The IT industry, like every other industry we suppose, is in a constant state of dealing with the next bottleneck. It is a perpetual game of Whac-a-Mole – a pessimist might say Sisyphusian at its core, an optimist probably tries not to think about it too hard and deal with the system problem at hand. But what do you do with the hammer when all of the moles pop their heads up at the same time?

Or, to be more literal, as the title above suggests, what do we do when processors and their SRAM as well as main memory stop getting cheaper as they have for many decades? How do system architects and those building and buying datacenter infrastructure not get depressed in this Post-Moore’s Law era?

In the past month, we keep seeing the same flattened curve again and again, and it is beginning to feel like a haunting or a curse. We have been aware of the slowing of Moore’s Law for years and the challenge it represents for system architecture on so many fronts – compute, memory, storage, networking, you name it – and we have been cautioning that transistors are going to start getting more expensive. But what is more striking, at least during late 2022 and early 2023, is that we have seen a series of stories showing that the cost of a unit of compute, fast SRAM memory, and slow DRAM memory is holding steady and not going down as it ought to.

The first time we saw this flattening curve pop up in recent weeks was a report by WikiChip Fuse from the International Electron Devices Meeting in December, which outlined the difficulties of shrinking SRAM cell area:

Now this chart doesn’t talk about costs explicitly, but with SRAM representing somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of the transistors on a typical compute engine, SRAM represents a big portion of the cost of a chip and we all know that the cost of transistors is going up