Moore’s Law and me

Graph of Transistor count and Moore's Law, 1970-2016
Transistor count and Moore's Law, 1970-2016

In 1985 I bought an Apple Macintosh computer.  It cost $3,500 ($7,000 in today’s dollars).  Soon after, Apple and other companies started selling external hard-disk drives for the Mac.  They, too, were expensive.  But in 1986 or ’87 the price for a hard disk came down to an “affordable” $2,000, and I and many Mac owners were tempted.  In the mid-1980s, a 20-megabyte (MB) hard drive cost $2,000 ($4,000 in today’s dollars).  That’s $200 per MB (in today’s dollars).

Fast forward to 2018.  On my way home last week I stopped by an office-supply store and paid $139 for a 4 terabyte (TB) hard drive.  That’s $34 per TB.

What would that 4 TB hard drive have cost me if prices had remained the same as in the 1980s?  Well, one terabyte is equal to a million megabytes.  So, that 4 TB drive contains 4 million MBs.  At $200 per MB (the 1980s price) the hard drive I picked up from Staples would have cost me $800 million dollars—not much under a billion once I paid sales taxes.  But it didn’t cost that: it was just $139.  Hard disk storage capacity has become millions of times cheaper in just over a generation.  Or, to put it another way, for the same money I can buy millions of times more storage.

I can reprise these same cost reductions, focusing on computer memory rather than hard disk capacity.  My 1979 Apple II had 16 kilobytes of memory.  My recently purchased Lenovo laptop has 16 gigabytes—a million times more.  Yet my new laptop cost a fraction of the inflation-adjusted prices of that Apple II.  Computer memory is millions of times cheaper.  The same is true of processing power—the amount of raw computation you can buy for a dollar.

The preceding trends have been understood for half a century—the basis for Moore’s Law.  Gordon Moore was a founder of Intel Corporation, one of the world’s leading computer processor and “chip” makers.  In 1965, Moore published a paper in which he observed that the number of transistors in computer chips was doubling every two years, and he predicted that this doubling would go on for some years to come.  (See this post for data on the astronomical rate of annual transistor production.)  Related to Moore’s Law is the price-performance ratio of computers.  Loosely stated, a given amount of money will buy twice as much computing power two or three years from now.

The graph above illustrates Moore’s Law and shows the transistor count for many important computer central processing units (CPUs) over the past five decades. (Here’s a link to a high-resolution version of the graph.)  Note that the graph’s vertical axis is logarithmic; what appears as a doubling is actually a far larger increase.  In the lower-left, the graph includes the CPU from my 1979 Apple II computer, the Motorola/MOS 6502.  That CPU chip contained about 3,500 transistors.  In the upper right, the graph includes the Intel i7 processor in my new laptop. That CPU contains about 2,000,000,000 transistors—roughly 500,000 times more than my Apple II.

Assuming a doubling every 2 years, in the 39 years between 1979 (my Apple II) and 2018 (My Lenovo) we should have seen 19.5 doublings in the number of transistors—about a 700,000-fold increase.  This number is close to the 500,000-fold increase calculated above by comparing the number of transistors in a 6502 chip to the number in an Intel i7 chip.  Moreover, computing power has increased even faster than the huge increases in transistor count would indicate.  Computer chips cycle faster today, and they also sport sophisticated math co-processors and graphics chips.

In terms of civilization and the future, the key questions include: can these computing-power increases continue?  Can the computers of the 2050s be hundreds-of-thousands of times more powerful than those of today?  Can we continue making transistors smaller and packing twice as many onto a chip every two years?  Can Moore’s Law continue unabated?  Probably not.  Transistors can only be made so small.  The rate of increase in computing power will slow.  We won’t see a million-fold increase in the coming 40 years like we saw in the past 40.  But does that matter?  What if the rate of increase in computing power fell by half—to a doubling every four years instead of every two?  That would mean that in 2050 our computers would still be 256 times more powerful than they are now.  And in 2054 they would be 512 times more powerful.  And in 2058, 1024 times more powerful.  What would it mean to our civilization if each of us had access to a thousand times more computing power?

