Our Multicore Future - a Ramble

The August hiatus has come and gone, and Silicon Valley is heating up - it seems like SV runs on an academic calendar with September being the fresh beginning a new year.

Earlier this summer I used the phrase "our multicore future" and was challenged about my certainty of its impact on our computing and communications infrastructure for the coming decade and beyond. So this sent me back to 1999 to re-read a chapter I had written for a book published by PwC where I discuss the collision of Moore’s Law with the laws of physics and its implications for future computing architectures.

The 20th century semiconductor approach to making smaller and more powerful transistors is scaling – reducing all the dimensions proportionally—to increase the number of transistors and increase the speed of the circuit. However, once the feature size of a transistor is scaled to below the sub-micron domain, the properties that control the operation of the device begin to change and limit further miniaturization. These fundamental limits are imposed by the laws of physics and thermodynamics -- where microprocessors can get no faster and electronics can get no smaller -- and potentially bring to a close the phenomenal 40 year economic ride that had given us some much innovation and has so dramatically changed our world.

How do we transition from the past to the future? What will intervene between the computing architecture of the past and the potential architectures of the future - molecular, optical, quantum or DNA computing? What will the worldwide semiconductor industry devise to sustain the multi-billion dollar investment the design and manufacturing infrastructure? What might extend Moore's Law for several more orders-of-magnitude? This is where our multicore future could take center stage.

The challenges are many -- particularly on the hardware side with interconnect technology between/among cores and on the software side with new programming paradigms required to harness the power of multicores -- and I will be pointing out new relationships and developments and writing small vignettes on this topic in the weeks and months to come.

PwC: PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology Forecast 2000. "Beyond the forecast: technologies in the 21st century.”