Smaller, smarter, but maybe not much faster: The future of the CPU

Moore’s Law won’t apply for much longer. What happens next?

Note: Our future CPU tech feature has been fully updated. This article was first published in November 2011.

It’s easy to think that some things will be around forever, but technologies change. Vinyl records became digital discs and then digital downloads. The internal combustion engine morphed into the hybrid engine and will probably be replaced by electric motors. For many of us the PC has been replaced by mobile devices.

The same changes happen in the world of CPUs. First of all we had valve-based computers, then computers made from individual transistors. We invented the integrated circuit, followed by the silicon microprocessor. CPUs became faster, more efficient, their components more miniaturised. The smallest features have shrunk from 10,000nm to just 14nm, and the transistor count has increased from a few thousand to several billion. But sooner or later the silicon CPU is going to reach the point where it can’t be improved any further.

We’ve seen signs of that already. The ever-increasing clock speeds of previous decades have gone, with CPU speeds sitting at just over 3GHz for most of the last decade. Manufacturers have been able to improve performance at that clock speed with clever design and impressive feats of miniaturisation, but that has its limits too. Some observers believe that even by shifting to more accurate manufacturing techniques such as extreme ultraviolet, the limit may be around 11nm – a scale we’re already very close to. Read more….