Semiconductor's Dinosaurs

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The dinosaur represents forced change and near extinction of what was once dominant. The semiconductor industry has its own dinosaurs.

semiengineering.com, Jul. 25, 2019 – 

Dinosaurs once ruled this planet. They existed in every shape and form – some large, others tiny. Each adapted to its own specific environment. Some stayed on the land, others went to sea, and yet another group took to the skies. They looked like they were invincible and would be the pinnacle of the food chain. Then a cataclysmic event happened, and dinosaurs went into a fairly rapid decline. Some evolved and survived, primarily those that had taken to the skies. The transformation was not immediate, but it led to a new order being established, one that ultimately rose to become the new top of the food chain.

The semiconductor industry has living dinosaurs that are on the path to near extinction, a transformation that would have seemed inconceivable a mere decade ago. I am talking about the demise of the humble Central Processing Unit – the CPU and everything associated with it. The CPU enabled an amazing transformation of our industry. No longer did everything have to be put into dedicated hardware, but instead could be programmed in software to take on multiple personalities, allow for updates and improvements, and to make products capable of fulfilling the needs of multiple applications.

The CPU was hit by two cataclysmic events. The first happened around 2005. It was a breakdown of Dennard scaling, which showed a relationship between transistor size and power density. This was because both voltage and current scaled with length, meaning that you got more transistors without an increase in power consumption. When that relationship no longer held, it became almost impossible to build a CPU with an increase in processing capability brought about by an increase in frequency. It would have consumed too much power.

So the industry transformed by adding more, smaller CPUs. Unfortunately, the software industry did not adapt well to this change and still, to this day, has problems creating general purpose software that is adaptable to multiple processors. Concurrency is being used in some small niches and one bright spot – the GPU – is now being used as more than just a graphics processor. It's showing up in a number of environments, such as AI and ML, which require massive concurrency and a different memory architecture.

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