Ask A Genius 400 – Moore’s Law As Moore’s Laws (1)
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/10/02
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is the plural nature of Moore’s Law?
Rick Rosner: People have been arguing for years. Moore’s Law is a set of laws about the rates at which various computer components shrink down, become more powerful, or the number of transistors you can jam onto a chip.
It is a combination of these laws. Every 18 months, something is supposed to happen. A micro transistor is supposed to shrink and so on. I think it celebrated its 50th birthday. It has been going for a while.
For at least 20 years, people have been speculating when it will stop being able to continue. Some argue it already is past that point. There was a well-respected person giving a speech in March saying that the more computation you do then the more heat you generate.
The number of calculations per second is such that there is not efficient way past a certain limit, even if you keep shrinking the transistors, to push the heat out of it, especially if you’re producing 3-dimensional stacked systems.
Everybody in the past saying it was over, then it hasn’t been. At the very least, it has to slow down. These doubling times of three years and so on. But the performance of computers now, instead of doubling every two or three years, can’t keep going.
It looks like there are only, according to this article, doubling times of 20 years. That’s thing one.
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