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Moore's Law Disputed
Kumiorava writes "Transistors can be packed to same chip two times more in every 18 months. This Moore's law has been repeated already over 30 years. Computers become faster, IT economy grows, but Moore's law doesn't apply. That has been proven by researcher Ilkka Tuomi. You can read the research from First Monday article The Lives and Death of Moore's Law." 'tho, to be fair, it seems to me that Moore's Law has lasted a lot longer then the throng of people who keep predicting its death.
The oft quoted 'Moore's Law' as some have said before, is not in fact a law at all, but instead a theory proposed by Moore based on the economic and technological trends of his time. He by no means meant to imply that this measurement be used as a benchmark of the technology industry. The fact that is is not only known, but hotly debated in the industry shows not the accuracy of the 'law', but instead the success of the marketing campaigns based off that quote. To be quite realistic, some manufacturers have pushed out technology that has not been completely tested in order to compete in the marketing game of Moore's Law, and thus we have cheap, unreliable PC's. (Don't get me wrong, this is only one of many reasons for this effect!)
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You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
Moore's Law has never really been a hard and fast law. It's more of a rule of thumb... I've read a few books that mention it, and some of them even disagree on the time period in which the double takes place. Some say a year, while some say 18 months. I've also seen articles which claim as a part of "Moore's Law" that the prices also cut in half.
Defying Moore's Law isn't like defying gravity. We know that at some point, miniturization will no longer be possible. It's hard to double the number of transistors in one space when they're on the atomic level. Do you think we could do that in 18 months?
I mean, if the marathon record gets 10 minutes shorter every few years, for example, that doesn't necessarily mean that 100 years from now we'll be running a 20 minute marathon.
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Just a track and field nitpick:
The marathon world record is usually broken by seconds, not 10 minutes. Since 1908, the record has never been broken by more than seven minutes. The improvement the last five times the record has been broken:
2002: 4 seconds
1999: 23 seconds
1998: 45 seconds
1988: 22 seconds
1985: 47 seconds
The current record is held by Khalid Khannouchi of the US. On April 14, 2002, he ran the London marathon in 2:05:38, breaking his old record by 4 seconds.
You can see the whole progession here:
http://www.kajakstandf.org/wr_progression/men/m
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
I think that the article makes the point that the death of Moore's law _as Moore stated it_ is inevitable:
"Moore noted that the complexity of minimum cost semiconductor components had doubled per year since the first prototype microchip was produced in 1959. This exponential increase in the number of components on a chip became later known as Moore's Law. In the 1980s, Moore's Law started to be described as the doubling of number of transistors on a chip every 18 months. At the beginning of the 1990s, Moore's Law became commonly interpreted as the doubling of microprocessor power every 18 months. In the 1990s, Moore's Law became widely associated with the claim that computing power at fixed cost is doubling every 18 months."
Once we reach quantum boundaries, the first statement of Moore's law will fail. There may be something like Moore's law in the future, but it will be just another restatement:
""Speculations on the extended lifetime of Moore's Law are therefore often centered on quantum computing, bio-computing, DNA computers, and other theoretically possible information processing mechanisms. Such extensions, obviously, extend beyond semiconductor industry and the domain of Moore's Law. Indeed, it could be difficult to define a "component" or a "chip" in those future devices.""
Also, if there's one thing that's been drilled into my head in the VLSI classes I've taken, it's that the parasitics associated with the interconnect are what really limit the speed, to a much greater extent than transistor numbers/characteristics.
So even if we didn't care about power, and heat could magically dissipate itself, the circuit could still only go as fast as the metal inside it would allow.