End of Moore's Law in 10-15 years?

javipas writes "In 1965 Gordon Moore — Intel's co-founder — predicted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double every two years. Moore's Law has been with us for over 40 years, but it seems that the limits of microelectronics are now not that far from us. Moore has predicted the end of his own law in 10 to 15 years, but he predicted that end before, and failed."

it's the law

[User 956 (568564)]

Moore has predicted the end of his own law in 10 to 15 years, but he predicted that end before, and failed.

So then it seems with regards to his Law, Moore has fallen prey to Murphy.

Re:it's the law

[click2005 (921437)]

What about the inverse of Moore's Law.. Every 2 years, the average IQ of all users on the internet halves.

Corollary to moores law

[goombah99 (560566)]

If you accept the statement I just made about moore's law being sustained because of economics then here's a corollary which makes an observable prediction.
Moores law stays fixed because the industry invests enough research dollars--and not one dollar more-- to keep it at that rate. Their entire economic model is built on this.

Therefore, if we every do reach a point where we simply are running out of available physics and computer science (multiprocessing) then the first sign of this will be an increasing fraction of research dollars spent to sustain moores law.

Plot the industry's margin, smooth the curve, and you will be able to extrapolate to the point where the research dollars cross the profit line. somewhere shortly before that is when moore's law will end.

The only way that would not be true is if the nature of innovation changes from frequent small leaps to massive leaps spaced far apart.

nonsense

[Quadraginta (902985)]

That's nonsense. The industry grew around the physics, not vice versa. The fact that the industry is predicated on a constant improvement of speed and complexity is because such a thing is achievable in microelectronics, certainly not because microelectronics is the only industry where such a thing is desirable.

I mean, who wouldn't want cars to become twice as gas efficient (without losing power) every 18 months, ad infinitum? If such a thing were technically possible, it would happen, because all the car makers would jump on the gas-mileage bandwagon to get ahead of their competitors.

Who wouldn't want the amount of food that can be grown per man-hour to double every 18 months, so the price per pound of beans and broccoli fell as fast as the price per CPU cycle of computers? If such a thing were possible, it would happen, as every farmer raced to lower his costs of production and undersell his neighbors like crazy, earning millions.

In very few industries other than microelectronics has anything like Moore's Law applied, and that's not from a lack of economic incentive, but from the plain uncooperativity of Mother Nature. You're arguing backwards, from effect (the economic structure of the industry) to cause (the physical nature of microelectronics).

Re:It's a law of econmics

[hackstraw (262471)]

Whenever one process technology reaches its physical limits, we get a new one, because the new process makes money.

I kinda agree and kinda disagree.

Moore's "Law" is clearly stated in terms of physics. It says that the number of transisters will double, not the speed will double over time.

However, as Kurzweil and other's have observed, the speed of _computation_ has doubled over time before Moore's law and there is no reason or hint that this will stop once Moore's law is obsolete.

Take a peek at http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 [kurzweilai.net] specifically http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/images/chart03.jpg [kurzweilai.net]

ICs have been good for a while, but then so were abacus' at one time.

CPUs are simply different than they were a few years ago. Things like the Niagra chip from Sun and the multi-core stuff from AMD and Intel is pretty different design (SMP on a chip -- yes, that is an oversimplification).

10-15 years is about in the middle of 2020, which seems to be a common point of a number of interesting stuff. Physics computations are predicted to be pretty interesting by then. Computers are predicted to be interesting by then. Who knows what else.

Its not hardware that I think is the problem or challenge, its the pains of software that seems to be more challenging. I mean its 2007 and we have what for software? OSes and compilers and whatnot have pretty much stagnated since the early 70s. Sure, we have 4g languages that are easier for us stupid people to program with, but from a performance and efficiency POV they are backwards, not forwards. JIT stuff in .NET and Java are a little interesting, but programming computers is still a PITA.

I guess we will have to wait and see.

Law?

[haystor (102186)]

Can we stop calling a prediction a law?

A law is an observation

[benhocking (724439)]

To simplify things a bit, a law is an observation, whereas a theory is an explanation. They are not the same thing, but you can have laws and theories dealing with the same subject matter.

Re:Law?

[plover (150551)]

Can we stop being so f'ing pedantic every time a story mentions Moore's Law?

This is slashdot, so ...

no.

Not to worry...

[Marc Desrochers (606563)]

It will be just in time for the arrival of cold fusion.

Moore's Second Law

[MyLongNickName (822545)]

Moore's second law: "Moore's first law will only work for 10-15 more years".
Moore's third law: "Moore's second law applies from the time it is quoted not from when it was originally uttered".

Again?

