Moore's Law

Just some nonsense - but it's the kind of thing that fascinates me.  Follows on a bit, I suppose, from my 'Imagining a fortune' thread.

'Moore's Law' was named for Gordon Moore, one of Intel's founders, based on an observation he made in the '60s.... that the number of components that could be crammed onto an integrated circuit would double every year.  That was later amended to every two years.  But it was pretty prophetic.

In 1971, Intel - then relatively unknown - launched the 4004 chip.  It was the world's first commercially-available microprocessor.  It was built from 2,300 tiny transistors, each around 10,000 nanometres (or billionths of a metre) across - about the size of a red blood cell.

By 2015, Intel was the world's leading chipmaker (no, not McCain's!).  That was the year it launched its Skylake chips.  Exact numbers aren't known, but the best guess is that Skylakes have 1.5 to 2 billion transistors apiece.  Spaced 14 nanometres apart, each is so tiny as to be literally invisible.

No other piece of consumer technology has advanced at such an astonishing pace.  The analogy commonly used is with cars.  If the cars from 1971 had developed at the same rate as the microchip, by 2015 they'd be capable of top speeds of 420 million miles per hour!  Enough to drive around the world in less than a fifth of a second.

'Moore's Law' will soon be obsolete, though.  Technologists estimate that the chip will continue to develop until the 2020s, by which time components could be as little as 5 nanometres apart.  For the law to hold for much longer than this, engineers would have to figure out how to build computers from components smaller than an atom of hydrogen - the smallest element there is.  As far as anyone knows, that's impossible.  This will naturally slow down the rate at which computers become obsolete.

One solution for further development would be to build 3D microprocessors (they're currently virtually flat) - in other words, building chips that stack their components on top of one another.  IBM reckons that 3D chips could allow designers to shrink a supercomputer that currently fills a building to the size of a shoebox.  The problem will be dealing with the heat generated, so liquid cooling would become the norm.

'Moore's Law' has succeeded in making computers smaller, transforming them from room-filling monsters into things that fit in your pocket.  It's also made them more energy-efficient.  And that's another mind-boggling fact.  The smartphone now packs more computing power than was available to entire nations in 1971 - and they can last a day or more on a single battery charge.

Source: The Guardian