[REM: Sorry no date available, got it through one mailing list.
   Probably this could have been towards end January, 2001 -hc]
   ----------------

   Burn Rate
   Peter Huber, Forbes Magazine,
   10.30.00

   CHIP ENGINEERS LIKE TO BOAST THAT IF DETROIT had improved its own
   technology as fast as theirs, your Buick would now go 10,000 mph and
   cover 2,000 miles on a gallon of gas. And it's true. They neglect to
   add that you'd also be driving to the moon and back every month, and
   using 180 gallons of gas to do so. The microchip proves yet again that
   technology scoffs at every limit to growth--so long as you supply it
   with unlimited energy. And we're burning more and more of the stuff to
   keep our silicon hot.

   Bell Labs engineer Kaveh Azar sets out the numbers in a recent paper
   in Electronics Cooling. Chip efficiencies have indeed improved at a
   remarkable pace. The number of gates on the Intel processor has
   doubled every 18 months or so. The amount of power consumed by the
   chip has increased exponentially, too, albeit at a slower--roughly
   36-month--doubling rate. Memory, video chips and even chips optimized
   for power-conscious laptops have all been riding up similar power
   curves.

   How come? Within the chip itself, the electrical energy required to
   process a single instruction has been cut in half about every 14
   months as the average size of the individual gate has shrunk. But the
   number of gates per chip and the chip's clock speed have risen at the
   same time. Overall, the number of bits processed has risen much faster
   than "bit efficiencies" have improved.

   And the chips themselves are, of course, multiplying across the
   continent like locusts. Rising energy densities in the individual
   microprocessor are mirrored in other chips on the motherboard and in
   adjacent desktop peripherals, through backup power supplies, network
   cards, modems, telephone switches, routers, wireless links, lasers,
   caching systems, servers and the chip fabs themselves. As a colleague
   and I outlined in these pages over a year ago ("Dig More Coal--the PCs
   Are Coming," May 31, 1999), the electrical loads add up to big numbers
   when you track them across the digital landscape.

   So the efficiency paradox bites us again: more efficiency, more
   consumption, too, because better performance and lower effective price
   outweigh everything else. The Eniac computer of 1946 was an enormous
   beast, with 18,000 vacuum tubes that consumed 180,000 watts of
   electrical power. Today you can find 2,000 times as much computing
   power in a 5-watt Nintendo 64. If your refrigerator had made as much
   progress down the energy curve, it would now be powered by a
   hearing-aid battery. But one Nintendo per teenager adds up to a whole
   lot more demand for electric power, overall, than one Eniac per
   planet.

   And better power, too. The faster the chip, the more exacting its
   demands for power quality. For a chip clocked at 1 gigahertz, a
   blackout is any interruption that lasts more than a billionth of a
   second. A huge new power infrastructure is growing up around the
   silicon, from tiny capacitors on the circuit board to megawatt-scale
   backup turbines that keep "server hotels" hot when the public grid
   fails. In digital circles the big power investments aren't in the
   extra kilowatt-hours, expensive though they are; they're in the fancy
   hardware that keeps the electrons reliable.

   Back at the chip level, engineers now foresee energy densities at the
   surface of the silicon approaching those in the core of a nuclear
   reactor. And thermal problems now present (along with physical limits
   to photolithography) one of the largest obstacles to further
   miniaturization. The gates keep shrinking, all right, and there are
   ways to pump in the watts they require; but what goes in as power
   comes out as heat, and at some point the silicon begins to melt.
   Microprocessors are now sprouting big cooling fins; some even come
   equipped with water-cooled microradiators. Money and research talent
   are being poured into finding better materials and architectures to
   cool the digital brain.

   ---------------
   Peter Huber (pwhuber@bellatlantic.net), a Manhattan Institute fellow,
   is the author of Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the
   Environmentalists and the Digital Power Report. Find past columns at
   www.forbes.com/huber.
   
   
   Chart
   Chip Power
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