Moore Predicts End of Eponymous Law
Gordon Moore, Intel retired CEO spoke with Moira Gunn on stage at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, in which he repeated his old assertion that within 10-15 years, the effects of Moore's Law will cease.
All things considered, this is significantly less inflammatory than it might be perceived, for at least three reasons (not including the fact that it has been asserted by GM himself before):
- The computer-industry-vs-the-speed-of-sound principle: the plain fact is that we’re still talking about 10 to 15 years - “an eternity in technology time” - of exponential increase in the transistor budget for an integrated circuit. (All good curves must come to an end. Ars Technica, September 19, 2007.)
- The oh-yeah-we’re-still-dealing-with-the-physical-world-here principle: “Something like this can’t continue for ever. If you extrapolate too far you always end in disaster, and we are approaching the size of atoms, and that’s a pretty clear limitation.” (Moore’s Law: at least 10 to 20 years before the limit is reached. Electronics Engineer Magazine, September 20, 2007)
- The brute-force-isn’t-the-only-strategy-we’ve-got principle: Or, the fact that we’re a creative species, and maybe we’ll continue to dream up clever ways to use all this brute power: “even then that’s not the end of the progress as by then engineers will have a budget of literally millions of transistors on a chip for their designs.” (Ibid.)
This is also interesting for those of us on the software side of things. When we reach a point where either a) we can’t just get more power to fuel inefficient code, operating systems or frameworks or b) chip design ceases to be a math problem and starts to look more like architecture, and thus has to start thinking software earlier and earlier, it’s going to be a game-changing moment.
EEE: With computing performance growing so fast, does the software hold us back?
GM: People can’t develop and debug software properly until they have the hardware so software does tend to lag the hardware. I certainly want a simple interface although I don’t know what it looks like. I think we are losing ground a bit in general purpose computing — its not through a lack of effort but they want to add so many new features its hard to simplify it, but it works pretty well.
Here are some nice trading cards from Intel about Moore’s Law:
