Moore's Law sounds like a comforting, or perhaps disturbing, promise that computer
processing power will double about every two years.
But despite the fact we call it a law, there have been plenty of folks in the tech center
opining that Moore's Law is in fact dead.
And we're hitting some kind of wall when it comes to just how powerful we can make
our technology. But how much truth is there to the rumor, and who the heck is Moore anyway?
It turns out Gordon Moore wasn't just some guy that made an observation about CPUs.
He was one of the founders of Intel. His story begins back in 1957, a few years after he finished his PhD at Caltech.
At the time he was working for Nobel Prize winner William Shockley on semiconductor development.
But Shockley wasn't exactly the best boss, with his management style characterized by
paranoia, aggressiveness, and intrusiveness.
The trinity of bad boss qualities. So maybe it's not surprising that he was later disgraced for espousing views that could
only be described as, uh, alarmingly racist.
Moore and seven of his colleagues left Shockley's company and started a new firm called Fairchild
Semiconductor. This walkout became so famous that Moore's group became known in tech circles as The
Traderous Eight.
Ravaging towns across Silicon Valley.
Fairchild went on to develop the first commercially viable integrated circuit, and although the
company is no longer around, its employees went on to found other influential tech firms,
including both AMD and Intel. It was also at Fairchild that Moore thought up the first formulation of his famous law
in 1965, that the number of components in an integrated circuit would double yearly.
Along with fellow Traderous Eightster, Robert...nice.
Moore left Fairchild in 1968 to found a new company they originally thought about naming,
Moore Noise. But since that sounded too much like Moore Noise, they decided that wasn't the best brand
for an electronics firm. And I wish I could go back in time to tell them they're making a huge mistake.
Instead, they went with NM Electronics.
But quickly changed the name to Intel, less than a month after the company was founded.
Sounded a little more...nice. While Moore's law prophesies exponential growth in transistor density, Moore himself
later predicted that the rate of increase would eventually slow down.
In 2005, Moore pointed out that we'd eventually hit some pretty hard physical limits, such
as the size of an atom. And indeed, while we've seen experimental transistors that work by changing the position
of only a single atom, there's still a debate raging as to whether this is the right way
to look at Moore's law. One consideration is that there isn't a standardized way to determine how big transistors are.
There already isn't much consistency between Intel and AMD, and with newer transistor types
that involve three-dimensional designs and alternative materials, focusing on transistors
per unit area might actually be missing the point.
Instead, current discussions on Moore's law tend to be more about whether we're going
to continue to see a certain amount of processing power gradually become cheaper.
Jensen Wong, CEO of NVIDIA, famously said last year that he believes Moore's law to
be truly dead, as silicon wafer costs had risen to the point where consumers could no
longer count on getting significantly more performance at a lower price if they waited
a year or two. Jensen was simply making an observation.
There's nothing he can do about it. But of course, that doesn't mean the price of a wafer is the only variable to think
about. Between chiplet-based processors that save money over monolithic chips that get lower
yields, new transistor designs like Gate All Around that can push through more electrons
at once, and the rise of artificial intelligence, which aims to provide more performance through
machine learning than we'd otherwise see just from doubling the number of transistors alone.
So while we might not be able to keep making our chips impossibly chock-full of transistors,
the tech industry still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve to make a future full of self-driving
cars, hyper-realistic games, and disturbing deep fakes a reality.
Somehow, I don't think computers will ever be powerful enough to make Twitter a more
civil place. But you were powerful enough to make it to the end of this video.
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