One Line
Computer scientists are exploring new materials to replace silicon, tech companies are hiring their own chip engineers, and advancements in the industry since 1911 have revolutionized the computer industry.
Key Points
- Transistors were invented in 1947, allowing for the development of integrated circuits and miniaturization of computations.
- Intel released the 4004 chip in 1971, the first CPU on a chip with 2,300 transistors.
- Carver Mead predicted 10^8 transistors on 1cm^2, which had been conservatively exceeded by 2000.
- Moore's Law predicted that the number of components on a chip would double every two years.
- Companies have been designing their own chips specifically for their applications, such as Google's TPU and Apple's M1 chip.
- Despite criticism, Moore's Law predictions are becoming more difficult to achieve due to cost of production and physical limitations, leading to the discussion of its demise in 2022.
Summaries
131 word summary
Computer scientists must be knowledgeable in both hardware and software, and researchers are exploring materials such as photons and carbon nanotubes to replace silicon. Tech companies are hiring their own chip engineers to design custom ASICs, and Google and Tesla have developed their own chips. Moore's Law, which predicted that the number of components on a chip would double every two years, is being challenged due to financial and physical constraints. Lee DeForest's discovery of the vacuum tube in 1911, and John Bardeen and Walter Brattain's invention of the transistor in 1947 at Bell Labs, enabled the creation of integrated circuits. In 1971, Intel released the first CPU on a chip, the 4004, and two years later the Altair 8800 was released as the first affordable personal computer, revolutionizing the industry.
389 word summary
Moore's Law, which states that the number of components on a chip will double every two years, is being challenged due to the financial and physical constraints of miniaturization. Lee DeForest's discovery of the vacuum tube in 1911, and John Bardeen and Walter Brattain's invention of the transistor in 1947 at Bell Labs, enabled the creation of integrated circuits. Carver Mead theorized that transistors could be miniaturized to fit 10^7 to 10^8 onto 1cm^2, and Gordon Moore predicted that computational power would increase by a factor of eight by scaling down a transistor's size. In 1971, Intel released the first CPU on a chip, the 4004, and two years later the Altair 8800 was released as the first affordable personal computer. The democratization of computers revolutionized the industry. By 2000, CPUs had 10 million transistors and were becoming increasingly small. This led to corporate consolidation and the predominance of Intel's x86 model, allowing for the development of personal computers. Carver Mead's 1972 prediction of 10^8 transistors over 1cm^2 was exceeded with 6x10^9, but Moore's Law is no longer economically viable due to increasing costs. Parallel processing enabled the Internet to be used by billions and CPUs to have multiple cores.
Chip design shops such as Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are now facing competition from tech companies hiring their own chip engineers to design ASICs. Amazon and Microsoft have teams that design chips tailor-made for their respective servers, while Apple developed its own M1 chip based on ARM architecture. Google revealed its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) in 2016, and Tesla followed suit in 2022. 2023 Every Media, Inc provides a daily email highlighting the most noteworthy tech topics. Anna-Sofia Lesiv, a writer at Contrary, is a Stanford economics graduate with experience at Bridgewater, Founders Fund, and 8VC.
The move away from a chip-for-all framework requires computer scientists to be knowledgeable about both hardware and software. Researchers are exploring replacing silicon with materials such as photons and carbon nanotubes. Google is developing machine learning models to assist chip designers, and the open-source hardware community is growing. Alan Kay famously said "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." Designing microelectronics must become part of computer science, and the gap between hardware and software must close. An example of this is Dojo, a wild west of hardware chip.
1021 word summary
2023 Every Media, Inc offers a daily email featuring the most interesting thinking and thinkers in tech. Anna-Sofia Lesiv, a writer at venture capital firm Contrary, graduated from Stanford with a degree in economics and has experience at Bridgewater, Founders Fund, and 8VC. Source material including quotes comes from David A. Kaplan's book The Silicon Boys: And Their Valley of Dreams. Computer scientists of the future will need to understand both software and hardware, as we move away from a chip-for-all framework. Researchers are looking into replacing silicon channels with smaller materials such as photons and carbon nanotubes. Google is producing machine learning models to assist chip designers, and the open-source hardware community is gaining traction. Alan Kay once said "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." Designing microelectronics needs to become synonymous with computer science, and the gap between hardware and software will need to close. Dojo is an example of a wild west of hardware chip. In 2016, Google revealed the design of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), a chip specifically designed to run its TensorFlow AI algorithm. Tesla followed suit in 2022. Amazon and Microsoft, who both have massive proprietary data centers, have teams that design chips tailor-made for their respective servers. Apple moved away from using Intel chips in 2020 and developed its own M1 chip based on ARM architecture, which is faster than Intel's. This was a successful move, as the M1 chip is now the fastest CPU on the market.
Chip design shops such as Intel, Nvidia, and Qualcomm are now facing the challenge of modern technology companies hiring their own chip engineers to design ASICs (application specific integrated circuits). These are processor chips whose circuits are designed for hyper-efficiency for a specific application.
Carver Mead suggests "silicon compilation" as the next step, which is mapping a program directly into the silicon for faster computation. This would eliminate the bottleneck of using the same standardized, general-purpose hardware architecture for all computations. Semiconductor companies have been copying ancient architectures for some time, as Carver Mead's 1972 paper predicting 10^8 transistors over 1cm^2 has been conservatively exceeded with 6x10^9. However, Moore's Law is no longer economically viable due to the cost of producing each individual transistor increasing, resulting in a decline of functional chip yield from fabs. This has necessitated strategies to mitigate defects, but at a greater cost. Parallel processing ushered in a new era of computational possibility, making it possible for the Internet to be used by billions around the world and for CPUs to have multiple processor cores to handle multiple instructions at once. Despite criticism, often from Gordon Moore himself, many still struggle to see how it would be economical to continue making transistors smaller. As the struggle to miniaturize grew, Moore's Law predictions started to roll in. By 2000, CPUs had 10 million transistors and were becoming invisible to the human eye. Cost of production pushed out many foundries, leading to corporate consolidation and mergers. Companies had to decide between designing and selling their own chips or fabricating someone else's designs. Intel's x86 model won out, meaning most foundries began manufacturing according to Intel's specs. IBM flooded Intel with orders, leading Intel to license their designs. This allowed for the development of personal computers, and later the release of the Apple II. Tens of thousands of Altair 8800s were sold, setting off a rapid development of computers. In 1975, the Altair 8800 was released as the first affordable personal computer. It was powered by the Intel 8080 chip, had 250 bytes of memory, and could be programmed by flipping mechanical switches. This democratization of computers revolutionized the industry.
Intel's first product was the 1103 memory chip, which used transistors to store and release electric charges. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild Semiconductors in 1968 to found Intel and create an integrated circuit with a central processing unit (CPU). The 4004 chip, released in 1971, was the first CPU on a chip and cost $360. It had 2,300 transistors and could perform 60,000 instructions per second.
Carver Mead theorized that transistors could be miniaturized to fit 10^7 to 10^8 onto 1cm^2. Gordon Moore predicted that the number of components on a chip would double every two years, and that by scaling down a transistor's size by two, computational power would increase by a factor of eight. The invention of the transistor in 1947 by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, under the guidance of William Shockley at Bell Labs, enabled the creation of integrated circuits. These circuits could be etched onto a single wafer of semiconductor material, rather than being hand-soldered together, and their miniaturization allowed for more computation with less power. Robert Noyce's Fairchild Semiconductors was the first successful startup to mass-produce these transistors. By 1968, their integrated circuits had over 1000 transistors, made possible by improved photolithographic techniques. Shockley's prediction that transistors would take over electronics proved true. Bell Labs researchers discovered a new class of materials called semiconductors, which allowed the current to flow through them when prompted. Vacuum tubes were used to build circuits that could carry out basic logic functions, such as addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. The University of Pennsylvania's ENIAC was a large-scale electrical computer that used 18,000 vacuum tubes and required 150,000 watts of power to operate.
Lee DeForest's discovery of the vacuum tube in 1911 provided a way to switch electrical signals on and off using electrical signals themselves. Electricity is essential for computers as it represents the physical form of information.
Today's chips are packed with billions of transistors and are capable of executing billions of instructions per second. The smallest transistors on the market are now reaching the 3 nanometer mark, but further miniaturization presents financial and physical challenges, meaning digital dreams may become more expensive to achieve. Nvidias CEO Jensen Huang announced Moore's Law is dead in September 2022. The end of Moore's Law is being discussed due to the fact that as chips are getting smaller, prices are going up. Every January 9th, the technology world stops and takes a closer look at Moore's Law.