Moore’s Law is foundational to anything and everything to do with technology. In a nutshell, it states that the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. A more modern definition says that chip performance doubles every 18-24 months. According to Intel’s former chief architect, Moore’s Law is reaching the end of its life. And this has huge implications for the tech industry, which draws its lifeblood from smaller and faster products.
Moore’s law is headed for a cliff. According to Colwell, the maximum extension of the law, in which transistor densities continue doubling every 18-24 months, will be hit in 2020 or 2022, around 7nm or 5nm.
“For planning horizons, I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call [Moore’s law] dead,” Colwell said. “You could talk me into 2022, but whether it will come at 7 or 5nm, it’s a big deal.”
There are a number of technologies (graphene, III-V semiconductors, carbon nanotubes, etc.) that offer some hope for the continuation of the promise of Moore’s Law, but none has proved practical as of yet.
And people have been predicting the demise of Moore’s Law for at least 3x the 7 years of this current prediction.
Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Yes, indeed. I’ve heard about Moore’s Law starting to not be applicable a few times in the last decade or more, and then something disruptive comes along, we take two steps backward, and it all starts over again. Example: Mobile low-power processors, and GPUs for mobile devices. Every year the processors in the iPhone double in speed or more, or double in cores, or the GPU doubles, etc.
The limiting factor of Moore’s Law is the size of atomic and sub-atomic particles. A transistor can only get as small as the atomic components used to compose it.
Every 10 years or so, this pronouncement is made, and inevitably we find a way to keep it going for another decade. Anyone who says Moore’s law has no more legs left is thinking 2 dimensionally– literally. Simply start building chips that are layered rather than a single layer and you can keep going for another 3 or 4 decades without running into a thermal wall (which, by then, we will be able to mitigate with some other as yet unknown technology.)
There’s also the third dimension. Die size is the same, more layers can make it deeper. Plus 7-9 years is a freaking huge long time when it comes to modern semiconductors.
graphene?
Freaking huge is right. We will no doubt be amazed as what is done in the future. I have been so far.
There are so many ways we can optimize so many parts of our computers and software, I am not worried about constraints on progress!
For all practical purposes Moore’s law has been dead since the mid-noughties. Sure, they’re still increasing the number of transistors, but that no longer translates into processing power the way it used to. Intel has therefore switched to multicore CPUs but those are much harder to take advantage of than higher clock frequencies. And then there’s Amdahl’s law. There’s a reason why PC sales are decreasing.