Moore’s Law Part 3 Possible extrapolations over the next 15 years and impact

This is the third entry of a series focused on Moore’s Law and its implications moving forward, edited from a White paper on Moore’s Law, written by Google University Relations Manager Michel Benard. This series quotes major sources about Moore’s Law and explores how they believe Moore’s Law will likely continue over the course of the next several years. We will also explore if there are fields other than digital electronics that either have an emerging Moores Law situation, or promises for such a Law that would drive their future performance.

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More Moore
We examine data from the ITRS 2012 Overall Roadmap Technology Characteristics (ORTC 2012), and select notable interpolations; The chart below shows chip size trends up to the year 2026 along with the “Average Moore’s Law” line. Additionally, in the ORTC 2011 tables we find data on 3D chip layer increases (up to 128 layers), including costs. Finally, the ORTC 2011 index sheet estimates that the DRAM cost per bit at production will be ~0.002 microcents per bit by ~2025. From these sources we draw three More Moore (MM) extrapolations, that by the year 2025:

• 4Tb Flash multi-level cell (MLC) memory will be in production
• There will be ~100 billion transistors per microprocessing unit (MPU)
• 1TB RAM Memory will cost less than $100

More than Moore
It should be emphasized that “More than Moore” (MtM) technologies do not constitute an alternative or even a competitor to the digital trend as described by Moore’s Law. In fact, it is the heterogeneous integration of digital and non-digital functionalities into compact systems that will be the key driver for a wide variety of application fields. Whereas MM may be viewed as the brain of an intelligent compact system, MtM refers to its capabilities to interact with the outside world and the users.

As such, functional diversification may be regarded as a complement of digital signal and data processing in a product. This includes the interaction with the outside world through sensors and actuators and the subsystem for powering the product, implying analog and mixed signal processing, the incorporation of passive and/or high-voltage components, micro-mechanical devices enabling biological functionalities, and more. While MtM looks very promising for a variety of diversification topics, the ITRS study does not give figures from which “solid” extrapolations can be made. However, we can make safe/not so safe bets going towards 2025, and examine what these extrapolations mean in terms of the user.

Today we have a 1TB hard disk drives (HDD) for $100, but the access speed to data on the disk does not allow to take full advantage of this data in a fully interactive, or even practical, way. More importantly, the size and construction of HDD does not allow for their incorporation into mobile devices, Solid state drives (SSD), in comparison, have similar data transfer rates (~1Gb/s), latencies typically 100 times less than HDD, and have a significantly smaller form factor with no moving parts. The promise of offering several TB of flash memory, cost effectively by 2025, in a device carried along during the day (e.g. smartphone, watch, clothing, etc.) represents a paradigm shift with regard of today’s situation; it will empower the user by moving him/her from an environment where local data needs to be refreshed frequently (as with augmented reality applications) to a new environment where full contextual data will be available locally and refreshed only when critically needed.

If data is pre-loaded in the order of magnitude of TBs, one will be able to get a complete contextual data set loaded before an action or a movement, and the device will dispatch its local intelligence to the user during the progress of the action, regardless of network availability or performance. This opens up the possibility of combining local 3D models and remote inputs, allowing applications like 3D conferencing to become available. The development and use of 3D avatars could even facilitate many social interaction models. To benefit from such applications the use of personal devices such as Google Glass may become pervasive, allowing users to navigate 3D scenes and environments naturally, as well as facilitating 3D conferencing and their “social” interactions.

The opportunities for more discourse on the impact and future of Moore’s Law on CS and other disciplines are abundant, and can be continued with your comments on the Research at Google Google+ page. Please join, and share your thoughts.

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Googler Shumin Zhai awarded with the ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President, Engineering

Recently, at the 27th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST’14), Google Senior Research Scientist Shumin Zhai and University of Cambridge Lecturer Per Ola Kristensson received the 2014 Lasting Impact Award for their seminal paper SHARK²: a large vocabulary shorthand writing system for pen-based computers. Most simply put, this is one of those rare works that is responsible for fundamental and lasting advances in the industry, and is the basis for the rapidly growing number of keyboards that use gesture typing, including products such as ShapeWriter, Swype, SwiftKey, SlideIT, TouchPal, and Google Keyboard.

First presented 10 years ago at UIST’04, Shumin and Per Ola’s paper is a pioneering work on word-gesture keyboard interaction that described the architecture, algorithms and interfaces of a high-capacity multi-channel gesture recognition system-SHARK². SHARK² increased recognition accuracy and relaxed precision requirements by using the shape and location of gestures in addition to context based language models. In doing so, Shumin and Per Ola delivered a paradigm of touch screen gesture typing as an efficient method for text entry that has continued to drive the development of mobile text entry across the industry.

"Awarded for its scientific contribution of algorithms, insights, and user interface considerations essential to the practical realization of large-vocabulary shape-writing systems for graphical keyboards, laying the groundwork for new research, industrial applications, and widespread user benefit."

Prior to joining Google in 2011, Shumin worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center for 15 years, where he originated and led the SHARK project, further developing and refining it to include a low latency recognition engine that introduced the ability to accurately recognize a large vocabulary of words based upon the patterns (sokgraphs) drawn on a touchscreen device. SHARK and SHARK² subsequently continued further development as ShapeWriter. During his tenure at IBM, Shumin additionally pursued a wide variety of HCI research areas including, but not limited to, studying the ease and efficiency of HCI interfaces, camera phone based motion sensing, and cross-device user experience.

At Google, Shumin has continued to inspire the Human-Computer Interaction research community, publishing prolifically and leading a group that incorporates HCI research, machine learning, statistical language modeling and mobile computing to advance the state of the art of text input for smart touchscreen keyboards. Building on his earlier work with SHARK/ShapeWriter, Gesture Typing is just one of the innovations that make things like typing messages on mobile device easier for hundreds of millions of people each day, and remains one of the most prominent features on Android keyboards.

Shumin has been highly active in academia during his career, as both visiting professor and lecturer at world-class universities, and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer- Interaction, a Fellow of the ACM and a Member of the CHI Academy. We’re proud to congratulate Shumin and Per Ola on receiving one of the most prestigious honors in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research community, and look forward to their future contributions.

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