The limits of semiconductor technology and oncoming challenges in computer micro architectures and architectures

Abstract

In the last three decades the world of computers and especially that of microprocessors has been advanced at exponential rates in both productivity and performance. The integrated circuit industry has followed a steady path of constantly shrinking devices geometries and increased functionality that larger chips provide. The technology that enabled this exponential growth is a combination of advancements in process technology, microarchitecture, architecture and design and development tools. Together, these performances and functionality improvements have resulted in a history of new technology generations every two to three years, commonly referred to as "Moore Law". Each new generation has approximately doubled logic circuit density and increased performance by about 40%. This paper overviews some of the microarchitectural techniques that are typical for contemporary high-performance microprocessors. The techniques are classified into those that increase the concurrency in instruction processing, while maintaining the appearance of sequential processing (pipelining, super-scalar execution, out-of-order execution, etc.), and those that exploit program behavior (memories hierarchies, branch predictors, trace caches, etc.). In addition, the paper also discusses microarchitectural techniques likely to be used in the near future such as microarchitectures with multiple sequencers and thread-level speculation, and microarchitectural techniques intended for minimization of power consumption.

History and Evolution of Modeling in Biotechnology: Modeling & Simulation, Application and Hardware Performance

“…As fabrication technologies cannot be arbitrarily small, it is believed that MOORE's law has come close to its end nowadays [18] . Furthermore, there is no direct proportional correlation between transistor count and processing power [19] . One suitable method to measure processing power commonly required for biotechnological applications is the number of floating-point operations that a microprocessor can perform each second (FLOPS), with common units million operations (megaFLOPS, MFLOPS) and billion operations (gigaFLOPS, GFLOPS).…”

Structural and Hardware Complexities of Microprocessor Design According to Moore’s Law

“…Applying the Moore's Law by doubling the number of transistors every two years increases the speed and performance of the processor and causes increasing the processor's hardware complexity (see Table 2) and structural complexity, which will be limited after a few years [22,23,24,25]. Table 3 shows the apparatus complexity measurement of different microprocessors from 1971 till 2012.…”

Hardware Complexity of Microprocessor Design According to Moore's Law

“…Applying Moore's Law by doubling the number of transistors every two years increases the speed and performance of the processor and causes increasing the processor's hardware complexity (see Table 1), which will be limited after a few years [17,18,19,20]. Table 2 shows the apparatus complexity measurement of different microprocessors from 1971 till 2012.…”