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The End of Moore's Law?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hitting-the-molecular-wall dept.

Lucius Lucanius writes "A recurrent theme of late, the NY Times describes an Intel researcher's paper on the possible end of Moore's law. Soon, 'transistors will be composed of fewer than 100 atoms, and statistical variations in this Lilliputian world are beyond the ability of semiconductor engineers to control.' Is it for real this time? "

3 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Moore's law doesn't apply to software by Stever777 · · Score: 4

    I'm not particularly concerned about hitting a theoretical limit to hardware power. At the moment, I'm typing on a system that has unimaginable 20 years ago.

    Yet it crashes often enough to be noticeable.
    It runs so slowly (a "mere" Pentium 400) that I can actually see my windows redraw.
    Booting takes 5 minutes (NT 4.0)
    Shutting down takes several minutes, too.

    Maybe hitting a limit to processor power will encourage programmers to reintroduce the concept of "knowing how to write good code." Lord knows processor speed and cheap memory have made it possible for even the best programmers to stop thinking about code quality.

    - Stever

  2. Did you know? by AnarchySoftware · · Score: 4

    that the number of times the End of Moore's Law is predicted doubles every sixteen months?

  3. Silly! by grmoc · · Score: 4


    Even if the Intel folk were right, and we couldn't make out gates any smaller (I bet we can, with bucky-tubes and those neato single-molecule gates), it wouldn't be the end of Moore's law.

    FIrst of all, there is the whole bandwidth problem- We programmers have to worry about cache coherency, cache misses, time to load from disk, time to load from RAM... etc.

    These things are the major bottleneck for many applications.

    Furthermore, This "limit" would only limit single-processor designs..
    There is still a large world on parallel-processing to consider.. What if the CPU could execute EVERY non-dependant, non-aliased branch at concurrently?

    (We'd obviously need better compilers, and probably better languages..)

    In any case to rehash: Even if the Intel engineers are right about the "gate limit", Plenty of other advances to discover..