[dylan_- (1661)]

There are always a few of these [techdirt.com].

I do recall someone telling me that no CPU would ever run at more than 2GHz, as it would then start emitting microwave radiation...

Re:Again?

[krray (605395)]

I do recall someone telling me that no CPU would ever run at more than 2GHz, as it would then start emitting microwave radiation...

I remember having / making a similar claim myself way back when -- with the 486/33 and 486/66 being the hot system in the day. I predicted they'd have a hard time getting above ~80Mhz because of FM radio interference / shielding problems. Boy was I wrong.... :*)

Today I predict "Moore's Law" to hold pretty true -- even in 10 or 15 years. IBM has been playing with using atoms as the gate / switch which will make today's CPU's look like Model T's.

In the 90's they had http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV1003.html [ibm.com]
Not too long ago they've done http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.20040909_samm.html [ibm.com]
And recently it has been http://www.physorg.com/news107703707.html [physorg.com]

This will both be a boom for storage and the chips themselves IMHO (not to mention my stock :).

Best part about predicting own failure

[gurps_npc (621217)]

Is that even if you are wrong, you are still right.

Wow, that Moore guy was so smart he outsmarted Moore.

Hafnium Breakthrough

[smitty97 (995791)]

from tfa:

"We're not far from that," Moore said on Monday. "Before we had our Hafnium breakthrough, we were down to the point where we were at five molecular layers in the gate structure of the transistors. When you clearly can't go below one...you get into other types of problems," Moore said.

The law will continue, they just need breakthroughs with Quarternium, Eigthnium, etc..

And next year ...

[mshmgi (710435)]

Next year, they'll tell us that Moore's Law will end in 5-7.5 years.

CPU speed already on the wane as consumer bait

[dave_mcmillen (250780)]

I have no idea if Moore's Law will really start to "fail" in a particular time scale (one of these times it's gotta be true, right?), but a related issue I find interesting is that CPU speeds don't seem to be being touted to computer buyers so heavily anymore. Walk into a big electronics store and look at their desktop offerings: where they used to prominently feature how many GHz they had inside (and people vaguely felt that more of these mysterious GHz was better), now the CPUs are given code names and numbers that don't reflect CPU speed: Check out this nifty X2, or the Turion 64, or ...

The new hook for consumers is the number of "cores", and once again most people have probably picked up the vague sense that having more of them inside means the computer is better. I've been told by people who might be in a position to know that it's not that they can't keep cranking up CPU speeds, but that the cost/benefit (profit-wise) stops making sense at some point because of the huge cost of implementing a new fab at a finer length scale, and we're pretty much at that point. So it makes sense that cores are the new GHz, and Moore's Law will have less and less direct impact on the end computer buyer from now on.

Maybe there's a Core Law to be formulated about how often the average number of processors per computer can be expected to double?

Re:CPU speed already on the wane as consumer bait

[cowscows (103644)]

Moore's Law doesn't really have anything to do with MHz or GHz, or clock speeds at all. It's more about the number of transistors crammed into a cost effective chip. For a while there, one of the main things that intel decided to do with all those transistors was to push the clock-speed as fast as they could. This certainly made computers more powerful, and it was an easy number to work into advertisements and such.But at the end of the day, it wasn't the only way that processors could be improved. To bring in a dreaded car analogy, they were making a car go faster by adding more cylinders to the engine, while mostly ignoring things like aerodynamics and efficiency in other parts of the car. But eventually they reached a point where there wasn't any room in the engine compartment for more cylinders, so now they're looking at making the rest of the vehicle more efficient.

The transistor count will keep going up, Moore's Law will continue. It's just that those new transistors will be used a little differently.

Not yet,

[SharpFang (651121)]

The law speaks about number of transistors. Considering current size of a typical CPU die (about 1cmx1cmx1mm) and assuming a "reasonable" maximum size of some 10cmx10cmx10cm we have about 15 years of doubling the SIZE of the CPU (with some challenges like heat dissipation, but nothing nearly as difficult as increasing the density further) and that's not considering increasing the density any more. So even if the density reaches its limits, the CPUs may simply grow in size for a good while.

Re:Not yet,

[Chirs (87576)]

You've neglected to consider power issues. The 10cm cube you mention is 10000x the volume of the "typical" current size you mention. Assuming power scales linearly with volume, that would require approximately 300KW of power just for the cpu. That works out to about 1250Amps of current at 240V.

Nobody wants to increase the size of cpus...defects scale more than linearly with area, so there is a strong incentive to keep the die area down. Also, as the physical size increases you run into other problems...power transfer, clock pulse transfer, etc.

My prediction

[Random832 (694525)]

I predict the number of predictions of the end of Moore's Law will double every six months.

