![]() ![]() “That’s a 30 times improvement in performance,” he says, adding that if software developers are clever, we could get chips that are a hundred times faster in 10 years. After a while, he “decided not to worry about it.” He says Intel is on pace for the next 10 years, and he will happily do the math for you: 65 billion (number of transistors) times 32 (if chip density doubles every two years) is 2 trillion transistors. He says he has been hearing about the end of Moore’s Law for his entire career. It means there are many ways to keep doubling the number of devices on a chip-innovations such as 3D architectures and new transistor designs. He points out that there are probably more than a hundred variables involved in keeping Moore’s Law going, each of which provides different benefits and faces its own limits. If they were right, he recalls thinking, “that’s a drag” and maybe he had made “a really bad career move.”īut Keller found ample technical opportunities for advances. When he joined the company, he says, many were anticipating the end of Moore’s Law. He leads a team of some 8,000 hardware engineers and chip designers at Intel. ![]() Jim Keller, who took over as Intel’s head of silicon engineering in 2018, is the man with the job of keeping it alive. Nonetheless, Intel-one of those three chipmakers-isn’t expecting a funeral for Moore’s Law anytime soon. Not coincidentally, the number of companies with plans to make the next generation of chips has now shrunk to only three, down from eight in 2010 and 25 in 2002.įinding successors to today’s silicon chips will take years of research.If you’re worried about what will replace moore’s Law, it’s time to panic. The cost of a fab is rising at around 13% a year, and is expected to reach $16 billion or more by 2022. Likewise, the fabs that make the most advanced chips are becoming prohibitively pricey. Economists at Stanford and MIT have calculated that the research effort going into upholding Moore’s Law has risen by a factor of 18 since 1971. New lithography methods using extreme ultraviolet radiation were invented when the wavelengths of visible light were too thick to precisely carve out silicon features of only a few tens of nanometers. New transistor designs were introduced to better corral the electrons. In 1999, an Intel researcher worried that the industry’s goal of making transistors smaller than 100 nanometers by 2005 faced fundamental physical problems with “no known solutions,” like the quantum effects of electrons wandering where they shouldn’t be.įor years the chip industry managed to evade these physical roadblocks. Over the decades, some, including Moore himself at times, fretted that they could see the end in sight, as it got harder to make smaller and smaller transistors. In truth, it’s been more a gradual decline than a sudden death. In early 2019, the CEO of the large chipmaker Nvidia agreed. Moore’s Law, Leiserson says, was always about the rate of progress, and “we’re no longer on that rate.” Numerous other prominent computer scientists have also declared Moore’s Law dead in recent years. The newest Intel fabrication plant, meant to build chips with minimum feature sizes of 10 nanometers, was much delayed, delivering chips in 2019, five years after the previous generation of chips with 14-nanometer features. This year that became really clear,” says Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT and a pioneer of parallel computing, in which multiple calculations are performed simultaneously. It has also fueled today’s breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genetic medicine, by giving machine-learning techniques the ability to chew through massive amounts of data to find answers. Almost every technology we care about, from smartphones to cheap laptops to GPS, is a direct reflection of Moore’s prediction. ![]() A few years ago, leading economists credited the information technology made possible by integrated circuits with a third of US productivity growth since 1974. Soon these cheaper, more powerful chips would become what economists like to call a general purpose technology-one so fundamental that it spawns all sorts of other innovations and advances in multiple industries. Moore also saw that there was plenty of room for engineering advances to increase the number of transistors you could affordably and reliably put on a chip. Moore, the company’s R&D director, realized, as he wrote in 1965, that with these new integrated circuits, “the cost per component is nearly inversely proportional to the number of components.” It was a beautiful bargain-in theory, the more transistors you added, the cheaper each one got. Integrated circuits, with multiple transistors and other electronic devices interconnected with aluminum metal lines on a tiny square of silicon wafer, had been invented a few years earlier by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor. ![]()
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