Moore’s law really is dead this time | Ars Technica
Moore's law has died at the age of 51 after an extended illness.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that the number of components in integrated circuits was doubling every 12 months or so. Moreover, as this site wrote extensively about in 2003, that the number of transistors per chip that resulted in the lowest price per transistor was doubling every 12 months. In 1965, this meant that 50 transistors per chip offered the lowest per-transistor cost; Moore predicted that by 1970, this would rise to 1,000 components per chip, and that the price per transistor would drop by 90 percent..
The new techniques [for keeping miniaturization going], such as strained silicon and tri-gate transistors, took more than a decade to put in production. EUV has been talked about for longer still. There's also a significant cost factor. There's a kind of undesired counterpart to Moore's law, Rock's law, which observes that the cost of a chip fabrication plant doubles every 4 years. Technology may provide ways to further increase the number of transistors packed into a chip, but the manufacturing facilities to build these chips may be prohibitively expensive-a situation compounded by the growing use of smaller, cheaper processors...
...As for the future, massive scaling isn't off the cards completely. The use of alternative materials, different quantum effects, or even more exotic techniques such as superconducting may provide a way to bring back the easy scaling that was enjoyed for decades, or even the more complex scaling of the last fifteen years. A big enough boost could even reinvigorate the demand for processors that are just plain faster, rather than smaller or lower power.
But for now, lawbreaking is going to be the new normal. Moore's law's time as a guide of what will come next, and as a rule to be followed, is at an end.
Moore’s law really is dead this time | Ars Technica
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that the number of components in integrated circuits was doubling every 12 months or so. Moreover, as this site wrote extensively about in 2003, that the number of transistors per chip that resulted in the lowest price per transistor was doubling every 12 months. In 1965, this meant that 50 transistors per chip offered the lowest per-transistor cost; Moore predicted that by 1970, this would rise to 1,000 components per chip, and that the price per transistor would drop by 90 percent..
The new techniques [for keeping miniaturization going], such as strained silicon and tri-gate transistors, took more than a decade to put in production. EUV has been talked about for longer still. There's also a significant cost factor. There's a kind of undesired counterpart to Moore's law, Rock's law, which observes that the cost of a chip fabrication plant doubles every 4 years. Technology may provide ways to further increase the number of transistors packed into a chip, but the manufacturing facilities to build these chips may be prohibitively expensive-a situation compounded by the growing use of smaller, cheaper processors...
...As for the future, massive scaling isn't off the cards completely. The use of alternative materials, different quantum effects, or even more exotic techniques such as superconducting may provide a way to bring back the easy scaling that was enjoyed for decades, or even the more complex scaling of the last fifteen years. A big enough boost could even reinvigorate the demand for processors that are just plain faster, rather than smaller or lower power.
But for now, lawbreaking is going to be the new normal. Moore's law's time as a guide of what will come next, and as a rule to be followed, is at an end.
Moore’s law really is dead this time | Ars Technica