The Ultimate Limit of Moore's Law

BuzzSkyline writes "Physicists have found that there is an ultimate limit to the speed of calculations, regardless of any improvements in technology. According to the researchers who found the computation limit, the bound 'poses an absolute law of nature, just like the speed of light.' While many experts expect technological limits to kick in eventually, engineers always seem to find ways around such roadblocks. If the physicists are right, though, no technology could ever beat the ultimate limit they've calculated — which is about 10^16 times faster than today's fastest machines. At the current Moore's Law pace, computational speeds will hit the wall in 75 to 80 years. A paper describing the analysis, which relies on thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and information theory, appeared in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters (abstract here)."

Comments

Transistors Per IC and Planck Time

[eldavojohn]

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted 40 years ago that manufacturers could double computing speed every two years or so
by cramming ever-tinier transistors on a chip.

That's not exactly correct. Moore's Law (or observation more like) reads in the original article as:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

All he's concerned about is quoting how many components can fit on a single integrated circuit. One can see this propagated to processing speed, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras but his observation itself is about the size of transistors -- not speed.

The title should be "The Ultimate Limit of Computing Speed" not Moore's Law.

Furthermore, we've always had Planck Time as a lower bound on the time of one operation with our smallest measurement of time so far being 10^26 Planck Times. So essentially they've bumped that lower bound up and it's highly likely more discoveries will bump that even further up. I guess our kids and grandchildren have their work cut out for them.