Half-century milestone for Moore's Law arrives, sparking questions over its longevity
Fifty years ago, Gordon E. Moore made a statement that would become the driving force behind the long-term planning of the tech industry. Known as Moore's Law, it stated that the number of transistors in a silicon chip would double every two years. This prediction has held true for decades, driving rapid technology breakthroughs and predictable advances in almost every aspect of technology.
However, recent developments suggest that we are approaching the end of Moore's Law. Intel's former chief architect Bob Colwell predicted that Moore's Law would be obsolete by 2020, and Intel itself has acknowledged this reality. As we enter the last years of shrinking transistors, there is no particular technology on the horizon to replace Moore's Law, according to Intersect360 Research analyst Michael Feldman.
The end of Moore's Law essentially levels the playing field for everyone, including startups and small companies nimble enough to embrace the new era of fixed transistor density. Leading vendors like Intel, IBM, and Nvidia will have to defend their turf in a world where hardware performance improvements will come almost entirely from improved design and emerging technologies.
Intel has put together a 50th anniversary page explaining the lasting impact of Moore's Law. The impact of Moore's Law has transformed computing from a specialized, expensive capability to an inexpensive, ubiquitous tool, affecting all parts of our lives. From the iPhone 6, which is roughly 1 million times more powerful than an IBM computer from 1975, to the iPad 2, which would've been speedier than the world's supercomputers up until about 1994, Moore's Law has been instrumental in the exponential growth of technology.
However, as we move beyond Moore's Law, the focus will shift from increasing transistor density or clock frequency to optimizing energy efficiency, parallelism, and software-hardware integration. Intel and other leading manufacturers will ensure hardware performance advances primarily through architectural innovations such as multi-core processors, dynamic clock scaling technologies like Turbo Boost and Speedstep, and improvements in communication and synchronization in large-scale GPU clusters for AI workloads. They will also focus on addressing efficiency bottlenecks and broadening their focus toward intelligent systems and enhanced computing ecosystems, as indicated by their acquisitions in AI and data-driven fields.
Emerging technologies such as 3D chip stacking and non-Von Neumann architectures are expected to address access speed bottlenecks. Graphene is an exciting potential future game changer in the post-Moore's Law world. The end of Moore's Law does not mean the end of computer innovation; rather, it marks a new chapter in the evolution of technology.
As OEMs and component makers prepare for a post-Moore's Law world, they would do well to start planning today. Beyond the 5nm process technology node, the physics of the underlying complementary metal oxide (CMOS) technology will make it impractical to shrink transistors much further. The industry must adapt to this new reality and continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in the world of technology.
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