Computing
By Nick Stam
Usage trends and the Internet will fuel a continued PC evolution.
There will be no pause for reflection as computing technologies continue their remarkable rate of progress over the next three to five years. We'll see many new technology innovations--advanced product-manufacturing techniques and next-generation microprocessor architectures--that will bring processor speeds up to 12GHz and beyond by 2005. Computing will be pervasive, with multiple devices located in the home, in the office, in the car, in the hotel room, in the public kiosk, and even on your body. Instant access to information and the ability to perform transactions from anywhere at any time will bethe most dramatic differences between computing today and computing five years from now. Even so, it is the continued advancement in chips and microprocessors--their capabilities and architecture as well as their manufacture and miniaturisation--that drives the other areas of computing innovation.
Chip Fabrication Technologies
It appears that AMD, IBM, Intel, and Motorola are still following Moore's Law (which postulates that processors will approximately double in performance and transistor count every 18 months) and will ship 0.13-micron processors in volume by mid-2001. According to Keith Diefendorff, editor-in-chief of Microprocessor Report, moving from one process generation to another, such as 0.18-micron to 0.13-micron, results in cutting the die size and power consumption roughly in half. This equates to a doubling of transistor count if you're using the same size die, and an increase in logic gate speed of about 30 to 50 percent. Around 2003, we'll see 0.10- or 0.09-micron processes using 157-nm wavelength excimer lasers for photolithography (versus 193-nm excimer lasers in the 0.13 process and 248-nm deep UV light in the 0.18 and 0.25 processes today).
If we extrapolate based on the expected availability of 1.5GHz processors in mid-2000, and if we assume that Moore's Law holds for at least three more 18-month cycles, we should see mainstream CPUs running in excess of 3GHz by 2002, 6GHz by mid-2003, and 12GHz by 2005. Total transistor counts are more difficult to characterise, because core transistors must be differentiated from on-board cache transistors. But we might just see 150 million core transistors by 2005 in mainstream CPUs, depending on die size and cost constraints.
Then again, we've heard claims from Sony that its third-generation PlayStation Emotion Engine, possibly shipping around 2005, could have 500 million transistors between core and caches!
