“Moore’s law has died at the age of 51 after an extended illness,” Peter Bright writes for Ars Technica. “In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that the number of components in integrated circuits was doubling every 12 months or so.”
“With a little more data and some simplification, this observation became ‘Moore’s law’: the number of transistors per chip would double every 12 months,” Bright writes. “Gordon Moore’s observation was not driven by any particular scientific or engineering necessity. It was a reflection on just how things happened to turn out. The silicon chip industry took note and started using it not merely as a descriptive, predictive observation, but as a prescriptive, positive law: a target that the entire industry should hit.”
“Problems with the original formulation of Moore’s law became apparent at an early date. In 1975, with more empirical data available, Gordon Moore himself updated the law to have a doubling time of 24 months rather than the initial 12. Still, for three decades, simple geometric scaling — just making everything on a chip smaller — enabled steady shrinks and conformed with Moore’s prediction.””
“In the 2000s, it was clear that this geometric scaling was at an end, but various technical measures were devised to keep pace of the Moore’s law curves. At 90nm, strained silicon was introduced; at 45nm, new materials to increase the capacitance of each transistor layered on the silicon were introduced. At 22nm, tri-gate transistors maintained the scaling. But even these new techniques were up against a wall,” Bright writes. “These difficulties mean that the Moore’s law-driven roadmap is now at an end. ITRS decided in 2014 that its next roadmap would no longer be beholden to Moore’s ‘law,’ and Nature writes that the next ITRS roadmap, published next month, will instead take a different approach.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: R.I.P. Moore’s law. 51 years was an amazing run!