One could easily add a last, pessimistic paragraph—noting the intersection between exponential increases in computing power, on the one hand, and climate change and resource limits, on the other.  But for now, let’s leave unresolved the questions raised in the preceding paragraph.  What is most important to understand is that technologies such as solar panels and massively powerful computers give us the option to move in a different direction.  But we have to choose to make changes.  And we have to act.  Our technologies are immensely powerful, but our efforts to use those technologies to avert calamity are feeble.  Our means are magnificent, but our chosen ends are ruinous.  Too often we become distracted by the novelty and power of our tools and fail to hone our skills to use those tools to build livable futures.


Electric car numbers, and projections to 2030













If you’re for pipelines, what are you against?

Canadian greenhouse gas emissions, by sector, 2005 to 2030















Global plastics production, 1917 to 2050

Graph of global plastic production, 1917 to 2017
Global plastic production, megatonnes, 1917 to 2017




Graph of global plastics production to 2050
Projected global plastics production to 2050

Source: UN GRID-Arendal










Graph sources:

Happy motoring: Global automobile production 1900 to 2016

Graph of global automobile production numbers, various nations, historic, 1900 to 2016
Global automobile production (cars, trucks, and buses), 1900-2016

This week’s graph shows global automobile production over the past 116 years—since the industry’s inception.  The numbers include car, trucks, and buses.  The graph speaks for itself.  Nonetheless, a few observations may clarify our situation.

1.  Global automobile production is at a record high, increasing rapidly, and almost certain to rise far higher.

2. Annual production has nearly doubled since 1997—the year the world’s governments signed the Kyoto climate change agreement.

3. China is now the world’s largest automobile producer.  In terms of units made, Chinese production is double that of the United States.  This graph tells us something about the ascendancy of China.

4.  Most of the growth in the auto manufacturing sector is in Asia, especially Thailand, India, and China.  In 2000, those three nations together manufactured 3 million cars.  Last year their output totaled 34 million.  After 67 years of production, Australia is about to shut down its last automobile plant.  Most of its cars will be imported from Thailand, and perhaps a growing number  from China.

5. Auto production in “high-wage countries” is declining.  As noted, the Australian industry has been shuttered.  US production is down 5 percent since 2000, and Canadian production is down 20 percent.  Over that same period, production fell in France, Italy, and Japan, though not in Germany.  Since 2000, auto production increases in Mexico (+1.7 million) are roughly equal to decreases in Canada and the US (-1.2 million).

6. There are some surprises in the data:  Turkey, Slovakia, and Iran all make the  top-20 in terms of production numbers.

Graph sources: Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association of the United States, World Motor Vehicle Data, 1981 Edition; Ward’s Communications, Ward’s World Motor Vehicle Data 2002; United States Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, National Transportation Statistics, Table 1-23

Electric cars are coming…  Fast!

Graph of the number of electric vehicles worldwide and selected nations
Increase in the stock of electric vehicles: global and selected nations

When- and wherever it occurs, exponential growth is transformative.  After a long period of stagnation or slow increase, some important quantity begins doubling and redoubling.  The exponential growth in cloth, coal, and iron production transformed the world during the Industrial Revolution.  The exponential growth in the power and production volumes of transistors (see previous blog post)—a phenomenon codified as “Moore’s Law”—made possible the information revolution, the internet, and smartphones.  Electric cars and their battery systems have now entered a phase of exponential growth.

There are two categories of electric vehicles (EVs).  The first is plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).  These cars have batteries and can be driven a limited distance (usually tens of kilometres) using electrical power only, after which a conventional piston engine engages to charge the batteries or assist in propulsion.  Well-known PHEVs include the Chevrolet Volt and the Toyota Prius Plug-in.

The second category is the battery electric vehicle (BEV).  Compared to PHEVs, BEVs have larger batteries, longer all-electric range (150 to 400 kms), and no internal combustion engines.  Well-known BEVs include the Nissan Leaf, Chevrolet Bolt, and several models from Tesla.  The term electric vehicle (EV) encompasses both PHEVs and BEVs.

The graph above is reproduced from a very recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) entitled Global EV Outlook 2017.  It shows that the total number of electric vehicles in the world is increasing exponentially—doubling and redoubling every year or two.  In 2012, there we nearly a quarter-million EVs on streets and roads worldwide.  A year or two later, there were half-a-million.  By 2015 the number had surpassed one million.  And it is now well over two million.  Annual production of EVs is similarly increasing exponentially.  This kind of exponential growth promises to transform the global vehicle fleet.

But if it was just vehicle numbers and production volumes that were increasing exponentially this trend would not be very interesting or, in the end, very powerful.  More important, quantitative measures of EV technology and capacity are doubling and redoubling.  This second graph, below, taken from the same IEA report, shows the dramatic decrease in the cost of a unit of battery storage (the downward trending line) and the dramatic increase in the energy storage density of EV batteries (upward trending line).  If we compare 2016 to 2009, we find that today an EV battery of a given capacity costs one-third as much and is potentially one-quarter the size.  Stated another way, for about the same money, and packaged into about the same space, a current battery can drive an electric car three or four times as far.

Graph of electric vehicle battery cost and power density 2009 to 2016

Looking to the future, GM, Tesla, and the US Department of Energy all project that battery costs will decrease by half in the coming five years.  Though these energy density increases and cost decreases will undoubtedly plateau in coming decades, improvements underway now are rapidly moving EVs from the periphery to the mainstream.  EVs may soon eclipse internal-combustion-engine cars in all measures: emissions, purchase affordability, operating costs, performance, comfort, and even sales.

Source for graphs: International Energy Agency, Global EV Outlook 2017: Two Million and Counting


United States Gross Domestic Product, by sector, 1947 to 2016










Back on track: North America needs high-speed passenger rail

A graph of passenger rail utilization, selected nations, average kilometres per capita
Passenger train use, kilometers per person per year (average), selected countries, 2014 or 2015 data

Not every problem has a clear solution.  Here’s one that does.  The problem is the exponential growth in air travel and attendant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.  The solution is high-speed passenger rail.

Compared to airplanes, high-speed trains can move people faster, more comfortably and conveniently, more cheaply, and with a fraction of the GHG emissions.  And Canada is uniquely placed to benefit from a passenger-rail renaissance; one of the world’s largest passenger-rail manufacturers, Bombardier, is a Canadian company.

Air travel is increasing exponentially.  As I detailed in a previous blog post, air travelers now rack up about 7 trillion passenger-kilometres per year.  And that figure is projected to double by 2030.  If we are to retain a tolerable climate, most of the planes will soon need to be grounded, excepting perhaps those used for trans-oceanic flights.

While airplanes may remain our best option for crossing oceans, within continents higher-speed rail (130–200 km/h) and high-speed rail (200+ km/h) can move people faster and more comfortably.  Such trains can transport passengers from city-centre to city-centre, eliminating the long drive to the airport.  Trains do not require time-consuming, invasive airport security screenings.  These factors, combined with high speeds, mean that for many trips, the total travel time is lower for trains than for planes.  And because trains have much more leg-room and often include observation cars, restaurants, and lounges, they are much more comfortable and enjoyable.

Many people will know the Eurostar high-speed line that connects Paris and other European cities to London via the Channel Tunnel.  Top speed for that train is 320 km/h.  A trip from downtown London to Downtown Paris—nearly 500 kms—takes 2 hours and 20 minutes, about the time it takes the average North American to drive to the airport, check in, check baggage, clear security, and get to his or her airplane seat.

China recently inaugurated its Shanghai Maglev line, with a maximum speed of 430km/h and average speed of 250 km/h.  Japan’s famous “bullet trains” went into service more than 50 years ago.  They now travel on a network of 2,764 kms of track and reach speeds of 320 km/h.

North America has one high-speed line, the Acela Express that links Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. The maximum speed is 240 km/h, through average speeds are lower.  Travel time from New York to Washington is 2 hours and 45 minutes, including time spent at intermediate stops: an average speed of 132 km/h.  The Acela Express trains were built by a consortium 75 percent owned by Canada’s Bombardier.

