Since the earlier poster brought up Silicon, why do you suppose Bell Labs was researching the electrical properties of silicon? To produce better diode rectifiers. The idea of actually making a three-terminal switch was a long term goal that they got to a lot quicker than they expected.

Bell Labs was in fact funneling a lot of military money into developing better tubes. And they were funneling a lot of military money into investigating silicon devices. They had more than enough money to do both. The military (and Bell Labs management because they could see the future in solid-state phone switches) funded the basic research to put themselves in a position where the applications were on the horizon.

A really great book documenting this amazing time is Crystal Fire. http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Fire-Transistor-Information-Technology/dp/0393318516

All sub-65nm and most 65nm processes are lithographically exposed in water current for the reason you stated. The next step is extreme UV or even e-beam lithography but it's expensive and very, very difficult.

You're quite right that this is an economic/mass-market issue more than a pure technical issue.

ABSOLUTELY! Necessity being the mother of invention and all that.

Of course we used all kinds of inputs into our planning process. We would have been fools not to.

I feel like you're doing a bit of "move the goal posts" here. First you very emphatically state that "[Moore's Law] is NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN fit to predict anything invovling money or resources"

I gave you a reply from experience that that is not true, and in fact companies do use (or at least used to) use Moore's Law in their planning process (where money and resources are involved).

Now you saying I'm claiming my company invested millions blindly because we had some faith in Moore's Law. Of course we didn't, and I don't think I implied that.

First off, looking at the speed improvements from the foundry over the last 10 years as evidence is pretty much the same thing as following Moore's Law.

Second, as I'm sure you know, sales reps will say "YES" to anything, so Moore's Law helps put things in context. If they are saying something way better than Moore's Law, you have to be skeptical.

Basically, I disagree that the fact that we used a variety of factors (like virtually any company will do for any decision) invalidates my point. You said that Moore's Law isn't fit for predicting things. I disagree.

If you would have said "Moore's Law isn't fit for making significant investments in the absence of other factors or critical thinking" then I would agree with you.

G3 and G4 were Macs using IBM designed (largely) processors. Motorola and IBM jointly produced Power PC chips that Apple used in the mid/late 90s (G3 and G4) but Motorola eventually dropped out and IBM wasn't interested in keeping up with Intel. For a few years, the Apple chips were better than the IBM chips (I didn't own an Apple computer at the time, so I was evaluating this as an engineer). By the time Intel had closed the gap Apple wisely went over to the Intel architecture.

I wrote:

You replied:

I didn't claim it was a law. No one even slightly knowledgeable about semiconductors thinks its a law. Did you read my post? The original post stated that "Didn't we already agree that predictions are only useful to talking heads, pundits and hucksters?".

My response was that this was in fact a very useful prediction for engineers and scientists actually doing the work.

So when I said "I don't know about that", it was pretty clear I meant that I didn't agree that predictions are only useful to talking heads et al.

I disagree with you a bit here. Moore's Law is an observation, sure, but to engineers that understand the assumptions that go into Moore's Law it has been extremely useful for making predictions involving money and resources.

At my last job I worked in an advanced development/product group working on CMOS wireless transceivers for basestations and handsets. We used Moore's Law explicitly in our planning. The IC business is brutal and you have very little room to miss your market windows. With multi-year development cycles this is tough. Therefore, like a duck hunter, you have to shoot where the technology is going to be, not where it is.

Basically, we started the design using a CMOS process that wasn't on the market yet. We were confident that it *would be* by the time we were ready to go to market. We were confident because the availability of that process was predicted by Moore's Law and any number of foundries were spending billions to make it happen.

If we hadn't used Moore's Law in our planning, we would have come out with products using two-year old technology, and our competition would have eaten our lunch.

The problem with the transitions to finFETs is now we have an apples-to-oranges comparison between finFET (or 3D gate or whatever you want to call it) processes and surface FET processes. GlobalFoundries feels they need to stretch the truth to get the point across that the process really is better objectively, even if the minimum feature size hasn't shrunk.

It reminds me of 10 years ago when the microprocessor companies finally stopped the GHz war. For several years, clock speed was a poor proxy for microprocessor performance, and Mac fans used to scream loudly (and rightly) how the IBM chips beat Intel on real-world benchmarks while Intel touted their higher speed.

Hopefully, this "node as minimum gate width" will go away and we'll move to more meaningful process figures-of-merit such as power density, power-delay product, gm/I, transit frequency, Ioff and the like.

I don't know about that. It's been a damn useful prediction in that it gave a pretty ambitious roadmap for engineers to follow. They've been quite successful and meeting the challenge up until quite recently.

A wise proverb that is apropos: If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there.

I agree with you. My post was sarcastic. If you look at Obama and Kerry's quotes over the last few weeks, punishment certainly is what they were selling. They don't have the capability to stop Assad from using chemical weapons without a very extensive strike, which they were claiming was not planned.

The USA doesn't have much credibility regarding chemical weapons, especially given the actions of the USA towards Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war.

I thought the US Administration's goal was to punish Assad for the large-scale use of chemical weapons with a "limited" military strike. How exactly does destroying the weapons count as punishment?

It's a bit like me turning in my guns to the cops if I commit a murder and that being the end of it.

It almost makes one think that this is really about Obama saving face for making a stupid comment about a "red line". Was Obama prepared to kill more innocent people in an ineffectual missile strike to save face? Now the Russians have given him an out are we not going to punish Syria after all? Hypocrisy?

If diet books are a dime a dozen, but *this* diet book is presumably worth $27, then it must be better than $27*(10 dimes/$)*(12 diet books/dime) = 3240 other diet books..

Wow. This must be a great book.

The Computer History Museum already has a few Crays (including the mythic Cray 3), but it would be cool if they could add this emulator to their library.

Maybe the OP doesn't want to work in porn.

And that would be legal. The issue is the companies are making the "interns" do non-internship related tasks.

For example, say a comic book company takes you on as a "production intern" at no pay. Awesome, right? Then they make you spend all the time cleaning out toilets and they fire the janitor. Is that cool with you?