Exciting news from Intel today on power efficient 3D transistors
Today Intel announced the commercialization of 3D transistors using low voltages and a 22 nm fab process, a development that will help the technology industry keep pace with the long term trends in power efficiency identified in our forthcoming IEEE article (Koomey, Jonathan G., Stephen Berard, Marla Sanchez, and Henry Wong. 2010. “Implications of Historical Trends in The Electrical Efficiency of Computing." In Press at the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. March.) . These new chips should deliver the same performance as 2D chips using half the power, and that’s good news for the continued development and proliferation of wireless sensors, controls, and mobile data analysis devices.
People have been predicting the end of Moore’s law for a long time. Over the years, my friends at Intel would only guarantee that they could keep up with those trends for the next five or ten years, but then they weren’t sure. The important thing is that they keep pulling rabbits out of the hat so that Moore’s law continues, and they seem to have just done it again. And since the improvements in computing efficiency go hand-in-hand with Moore’s law, continuing rapid developments in battery powered mobile computing devices are also "in the bag”.
One interesting thing is that the trends in computing efficiency actually predate Moore’s law, as they also applied to computers made using vacuum tubes and discrete transistors (as our article demonstrates empirically). So the efficiency trends are an inherent characteristic of electronic information technology, not just those powered by microprocessors.
For video of my talk at Microsoft last December on trends in computing efficiency, go here.
For a nice article in CNET about 3D transistors, go here.
