WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.360 Moore's Law sounds like a comforting, or perhaps disturbing, promise that computer 00:00:05.360 --> 00:00:08.920 processing power will double about every two years. 00:00:08.920 --> 00:00:13.360 But despite the fact we call it a law, there have been plenty of folks in the tech center 00:00:13.360 --> 00:00:17.040 opining that Moore's Law is in fact dead. 00:00:17.040 --> 00:00:20.760 And we're hitting some kind of wall when it comes to just how powerful we can make 00:00:20.760 --> 00:00:25.800 our technology. But how much truth is there to the rumor, and who the heck is Moore anyway? 00:00:25.800 --> 00:00:30.680 It turns out Gordon Moore wasn't just some guy that made an observation about CPUs. 00:00:30.680 --> 00:00:38.360 He was one of the founders of Intel. His story begins back in 1957, a few years after he finished his PhD at Caltech. 00:00:38.360 --> 00:00:44.080 At the time he was working for Nobel Prize winner William Shockley on semiconductor development. 00:00:44.080 --> 00:00:49.400 But Shockley wasn't exactly the best boss, with his management style characterized by 00:00:49.400 --> 00:00:52.520 paranoia, aggressiveness, and intrusiveness. 00:00:52.520 --> 00:01:00.040 The trinity of bad boss qualities. So maybe it's not surprising that he was later disgraced for espousing views that could 00:01:00.040 --> 00:01:04.040 only be described as, uh, alarmingly racist. 00:01:04.040 --> 00:01:09.600 Moore and seven of his colleagues left Shockley's company and started a new firm called Fairchild 00:01:09.600 --> 00:01:15.240 Semiconductor. This walkout became so famous that Moore's group became known in tech circles as The 00:01:15.240 --> 00:01:18.600 Traderous Eight. 00:01:18.600 --> 00:01:22.400 Ravaging towns across Silicon Valley. 00:01:22.400 --> 00:01:26.920 Fairchild went on to develop the first commercially viable integrated circuit, and although the 00:01:26.920 --> 00:01:32.080 company is no longer around, its employees went on to found other influential tech firms, 00:01:32.080 --> 00:01:39.320 including both AMD and Intel. It was also at Fairchild that Moore thought up the first formulation of his famous law 00:01:39.320 --> 00:01:44.640 in 1965, that the number of components in an integrated circuit would double yearly. 00:01:44.640 --> 00:01:49.200 Along with fellow Traderous Eightster, Robert...nice. 00:01:49.200 --> 00:01:54.880 Moore left Fairchild in 1968 to found a new company they originally thought about naming, 00:01:54.880 --> 00:02:01.200 Moore Noise. But since that sounded too much like Moore Noise, they decided that wasn't the best brand 00:02:01.200 --> 00:02:06.120 for an electronics firm. And I wish I could go back in time to tell them they're making a huge mistake. 00:02:06.120 --> 00:02:09.560 Instead, they went with NM Electronics. 00:02:09.560 --> 00:02:15.120 But quickly changed the name to Intel, less than a month after the company was founded. 00:02:15.120 --> 00:02:23.120 Sounded a little more...nice. While Moore's law prophesies exponential growth in transistor density, Moore himself 00:02:23.120 --> 00:02:27.360 later predicted that the rate of increase would eventually slow down. 00:02:27.360 --> 00:02:32.520 In 2005, Moore pointed out that we'd eventually hit some pretty hard physical limits, such 00:02:32.520 --> 00:02:38.720 as the size of an atom. And indeed, while we've seen experimental transistors that work by changing the position 00:02:38.720 --> 00:02:44.080 of only a single atom, there's still a debate raging as to whether this is the right way 00:02:44.080 --> 00:02:51.440 to look at Moore's law. One consideration is that there isn't a standardized way to determine how big transistors are. 00:02:51.440 --> 00:02:56.080 There already isn't much consistency between Intel and AMD, and with newer transistor types 00:02:56.080 --> 00:03:01.520 that involve three-dimensional designs and alternative materials, focusing on transistors 00:03:01.520 --> 00:03:05.120 per unit area might actually be missing the point. 00:03:05.120 --> 00:03:09.000 Instead, current discussions on Moore's law tend to be more about whether we're going 00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:13.800 to continue to see a certain amount of processing power gradually become cheaper. 00:03:13.800 --> 00:03:19.400 Jensen Wong, CEO of NVIDIA, famously said last year that he believes Moore's law to 00:03:19.400 --> 00:03:24.920 be truly dead, as silicon wafer costs had risen to the point where consumers could no 00:03:24.920 --> 00:03:29.720 longer count on getting significantly more performance at a lower price if they waited 00:03:29.720 --> 00:03:32.760 a year or two. Jensen was simply making an observation. 00:03:32.760 --> 00:03:38.840 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 00:03:38.840 --> 00:03:45.080 about. Between chiplet-based processors that save money over monolithic chips that get lower 00:03:45.080 --> 00:03:49.280 yields, new transistor designs like Gate All Around that can push through more electrons 00:03:49.280 --> 00:03:54.520 at once, and the rise of artificial intelligence, which aims to provide more performance through 00:03:54.520 --> 00:03:59.400 machine learning than we'd otherwise see just from doubling the number of transistors alone. 00:03:59.400 --> 00:04:04.840 So while we might not be able to keep making our chips impossibly chock-full of transistors, 00:04:04.840 --> 00:04:09.560 the tech industry still has plenty of tricks up its sleeve to make a future full of self-driving 00:04:09.600 --> 00:04:14.440 cars, hyper-realistic games, and disturbing deep fakes a reality. 00:04:14.440 --> 00:04:18.680 Somehow, I don't think computers will ever be powerful enough to make Twitter a more 00:04:18.680 --> 00:04:22.280 civil place. But you were powerful enough to make it to the end of this video. 00:04:22.280 --> 00:04:25.920 Hey, thanks for watching! Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. 00:04:25.920 --> 00:04:29.640 Check out our other videos, comment below with video suggestions, and don't forget to 00:04:29.640 --> 00:04:35.760 subscribe and follow TechWiki, where we will suggest things to you that maybe you hadn't 00:04:35.760 --> 00:04:36.280 thought of before.