Moore's Law as Energizer Bunny: not about silicon.

[mschuyler (197441)]

Moore is being short-sighted about his own law. It's not about silicon. If you extraploate backwards from the first integrated chip you see that "Moore's Law" has been in effect for over 100 years. It started with manual switches, then moved to electric motor switching, then to vacuum tubes, then to transistors, then to integrated circuits. Every one of those mediums has been subject to and demonstrates Moore's Law. Graph it and you'll see. It's a perfect logarithmic line. Every time the method itself peaks of its own accord a new medium is found which can continue the progress. (Any familiar with the growth of telco equipment can see this in the switching systems: Electric switches to step systems to crossbar to ESS.) If IC does run out, there is a future of possibilities: holographic, quantum, bio, etc. Moore's Law is like the Energizer Bunny. It just keeps going.

Re:Gordon Moore

[kebes (861706)]

A realistic design for a quantum computer would probably have a classical CPU that does most of the work, with a quantum co-processor. Traditional things, like running the OS and dealing with hardware I/O, would probably still be classical. The quantum co-processor would be assigned computations by the CPU that can be accomplished much faster than on the classical CPU.

This abstraction would mean that most software wouldn't have to be written with any understanding of quantum computing: libraries and compilers would be designed to use CPU calls that launch the quantum co-processor, if available.

For many operations, the quantum CPU would not be needed. But for certain tasks, it would provide orders-of-magnitude speed boosts. If quantum co-processors became commonplace, we would see improvements in all kinds of parallel-processing tasks (matrix operations, simulations, graphics, maybe even search?).

Re:Gordon Moore

[Daniel_Staal (609844)]

Somewhere, once a upon a time, I saw an article that took the opposite approach: They worked out what the absolute maximum transistor density was, and worked out from that when Moore's Law had to end. They figured one transisitor per Plank-unit, in a spherical computer. (Where the clock speed is proportional to the size of the sphere, governed by the speed of light.)

IIRC, it ended up something like 150 years in the future.

Re:Gordon Moore

[kebes (861706)]

I'm not sure if this is the same article that you saw previously, but this paper discusses that topic:
Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation [nature.com]" Nature 406, 1047-1054 (31 August 2000) | doi: 10.1038/35023282 [doi.org] (for those without access to Nature articles, this arXiv preprint [arxiv.org] appears to be the same article).

The article reviews the absolute maximum limits for computation, based on current understanding of thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics.

The basic conclusion of the paper is that a theoretical 1 kg computer (confined to a volume of 1 liter), operating perfectly at the edge of what is physically possible could compute 10^51 operations/second on 10^31 bits of information (as compared to our current computers: 10^10 operations/second on 10^10 bits). Naively scaling Moore's law from current sizes, this suggests that we will reach such limits in 250 years. Of course the paper repeatedly points out that this is for an unrealistically 'perfect' computer, that is somehow able to perfectly organize all its internal matter solely for performing the computation at hand. For instance when running a computation it effectively has a temperature of ~10^9 Kelvin, which is considerably hotter than any known material could withstand.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to see what the fundamental principles of relativity and quantum mechanics indicate as a boundary for any sort of computation. The article is an interesting read.

sure they do

[Quadraginta (902985)]

They only change in ways that are generally not possible to anticipate, hence which haven't been predicted.

And of course they would. Technology, like the stock market or the weather, is inherently a chaotic system over a certain characteristic timespan (1-2 weeks for the stock market and the weather, 25-50 years for technology). That is, over the characteristic timespan very small causes can produce enormous, system-wide effects, what you might call the butterfly wing flapping causing the hurricane phenomenon.

For example, a couple of guys (Jobs and Wozniak) screw around in the garage in the early 80s, trying to put together a really cheap personal computer. That's a very small cause. And twenty-five years later, it has had a giant effect: iMacs and iPods and iTunes oh my. Problem is, there was no practical way in the 1980s to distinguish the small cause that mattered (Jobs and Wozniak) from the other 50 zillion small causes that didn't matter (the other 50 zillion pairs of scruffy entrepreneurs in garages whose brilliant idea went nowhere).

This is why predictions of the future out more than 50 years usually end up looking hilarious in hindsight. When sf writers of the 50s and 60s predicted the present, they projected the dominant themes of their time (spaceflight, atomic physics, the struggle with Soviet Communism). They did not -- and could not -- realize that all three themes would pretty much abruptly and surprisingly come to an end in the 90s. When present writers predict the future, they project the dominant themes of our times (e.g. networked computing). It's very likely these projections, too, will end up wildly wrong. Networked computing is likely to become as humdrum and static as telephony within the next half-century or so.