All my life we have had computers, based on chips that get faster and smaller every year, but there is a physical limit to how small the transistors on the chip can go.
We have managed to get down to about 20nm scale and Intel is pushing for 16nm but the road ends around the 10nm scale, as the parts are too small to physically carry an electrical current without burning out or the error rate being too high to do reliable computations.
I’m a Software developer and it has been great to think that even if I write reliable but slow code, that next year with newer faster hardware it would be reliable fast code.
So could this or the next decade sound the death knell on Moore’s Law, the cornucopia of the IT, games and graphics and software industries!
But what will this mean for the games, mobile and graphics industry as a whole?
A: 28nm features stacked 2 high gives you 14nm per transistor, or stacked 4 high gives you 7nm per transistor, so if you can stack them 8 heigh you would in effect have 3.5nm transistors. So we can circumvent the 5nm barrier even with 28nm technology. We just need to stack up or layer transistors. Doh! Nice little brain teaser.
As for games, they already under-utilise hardware, it’d be wise to simply make multi-threading a more key part of your development process (though that has been the case for a long time, regardless of this theory).
I don’t see the need to make it seem so melodramatic, especially considering it has already happened.
Nothing more to say than Wikipedia already covers, so I may as well link it. Moore's law - Wikipedia
Think about it every year or two you can get a faster mobile phone, cpu or graphics card. OK every 6+ years for consoles but we have had an era of increased graphics and processing power to make better games.
Well there are limits to multi-threading as you are limited to the number of cores on the chip which is restricted by Moore’s law. You can go multi-chip but then you have inter chip bandwidth and memory bandwidth limitations.
As for underutilized hardware, I would disagree, a lot of AAA games push the hardware to it’s limits. Take the new Mantle API and the Frostbite Game engine used in Battlefield 4 for example.
Maybe you don’t understand the games industry, every year it needs to produce a newer better game to keep it’s business going, if the hardware stops advancing then the industry can’t just add more art, graphics and complexity to the next game.
The next iPhone could be no faster or smarter than the previous one, they just start alternate the cases bevel from flat to smooth.
I agree that way too many developers rely on more and more powerful hardware. I never agreed that they should do that. Personally, I always optimize my projects not only for my current hardware (which is usually behind the times such as my 6 year old dev laptop) but for even less powerful machines. It’s always good to be efficient. I have that engrained in my head as a habit. Probably because I started dev on machines that had 16Kb of RAM and CPUs that maxed out at 1MHz.
Innovation needs to come from the game (or whatever software) developers. Stop relying on “gee whiz” FX and focus on game play. CPUs are so incredibly fast today devs should be able to do anything they need to make an excellent game. The problem is every time hardware advances instead of them focusing on packing in more game play, better AI, populating the game worlds with more objects that can be interacted with, filling the cities in RPGs with semi-intelligent NPCs… what do they do? They waste all of the increased power focusing on graphics. “We must show reflections when the player walks by mud puddles!”, “yes we are still only putting 7 dumb NPCs into the main city but they will look better than any other NPCs in other games”. That is what has been happening for the past 20 years.
Fortunately, there are many Indy devs who have been focusing more on putting the game back into games instead of focusing on visual advances to the detriment of everything else.
So… it will be fine. I hope the hardware does stop advancing. If it does we will probably see some of the greatest games ever.
Hey now, I don’t think my new Toon Shaders are anything that defines Graphics I made it in hopes just to get a more better look than a plain cartoon Shader with no depth of field to it lol.
(Which I did update the Asset Store Forum if you want to check out the new screen shots).
But I know what you mean hahaaha, I totally agree, people only focus on graphics and forget everything else.
You innovated in software! I doubt your work is something that will cause a major bottleneck due to the graphics. That kind of thing is great! If your system is sucking up 50% of all frame time then boooo hsssss shame. Lol
But yeah seriously. Look at things like Raid on Bungeling Bay and Sim City. I doubt many modern games (especially mobile games) even have logic that advanced. Modern RPGs are 3D and you can see the veins on leaves but are they any deeper than Phantasie 3 and Questron 2 from nearly 30 years ago? Sure they definitely look and sound better. They seem a lot more like movies. I just find it amazing how much presentation has changed over the years while the actual game AI, depth and such has progressed at maybe 1/20th of the speed.
My wife waited for a bigger phone. A few weeks ago, I got her the Note 4. It has a quad core, 2.7 Ghz processor with 3 GB of Ram, and a 2560x1440 display. It’s more powerful than the gaming rigs we bought 4 years ago and it fits in her pocket! The technical definition of Moore’s law is no longer being met, however the spirit of the law is live and well.
Just because they can’t keep making them smaller and smaller doesn’t mean progress will halt and computers won’t become stronger.
At worst it just means you won’t be playing Call of Duty on a wristwatch, which is impractical anyway.
It’s not like the current method of building them is even the absolutely necessary method. New tech could easily end up removing such limitations at some point.
Sure, there are very few games that fully utilise modern hardware, not sure what you are trying to say there. It has nothing to do with Moore’s Law though, so I’ll leave it alone. Unity in it’s current state is very difficult to get utilising much of modern hardware (thankfully 5.x fixes this somewhat).
Just because Moore’s Law isn’t being kept to doesn’t mean hardware will stop advancing…
My comment about multi-threading relates to the fact that once hardware hits the size limits it’s likely it will diversify it’s architecture, resulting in cores for specific purposes, similar to what GPU architecture does today (I have no source for this prediction, but it does make sense).
Hardware won’t stop advancing, it will simply advance in different directions (something that it has in fact already started doing). Remember Moore’s Law was made in a time where mobile computing was a distant dream, and power consumption was not a consideration deemed important in design, it doesn’t really apply in this modern era.
This is all assuming we will still be using Silicon based architecture in 50 years, which is naive really.
Actually have you noticed that smart phones are getting bigger now, OK apparently it’s the display, but I wonder how much is due to the slowing of Moore’s Law and battery technology trying to catch up.
Lots of factors. And in the end, the hardware is still amazingly, blistering, completely mind-blowingly powerful. And it fits in my pocket and runs full screen videos and games for ~8 hours! Long, long way from my pocket football game at age 8.
I have the LG G3 and I have to say omg it’s amazingly fast too! It’s equivilent to my Laptop I use
which as a 2.4 I Core 3 Dual Core
4 gigs of ram
1 gigs graphics card.
So that’s saying something about phones.
The note has a bit faster processor than my phone, but I got the 4K resolution on mine
Which does make things more crisp, but aside from that it’s virtually useless I think
But there has to be a benefit to the customer, if your tweaked chip is 50% faster then you can probably sell it but what if you only get a 10% improvement over an existing CPU, would you want to spend millions on building it, could you convince Intel or AMD to make it on such slim margins.
Once we bottom out on Moore’s Law then there is one option, larger chips. Chips can expand in area and maybe with improvements and advancements in 3D stacking of chip components expand in volume.
But even none silicon hardware if it uses electrons will have similar physical limitations, maybe photonics, chips that compute using light or quantum computing. The thing is there is nothing at the moment that can do what silicon does and even if there are alternative options they could take decades to mature and catch up with silicon.
A lot of the time chips are built to the highest quality they can in the fab then they adjust the performance of the silicon based on the control circuitry, hence some chips are renowned for being overclockable. Simply because the apparent different models are in fact made to the same standard but only tested to the level they are sold at.
In effect they market chips at reduced capacity, in some cases they have even added control circuitry to turn off features.
This supports their premium priced products. It’s a bit like a hotel charging different rates for the same volume of room just dressed slightly differently.
It’s not about benefit to the customer if you come at it from the manufacturers perspective, it’s about how they market it. The generation gaps of CPU’s these days are already incremental in performance terms, it’s been that way for a while.
You say it could take decades, but does that matter? As stated before, it’s not as though improvements won’t happen, they just won’t happen at the rate Moore predicted. It could very well be that we move on to a material/method that ends up having rates faster than Moore’s Law, we don’t know.
Also is larger chips a bad thing? It seems like you’re holding Moore’s Law up as this ideal situation to be in, which it isn’t, it’s simply an outdated method of predicting trends. Larger chips aren’t necessarily a terrible idea, desktops and servers would be fine with a change that made chips larger but faster/more efficient. And like you said yourself, mobiles are getting bigger anyway, why not fill some of the space with more CPU
