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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.
You know, seems to me that as long as I can remember using computers, people have been saying Moore's law can't hold out forever. And, while, I guess, logically, that has to be true, it seems to be out-living most of these predictions. A lot like Apple and FreeBSD :-)
+Pete
Score:-1, Funny
People are clever. They figure out ways to do things that seem impossible. While the physical laws of the atom will be a barrier, I have faith that we will work around them (so to speak). Perhaps getting atoms to do multiple things at once (who knows). But don't bet against a breakthough with economic gain at steak.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
"Moore's Law" is a theory about innovation, not a law in any way. Sure it's fun to call it a law, but it has no basis in physical phenomena, and it's breakable-- Moore himself says it should run out. Scientific laws don't expire.
Many people have used Moore's Law to loosely talk about computer power doubling every x months. Interpreted that way, Moore's law could survive quite a while longer.
Having said the above however, exponential growth always ends when it bumps into physical barriers. Otherwise the planet would be covered a thousand feet deep in dead flies (who as we all know reproduce exponentially when the environment permits.)
But few if any of those involve exponential improvement.
You're right, it's going to lead to other innovations: we'll might start seeing expansion in a "wider" direction becoming more common than "faster" chips. (128-bit architectures, with the next step to 256 bit machines, etc.) And/or engineers will focus on different problems, perhaps something like coming up with innovative ways to dissipate on-die heat. Things like this usually lead to other breakthroughs, too. For example, the more efficiently you can get rid of heat, the more layers you could stack on the chip. Technically, the transistor density wouldn't increase, but the transistor count on a single chip could be multiplied by orders of magnitude.
John
If you can double the density of your transistors anymoore, you still can fake it, by doubling the number of cores every year, as Intel and AMD will do. Another thendy trick is to add units for hardware threads... But, if you can figure out how make several layers of cores, the density will double every year again, mixing DVD technology and CPU manufacturers projects, this is the commercial version of moore's law...
However, most common math does not involve some physical matter that shrinks exponentially. It's really the exponential part that is impressive. Exponential growth over a couple of year is not such a big deal, but 40 years is huge. The 1965's chip had 60 devices (transistors + resistors) and today's chip have 1,700,000,000 transistors... if that's not impressive growth, I don't know what is.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Considering that a long term corporate plan is about... 3 months, it makes sense. Moore was saying that there are like 10-20 years left of density doubling. That is way beyond how far ahead CEOs look, so it is out of sight to him.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
Moore's law has stuck around for forty years in the same way that my pet hampster lived for ten years. It died but got replaced by something similar with the same name and nobody noticed.