Moore’s Law Will Never End
Moore’s Law has been many things to many people. It has been a statement of physical limits and an economic formula. It has been the cause of overheating and complex power solutions, and it has been a competitive weapon among companies looking to boost performance and cut costs.
It also has been revised on more than one occasion as the time frame in which the number of transistors doubles has floated between 18 and 24 months. And it has been predicted to die on multiple occasions, starting back at 1 micron (aka 1,000nm) when lithography was believed to be at its physical limit.
Moore’s Law has defied all predictions and all odds. Some companies have jumped off the bandwagon and moved in different directions, while the largest continue to adhere to its advancement with almost religious fervor. But the real future of Moore’s Law be less of a mark of size of the company making the investment in a new chip than a piece of an overall system that limits the use of advanced process nodes for extremely regular structures in places where space matters but little else.
As we move into 3D stacking over the next few years and tighter integration between software and system design, the real future of Moore’s Law may be less impact on the overall system and less importance for what makes one chip different from another. Rather than come to an abrupt end, Moore’s Law may be the part of the chip that is most commoditized rather than the part that wields the competitive edge.
This is a rather shocking end game for a formula that has dictated how chips were developed throughout most of the history of ICs. But it also means that companies will need to start looking beyond Moore’s Law and replacing it with new formulas, approaches and structures—ones that may have far less impact over the long haul but which will be just as important for the generation of semiconductors that benefit from them. The same variables of area, power and performance still matter, but they will no longer be defined by the line width between all the components on a chip.
–Ed Sperling
Tags: 3D stacking, Moore's Law
December 17th, 2009 at 5:48 am
I understand it may look like a universal law because Intel and Gordon Moore still have their eye on it, but the exponent by exponent steps that the processors take is managed and administrated by people at Intel.
Without Moore’s law there would be chaos.
The FTC’s interest in INTEL. By proxy, is tinkering with Moore’s law. The AMD patent cross license may be only disruption needed to end the days our processors all resided within a harmonious range.
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/technology/companies/17chip.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore‘s_law
December 28th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2006/08/347233.html
Moore’s Law has ended or will end soon. I predicted this in the 2006 article linked above. The limit appears to be around 6.25 billion transistors on a CPU chip, to be reached around 2015-2018 (see graph in article).
The prediction is based on the principle of logistic growth — a real scientific principle, which Moore’s Law is not.
Note that hopeful research omens emerge with some regularity, but they have not panned out. Moore’s L. has been stuck at 1.72 billion transistors since 2006!
Also note that the law is not about memory and not about nonelectronic devices, i.e., those not based on electrical charges).
Gordon Moore himself, the inventor of the law, is the arbiter on this, the Mother Nature of Moore’s Law, and I think he agrees.
Clayton Hallmark
January 7th, 2010 at 11:44 am
The developing concept of quantum computing is the result of Moore’s Law’s eventual break down in the year 2020 when the size of silicon chips cannot be decreased.