This brings us to the truly good news: Canada is home to a world-leading passenger rail manufacturer, Bombardier.  You will find the company’s rolling stock in the subways of New York, London, and more than a dozen other cities.  Its intercity trains run throughout Europe, Asia, and North America.  And its high-speed trains are currently moving passengers in China, Europe, and the US.  Until a recent merger of two Chinese companies, Canada’s Bombardier was the largest passenger train manufacturer in the world.  Canada has a huge opportunity to create jobs and economic activity while leading the world in low-emission, cutting-edge rail technology.  As climate change forces Canada to scale back fossil-fuel production and maybe even auto manufacturing, Canada will need new economic engines.  Passenger-rail manufacturing can be an economic engine of the future.

Not all the news is good, however.  Many will have recent heard news reports about Bombardier.  Over the past few years, Federal and provincial governments have provided cash injections to the company totaling more than a billion dollars, largely to cover costs on its C-Series passenger-jet program.  Bombardier is in trouble.  Indeed, it may have made one of the biggest business blunders in recent decades: financially imperiling a world-leading train maker to make a huge gamble on planes just as climate change forces us to ground the planes and build a trillion-dollar passenger rail system.  Bombardier has recently announced that it may merge its train division with the German company Siemens.

Bombardier has been foolish.  Canadian citizens and their governments have been equally foolish: handing over billions of taxpayer dollars and not receiving a single passenger train in return.  But we can be smart.  That means building a North American network of fast trains.  Bombardier can prosper by being one of the main suppliers for that network.  High-speed passenger rail can be a win-win-win: jobs for Canadians and Americans; fast, comfortable travel; and a high-tech, low-emission transportation system on this continent like the ones being built in Europe and Asia.

The graph at the top of this article shows average per-person passenger-train utilization.  The data is from the most recent year available: 2014 or ’15.  Passenger rail utilization rates in Canada and the US (an average of less than 40 kms per person per year) are among the lowest in the world.  In China, average use is more than 800 kms per person per year and rising very rapidly.  In many European nations, it is more than 1,000 kms per year per person—25 to 30 times the Canadian and US rates.  There is huge growth potential for the passenger rail sector in North America.

Graph sources: OECD.


Fractal collapse: How the dominant societies and economies may fail.

Six images showing the stages of formation of a Sierpinski triangle
The stages of formation of a Sierpinski triangle illustrating fractal collapse

Fractal collapse is an important, useful idea.  It helps us understand that a society, economy, political system, or civilization may not “fall,” but rather become pock-marked and weakened—shot through with micro-collapses.

The United States may be in an advanced state of collapse.  There are many indicators that this is the case.  The national debt, nearly $20 trillion, about a quarter-million dollars per family of four (see my “US national debt per family”), seems unrepayable.  America’s former industrial heartland is now mostly rustbelt, and parts of Detroit look like sets for “Walking Dead” or “The Road.”  Climate change is bearing down from one side and resource depletion from another.  Its democratic system—rotted by dark money, voter suppression, gerrymandering, the distortions of the Electoral College, and messianic populist politics—has delivered gridlock, ideologues, cartoon-level analyses of complex issues, and, now, Trump.  Many of the manufacturing jobs that have not moved to Asia may soon be taken by robots.  Inequality and incarceration-rates are at record highs.  One could extend this list to fill pages.

Despite the preceding, I’m not predicting that America (or Greece or Australia or England) will “fall”—pitch into rapid and irreversible economic contraction and social disintegration.  Instead, fractal collapse is more likely.  In fractal collapse, parts of a system fail, at various scales, but the system, in diminished form, carries on.  We’re seeing this in America.  We see the collapse of a household here (perhaps a result of the opioid crisis), and a neighbourhood, there; a city declines rapidly (think Detroit or Scranton) and a county declares bankruptcy.  Collapse occurs in various places and at various scales but the aggregate entity moves forward.  And such collapses are not predictable—they do not just happen to poor people or in the “poor” places.  Suddenly and unexpectedly, the investment banks collapse, then General Motors becomes insolvent.  The Senate and House of Representatives cease to function properly.  Collapse is not a single event.  As we are seeing it play out now—amid the hyper-energized and dominant “industrial” economies—collapse is multiple, iterative, and repeated across scales: it is fractal.

And collapse is not monolithic or pervasive.  Indeed, some parts of the system expand and prosper.  The US is manufacturing billionaires at a record pace, the stock market continues to climb, output of everything from corn to natural gas is up, and Google and Apple are world-leading corporations.  A hallmark of collapse is that societies become dis-integrated, allowing some parts to fall as other parts rise.

The image above is a Sierpinski triangle or “gasket.”  It helps visualize this idea of fractal collapse.  Step by step, the original triangle shape develops more holes and loses area, but it does not disappear.  its outlines remain apparent.

To make a Sierpinski gasket, we start with an equilateral triangle.  Then we identify the mid-points of each side and use these as the vertices of a new triangle, which we remove from the original.  (See the top-middle triangle, above.)  This leaves us with three equilateral triangles.  We repeat this process over and over; we iterate.  From each remaining triangle we remove the middle, leaving three smaller triangles.  The Sierpinski gasket and its repeated holing can serve as a visual metaphor for the fractal collapse that may now be hollowing out many of the world’s nations.

The future is not binary, not rise or fall.  Increasingly, nations may become less homogeneous.  Some parts may expand and prosper while other parts may wither or fail.  The overall trendline may not be upward, however, but rather downward.  Our future may not be a train wreck, but rather a slow dilapidation.  Not with a bang but a wimper.  We can change this outcome.  But currently very few are trying.

The intellectual history of the idea of fractal collapse is not wholly clear.  The concept came out of the physical sciences and has been popularized as a description of social and economic collapse by author and analyst John Michael Greer.

Unimaginable output: Global production of transistors

Approximate global production of transistors, per capita, selected years, 1955 to 2015

Global production of transistors has surpassed 20 trillion per second—hundreds of quintillions per year.  Transistors are the primary building blocks of modern electronic devices: computers, smartphones, TVs, radios, and other devices.  Transistors use semiconductor materials to amplify (think transistor radios) or switch (think digital computers) electronic signals and electrical power.  Transistors can be individual components, but are found in far greater numbers embedded in integrated circuits—in computer “chips.”

The graph above shows global production of transistors per year per person.  Per capita values are used here to make the size of the numbers more manageable.  In 1955, production was one transistor per 1,000 people—essentially zero.  Radios and TVs in the mid-’50s used vacuum tubes rather than transistors and integrated circuits.

Just ten years later, in 1965, production had increased 1,000-fold, to one transistor per person per year.  Transistor radios were gaining popularity in the 1960s.  Each radio contained several transistors—often 5 to 10.

While production in 1965 was one transistor per person per year, by 1975 it was nearly 1,500 per person.  Individual transistor components had been replaced by semiconductor computer chips, each containing thousands or millions of individual transistors.

The 1980s saw the proliferation of computers and home electronics.  By 1985 global production of transistors had surpassed 40 thousand per person per year.  By 2000 it was 65 million.  Today it is 56 billion per person.

The world now produces more transistors in one second that it did in one year in 1980.

The global population could not afford to purchase, on average, 56 billion transistors per person per year if prices had remained at 1965 or 1985 levels.  In the latter-1950s, a transistor radio with 5 transistors cost nearly $500 in today’s dollars.   Now, for not much more money, you can buy an iPhone that contains hundreds of billions of transistors.

A pound of rice sells for approximately one dollar and contains about 25,000 grains.  For that same dollar you can buy—as part of a memory stick or a phone—not 25,000 transistors, but billions.  A transistor today is thousands of times cheaper than a grain of rice.

Much of the news about the world is negative: famine, genocide, fisheries collapse, climate change, extinctions, resource depletion.  But we also need to acknowledge that our global hyper-civilization is truly wondrous.  We have built human systems of nearly incomprehensible power and productivity.  This is both their great strength and their great peril.  Nonetheless, if we are to safeguard some version of this civilization into the future we must appreciate and value it, despite its profound flaws.  We must take the time to understand it.  And we must work together to reform it.

Graph sources: VLSI Research.   Note that values are approximate and were derived, not directly from data, but from an existing graph.  Thus, while overall trends and conclusions are robust, individual values for specific years are approximate.