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Moore's Law Dead by 2022, Expert Says

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Renegade:
All good things must come to an end?

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319330

Moore's Law -- the ability to pack twice as many transistors on the same sliver of silicon every two years -- will come to an end as soon as 2020 at the 7nm node, said a keynoter at the Hot Chips conference here.

While many have predicted the end of Moore's Law, few have done it so passionately or convincingly. The predictions are increasing as lithography advances stall and process technology approaches atomic limits.

"For planning horizons, I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call it dead," said Robert Colwell, who seeks follow-on technologies as director of the microsystems group at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. "You could talk me into 2022, but whether it will come at 7 or 5nm, it's a big deal," said the engineer who once managed a Pentium-class processor design at Intel.

Moore's Law was a rare exponential growth factor that over 30 years brought speed boosts from 1 MHz to 5 GHz, a 3,500-fold increase. By contrast, the best advances in clever architectures delivered about 50x increases over the same period, he said.

Exponentials always come to an end by the very nature of their unsustainably heady growth. Unfortunately, such rides are rare, Colwell said.

"I don't expect to see another 3,500x increase in electronics -- maybe 50x in the next 30 years," he said. Unfortunately, "I don't think the world's going to give us a lot of extra money for 10 percent [annual] benefit increases," he told an audience of processor designers.

Colwell poured cold water on blind faith that engineers will find another exponential growth curve to replace Moore's Law. "We will make a bunch of incremental tweaks, but you can't fix the loss of an exponential," he said.

DARPA tracks a list of as many as 30 possible alternatives to the CMOS technology that has been the workhorse of Moore's Law. "My personal take is there are two or three promising ones and they are not very promising," he said.
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More at the link.

On the plus side, it might make it easier to buy ASICs for cryptocurrency mining in a few years. :)

eleman:
Yeah, they said the same thing about 28 nm, and then 20 nm.

Moore's second law: Once every two years an "expert" will predict the demise of Moore's Law.

p.s.: Moore's law is long dead from average joe's perspective anyway. My six years old core 2 e7200 has comparable single thread performance to today's i3 somethings (which are curiously sold at the same price level my e7200 sold for in the day). Intel and AMD continue to add new cores but I no longer see real-world performance gains doubling once every two years. Well, at least they had a good run from mid-nineties to late-oughties anyway.

Renegade:
My current box is 4 years old (about), and still has LOTS of power. It was mid-range when I got it too.

Few people need what many computers can do now. They do email, Facebook, and not much else.

wraith808:
Yeah, they said the same thing about 28 nm, and then 20 nm.

Moore's second law: Once every two years an "expert" will predict the demise of Moore's Law.

p.s.: Moore's law is long dead from average joe's perspective anyway. My six years old core 2 e7200 has comparable single thread performance to today's i3 somethings (which are curiously sold at the same price level my e7200 sold for in the day). Intel and AMD continue to add new cores but I no longer see real-world performance gains doubling once every two years. Well, at least they had a good run from mid-nineties to late-oughties anyway.
-eleman (July 24, 2014, 10:57 AM)
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Yeah... wishing and saying isn't going to make it so.  And there was no scientific proof in that article that I could see... just convincing reasoning.

Vurbal:
Yeah, they said the same thing about 28 nm, and then 20 nm.

Moore's second law: Once every two years an "expert" will predict the demise of Moore's Law.-eleman (July 24, 2014, 10:57 AM)
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I think the first time I saw that claim was all the way back when Intel's 180nm process CPUs hit the market.

p.s.: Moore's law is long dead from average joe's perspective anyway. My six years old core 2 e7200 has comparable single thread performance to today's i3 somethings (which are curiously sold at the same price level my e7200 sold for in the day). Intel and AMD continue to add new cores but I no longer see real-world performance gains doubling once every two years. Well, at least they had a good run from mid-nineties to late-oughties anyway.

--- End quote ---

Yep. We've long since reached the point where the limits on the useful lifetime of a computer were determined primarily by component durability rather than speed or the selection of technical features. For the typical computer user that happened more than a decade ago. For most power users it was probably 5 years back.

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