The End of Iron August 5, 2017

There is a phrase in the industry, “Kill it with Iron”. It means to throw more hardware at a performance problem rather than trying to improve efficiency in the application. Usually it’s cheaper. Much cheaper. This will not always be the case.

Many people seem to forget that the rapid advancement of computing power in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is an artifact of one specific technology, semiconductor photolithography. This technology has an inherent end and becomes increasingly difficult with decreasing returns as that end is approached.

CPU	Speed	Release Date	Increase
Pentium 100	100 Mhz	1994
Pentium 3	1 Ghz	2000	150%/yr
Pentium 4	3 Ghz	2002	100%/yr
Core i7	4 Ghz	2014	2.7%/yr

Node size follows a similar curve lagged by a few years.

In the early days cpu power advanced rapidly. Smaller processes meant faster chips. One could draw an exponential curve, but it only fits over a short span. Semiconductors hit a wall a few years after 2000. Progress has been slow. It will stop soon. There is no similar replacement in the tech pipeline. For all the talk of carbon nanotubes, they are still only slightly better than semiconductors. Not to mention severely underdeveloped from a manufacturing standpoint. Alternate semiconductor formulas have been around for years and have been overshadowed by silicon for good reason. The much lauded Indium-Gallium chips can achieve very high clock speeds and survive extremely high temperatures. They have been used extensively in spacecraft. Unfortunately the crystal structure limits process size to that of decades old silicon chips. Chips are going vertical but power dissipation will limit that.

Soon, exactly depending on who you ask and the phase of the moon, there will be no smaller silicon processes. Even now only certain components are being shrunk because others have hit their absolute limit. In a few years there will no longer be any significant improvement in processor power or memory capacity per cubic centimeter. Put more simply, power, price, and size are about to be tied directly. Want twice the power? Buy twice as many chips.

Kill it with Iron is about to die.

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