them less than the previous version to manufacture.
Building cheaper, faster products is a means to an end; that end is receiving a decent return on the investment made. How large is the market for new microprocessors and how large an investment is required to build the next generation of products?
Rock’s law says that the cost of a chip fabrication plant doubles every four years (the per wafer price in the table above is increasing at a slower rate). Gambling hundreds of millions of dollars, later billions of dollars, on a next generation fabrication plant has always been a high risk/high reward investment.
The sales of microprocessors are dependent on the sale of computers that contain them, and people buy computers to enable them to use software. Microprocessor manufacturers thus have to both convince computer manufacturers to use their chip (without breaking antitrust laws) and convince software companies to create products that run on a particular processor.
The introduction of the IBM PC kick-started the personal computer market, with Wintel (the partnership between Microsoft and Intel) dominating software developer and end-user mindshare of the PC compatible market (in no small part due to the billions these two companies spent on advertising).
An effective technique for increasing the volume of microprocessors sold is to shorten the usable lifetime of the computer potential customers currently own. Customers buy computers to run software, and when new versions of software can only effectively be used in a computer containing more memory or on a new microprocessor which supports functionality not supported by earlier processors, then a new computer is needed. By obsoleting older products soon after newer products become available, companies are able to evolve an existing customer base to one where the new product is looked upon as the norm. Customers are force marched into the future.
The plot below shows sales volume, in gigabytes, of various sized DRAM chips over time. The simple story of exponential growth in sales volume (plus signs) hides the more complicated story of the rise and fall of succeeding generations of memory chips (code+data):
The Red Queens had a simple task, keep buying the latest products. The activities of the companies supplying the specialist equipment needed to build a chip fabrication plant has to be coordinated, a role filled by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). The annual ITRS reports contain detailed specifications of the expected performance of the subsystems involved in the fabrication process.
Moore’s law is now dead, in that transistor doubling now takes longer than two years. Would transistor doubling time have taken longer than two years, or slowed down earlier, if:
- the ecosystem had not been dominated by two symbiotic companies, or did network effects make it inevitable that there would be two symbiotic companies,
- the Internet had happened at a different time,
- if software applications had quickly reached a good enough state,
- if cloud computing had gone mainstream much earlier.
Unreliable cpus and memory: The end result of Moore’s law?
Where is the evolution of commodity cpu and memory chips going to take its customers? I think the answer is cheap and unreliable products (just like many household appliances are priced low and have a short expected lifetime).
We have had the manufacturer-customer win-win phase of Moore’s law and I think we are now entering the win-loose phase.
The reason chip manufacturers, such as Intel, invest so heavily on continually shrinking dies is the same reason all companies invest, they expect to get a good return on their investment. The cost of processing the wafer from which individual chips are cut is more or less constant, reducing the size of a chip enables more to fitted on the same wafer, giving more product to sell for more or less the same wafer processing cost.
The fact that dies with smaller feature sizes have reduce power consumption and can run at faster clock speeds (up until around 10 years ago) is a secondary benefit to manufacturers (it created a reason for customers to replace what they already owned with a newer product); chip manufacturers would still have gone down the die shrink path if these secondary benefits had not existed, but perhaps at a slower rate. Customers saw, or were marketed, this strinkage story as one of product improvement for their benefit rather than as one of unit cost reduction for Intel’s benefit (Intel is the end-customer facing company that pumped billions into marketing).
Until recently both manufacturer and customer have benefited from die shrinks through faster cpus/lower power consumption and lower unit cost.
A problem that was rarely encountered outside of science fiction a few decades ago is now regularly encountered by all owners of modern computers, cosmic rays (plus more local source of ‘rays’) altering the behavior of running programs (4 GB of RAM is likely to experience a single bit-flip once every 33 hours of operation). As die shrink continues this problem will get worse. Another problem with ever smaller transistors is their decreasing mean time to failure (very technical details); we have seen expected chip lifetimes drop from 10 years to 7 and now less and decreasing.
Decreasing chip lifetimes is actually good for the manufacturer, it creates a reason for customers to buy a new product. Buying a new computer every 2-3 years has been accepted practice for many years (because the new ones were much better). Are we, the customer, in danger of being led to continue with this ‘accepted practice’ (because computers reliability is poor)?
Surely it is to the customer’s advantage to not buy devices that contain chips with even smaller features? Is it only the manufacturer that will obtain a worthwhile benefit from future die shrinks?
Secret instruction sets about to make a come-back
Now it has happened Apple’s launch of a new processor, the A4, seems such an obvious thing to do. As the manufacturer of propriety products Apple wants to have complete control over the software that customers run on those products. Using a processor whose instruction set and electrical signals are not publicly available goes a very long way to ensuring that somebody else’s BIOS/OS/drivers/etc do not replace Apple’s or that the distributed software is not ‘usefully’ patched (Apple have yet to reveal their intentions on publishing instruction set details, this is an off-the-cuff prediction on my part).
Why are Apple funding the development of the LLVM C/C++ compiler? Because it enables them to write a back-end for the A4 without revealing the instruction set (using gcc for this purpose would require that the source be distributed, revealing the instruction set). So much for my prediction that Apple will stop funding LLVM.
The landscape of compute intensive cpus used to be populated with a wide variety of offerings from many manufacturers. The very high price of riding the crest of Moore’s law is one of the reasons that Intel’s x86 acquired such a huge chunk of this market; one by one processor companies decided not to make the investment needed to keep their products competitive. Now that the applicability of Moore’s law is drawing to an end the treadmill of continued processor performance upgrades is starting to fading away. Apple are not looking at a processor upgrade cycle, that they need to keep up with to be competitive, that stretches very far into the future.
Isn’t keeping an instruction set secret commercial suicide? The way to sell hardware is to make sure that lots of software runs on it and software developers want instruction set details (well ok, a small number do, but I’m sure lots of others get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that the information is available should they need it). This is very much a last century view. The world is awash with an enormous variety of software, including lot of it very useful open source, and there is a lot more information available about the set of applications many customers want to use most of the time. Other than existing practice there is little reason why a manufacturer of a proprietary product, that is not a processor, needs to release instruction set details.
In the early 1980s I was at the technical launch of the Inmos Transputer and was told that the instruction set would not be published because the company did not want to be tied down to backwards compatibility. Perish the thought that customers would write assembler because the Inmos supplied compilers produced poor quality code or that a third party compiler would good enough to gain a significant market share. In marketing ability Inmos was the polar opposite of Apple. For a while HP were not very forthcoming on the instruction set behind their PA-RISC processor.
Will the A4 instruction set remain secret? On the whole, perhaps it can. The software based approaches to reverse engineering an instruction set require access to a compiler that generates it. For instance, changing a plus to a minus in one expression and looking for the small change in the generated executable; figuring out which status flags are set under which conditions is harder, but given time it can be done. Why would Apple release executable compilers if it wants to control the software that runs on the A4?
If the instruction set were cracked where would a developer go to obtain a compiler targeting the A4?
Given the FSF‘s history with Apple I would not be surprised if there was a fatwa against support for a proprietary instruction set in gcc. I suspect Apple would frown very heavily on such support ever being in the standard llvm distribution. I could see Apple’s lawyers sending letters to anybody making available a compiler that generated A4 code.
In the past manufacturers have tried to keep processor instruction sets secret and found that commercial reality required them to make this information freely available. Perhaps in the long term, like Moore’s law, the publication of detailed instruction set information may just be a passing phase.
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