The History of Moore's Law

An anonymous reader sent us linkage to a Scientific American article that is an interview with Gordon Moore discussing all sorts of things relevant to a guy who gets a cool law named after him.

Comments

Moore's Law and the Quantum Computer

[parallax]

It's amazing that something as revolutionary as the single chip computer could come out of an engineer staring at thirteen separate schematics and saying, "Ok, but what about doing this with one chip?" And then being in the right circumstances to do it.

The single-chip CPU is arguably the most important development of late 20th century, and it's exponential improvement (Moore's Law) is what drives the information economy. So what happens when Moore's law runs out?

If current trends are projected forward, by 2020 a bit of memory will be a single electron transistor, traces will be one molecule wide, and the cost of the fabrication plant will be the GNP of the planet. The speed of light imposes practical limits on how large you can make a chip and how fast you can clock one. This is why we'll have GHz chips, but fundamental physical laws prevent THz chips.

More importantly, the physical limits that shut down THz electronic computers apply to _any_ classical computing architecture; optical computing and other exotic technology can't beat the speed of light, or single-particle storage problems.

You can't win by going to SMP, because at best you get a linear increase with each processor; exponential increases in power require exponential increases in processor number, which require exponential increases in space and power consumption.

The only basis in physics for continuing Moore's law past classical computing is quantum computing. In a quantum computer N quantum bits (qbits) equals 2^N classical bits. This allows you to build a computer which scales exponentially with the physical resources of the computer. Quantum computing isn't a solved problem, but if and when it is it will be a revolution as big as the first single-chip CPU.

parallax

What happens when Moore's law fails?

[Greg Titus]

What I thought was most interesting about the interview is Moore saying that now his law is partly self-fulfilling because the industry drives R&D and plant investment to meet the curve.

Assuming that the law eventually collapses (I don't know enough of the hardware to guess why exactly...), what happens to long-range planning? What happens to all those Asian memory manufacturers that use Moore's law to make long-term plans? Seems like a lot of chaos is in the offing in the semi-conductor industry if enough people come to believe that they can't depend on Moore's law any more...

And what is Microsoft, and all the other makers of bloat-ware going to do when they don't have Moore's law to bail them out and make their products (almost) usable as they go through upgrade after bloated upgrade?

30,000,000,000$ US + id's law

[Wah]

Just to figure out how to make faster computers?! Allright, they just need to keep up with id's law (They will release a game every 18 months that is so cool you have to buy a new faster computer) Really, how many of you have upgraded just to keep playing id stuff? My last four major upgrades coincided with releasess 386/16-->486/50 for Doom 486/50-->P100 Quake P100-->Cyrix 200(sucked, but cheap |at the time|) Quake II Cx200-->Cel333(+ o'clocking) Quake3.