Gordon Moore: Moore's Law is Dead
Golygydd Max writes "Moore's Law will not hold forever, claims Gordon Moore.
In a Techworld article, he points out the limitations of the law, in particular, the limitations as we approach the size of atoms.
He helpfully explains, however, that the law will hold for a few years yet." Still, sticking around for forty years is pretty impressive.
I wish I could mod the Wikipedia article up.
I agree, 40 years is actually pretty short. Most common math was proven hundreds to thousands of years ago. A good portion of physics was known a few hundred years ago. A good portion of chemistry has been around for about 150 years.
What is impressive: he predicted the growth would follow the trend it did, in an area that hadn't really been well-established.
Which leads to a second dilemna: since Moore was heavily involved in the industry that the law describes growth in, did Moore's law follow the natural growth, or the growth match Moore's law because industry decided to follow the law?
Though of course your post is a joke, the answer is no. Moores law itself wasn't just a number that he pulled out of his arse, but a serious study of transistors and statistics. But back then approaching the size of the atom with a transistor must have seemed a *very* remote idea. As the summary says holding for forty years is an achievement in itself.
That said CPU power isn't just a measure of transistor density anymore (it was at least in Intel propoganda for a while), as you can see with the dual core and 64 bit developments. There's still plenty of juice left to be squeazed out of the current design before it's squeazed out.
No it can't, because we still don't understand how the brain(s) work, because the neurons ain't the only thing working in there, ...
The best thing we can do is throw random "computing equivalent" numbers and check if we're there right now
And these random numbers are modified every other morning...
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler