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How long can Moore's law hold out?

Anyone who has ever been involved in computers must know about Moore's law. I you haven't heard of it then find out about it here. For as long as I can remember, computer processors have been churned out according to this law (more of an observation than a law but companies turned it into a law). This means that every computer you buy becomes obsolete before you even arrived home and turned it on for the first time.

Last year, if I remember correctly, there were some worries about whether Moore's law would last long. Then the boffins managed to figure out how to make things smaller yet again. It seemed that Moore's law has some more life in it yet.

It appears that the parent company of Mr. Moore, Intel, is going on full steam with this principle and in their latest news they have just completed their 32nm development phase. You can read all the juicy details here straight from the horses mouth.

According to the companies goals they are aiming to trundle out some new technology every year or so. This appears to me that they know something that we don't (not hard in my case :) and are confident in sticking to Moore's law for quite a few years yet.

But are they shooting themselves in the foot? While researchers and scientists would welcome this newer and faster(?) technology I don't think the average consumer is able to keep up with such a rapid change. I may be wrong because they have been able to keep up so far however there must be a saturation point and I believe that is close, if not already here, thanks to the current economic environment.

Lets just say that the consumer can continue forking out money for newer and faster(?) technology. Eventually, let say in ten years time, there is going to be a physical limit to how much we can shrink things (just don't shrink the kids honey) and that will be the end of Moore's law.

What will that do for technology? Will there be another form of technology to replace that? Perhaps organic computers will become the main focus of research. Where scientists start stringing long strands of DNA together to make artificial brains. Or maybe we become good enough to make transistors out of three atoms for molecular sized computers.

If that were to happen the possibilities could be endless. If I could go to the store and buy a pill. In that pill is a tiny graphics card made by NVidia which, when swallowed, delivers it to my brain. This graphic card not only corrects my eyesight but allows me to superimpose internet supplied information on top of what I see. Just like that cute little terminator playing the flirting ritual with John Conner does. Personally I would be happy enough with the corrected eyesight :)

Unfortunately I don't think I will see that bit of science fiction in my lifetime. Unless they develop the elixir of immortality and I can get my grubby little hands on it. So I will have to be satisfied with what I have, bringing me in a round about way to my current question. How long will Moore's law last and what will happen then? What do you think?



Visiting Borgs

Read 8 comments


Moore's Law has evolved as the processor evolved from doubling transistors and speed, to include the addition of multiple cores. The basic principle that computing power doubles every 18-months relative to price can continue until quantum computers are produced, then we don't know what will happen.

GPUs are currently exceeding Moore's Law, as are hard drives, which means the bottle neck is the network/internet!
don't forget quantum processors. they look interesting to say the least.
Check out this nice paper from Berkeley --

I think that the most likely limit to Moore's Law will be economic rather than physical. There are always ways to improve technically, but as oz_ollie says, the network is the biggest bottle neck at the moment (especially here in Australia) and that is all about money and having enough to put faster/more cable/fibre in the ground.

There is also the consideration of what will we do with all of this power? Most people now have computers on their desks so powerful that they only use a fraction of that potential. I mean come on, word processing, sending email and browsing the web are not high end application requiring quantum computing (unless you are running Windows 20XX).

So for those of us running Linux, MacOS etc on a quantum computer, what could we possible want that will justify the bottles of liquid helium, radiation shielding etc etc that the average quantum computer comes with?

I think that the challenge for Intel and companies like it will be to find ways to continue obsoleting their old products so that we feel we need to buy new ones. Compared to that, sticking to Moore's Law is going to be easy.
That is a great read, admittedly I was well out of my depth in some areas, but the authors have explained their concepts and theories really well. It will be interesting to see how software developers respond to their "manycore" conclusions.
Any answer to that question is little more than guesswork. Not much worth in that, except for maybe placing a bet or challenging wannabe crystal ball readers ;-)

If ever science fails to deliver a way to make smaller circuitry, there is always the possibility it may deliver something else that will provide more computing power.

I believe computers still have a long way to go. There are still many promises from the past that are yet to deliver. Neural networks, bio-computers, agent technology, robotics, computer learning and many other fields have been active for 20 years or so and little has reached mass production level, so I guess there's a lot of stuff on the pipeline for the coming years.
How strange! To me this blog seems strangely out-of-date.

Will Moore's Law continue?
Depends which one you mean. The doubling-of-transistors-on-a-chips seems like it will continue for a while (but notice that GPUs passed CPUs years ago).

The doubling-of-processing-power law may not be strictly Moore's but it has been a common definition. And it was indeed true. But that ended about the year 2000, as various academics pointed out long ago.

Example : I recently built a new computer. It is a whole THREE times faster than the one I assembled in 2000. Pitiful! If the processing-power law had kept up, it would have been more like THIRTY times faster. It was only in the 90's that it seemed like a new computer was obsolete by the time you brought it home.

True, the new CPU is a true dual processor, but even now there are almost no programs capable of using multiprocessors. There is rendering and scientific stuff and suchlike. Games have been promising multiprocessor use for years. Are there any yet?

I think you are right about saturation for the average consumer, though. The enormous popularity of netbooks shows that average consumers have finally (years late) realised that they do not actually need more computer power.
Please, what parts did you use and how do you calculate that it's three times faster?

Back in 97 I bought a P200MMX, now I use AMD Athlon 1Ghz system since 2002, so in 5 years it became 5 times faster *if* speed is determined from hz's of cpu only, but concidering every other aspects as well the change is enormous. And while it's well enough for me, today I could my multi-cores with enormous difference to this.

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Archive Category: News
Keyword Tags:  Moore's law   Intel   technology   future

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