DARPA Official: Computing Speed Headed for a 'Fallow Period'

The most important change in the next two decades of computing might be the lack of change in computer processing speeds, Bob Colwell, a deputy director at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, predicted Tuesday.

For about the past 40 years, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on a computer chip has doubled roughly every two years, a phenomenon known as Moore's Law after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore first noted the trend in 1965.

That trend is likely to reach its limit in the next six to 12 years, as the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology that underlies modern silicon computer chips reaches its physical limits, said Colwell, deputy director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office and a former longtime Intel chip architect.

"When I make that statement, a lot of people say 'yeah, yeah, a lot of people have always predicted Moore's Law will always end and it never has yet so let's move on to something else,'" Colwell said. "And that's true. People have said that forever and they have not been right yet. Unfortunately, physics being what it is, someone will eventually have to be right."

"The point is," Colwell added," the single best exponential technology curve mankind has ever seen is what we just lived through the last 40 or 50 years and it's going to end real soon. So, how can you possibly think that won't make a difference to the Department of Defense or computing or electronics or any other related industry?"

Colwell was speaking at an Emerging Technologies Symposium sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, a government and industry group.

That doesn't mean computing speeds will hit a permanent brick wall. "There's a lot of government money chasing new switches," to replace CMOS-engineered silicon, Colwell said. But none of the alternatives looks promising so far and there's likely to be a "fallow period" while computing power simply rests at is outside limit.

For some companies that may spell doom if they can't periodically offer consumers a new upgrade. But, "in a perverse sort of way, it may mean there's a new flowering of computer architectures," Colwell said, as electronics companies come out with specialized architectures for different fields and tasks.

In the past, companies rarely put out "special purpose" computers, Colwell said, because the pace of new computing power outran anything but a one-size-fits-all approach. With a decade or so of downtime on more computing speed, though, the industry might begin launching specialty computers for graphics designers, engineers, architects and all sorts of different industries.