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Moore's Law: Chips
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Moore's Law does have impressive predictive value, even in areas it didn't specifically address. For instance, hard drives seem to double in capacity at roughly the same rate, although Moore's Law has nothing to do with hard drives. Chip density does keep improving, and today's leading CPUs are created on a 0.18 micron scale with a lot of components. RAM chips do double in capacity almost like clockwork, and so does CPU power.
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Moore's 1979 paper, therefore, makes an important amendment to the 1975 Moore's Law. Moore still claims that the complexity of the most complex commercially available chips had - for the first 15 years - been doubling roughly every year and, after that, doubling every two years. Now he ... explicitly notes that the curve represents the limit of achievable complexity and that most chips fall far beyond the curve. Whereas the reason for this slowing down was in 1975 described as disappearing "circuit cleverness," in 1979 Moore noted that the essential problem was in designing products that would benefit from the maximum complexity. This was becoming the dominant concern as the industry was attempting to move from large-scale integrated circuits, LSI, to very large-scale integration, or VLSI. As Moore put it:
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Almost two decades later, Noyce's foresight of economic limitations has brought about what has been referred to Moore's Second Law. (Ross 1995) "What has come to worry me most recently is the increasing cost. . . This is another exponential," writes Moore (Economist 1995). In today's dollars, the cost of a new "fab" (fabrication plant) has risen from $14M in 1966 to $1.5B in 1995. By 1998 work will begin on the first $3B fabrication plant. Between 1984 and 1990, the cost of a fab doubled, but chip makers were able to triple the performance of a chip.
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Moore's Law is based on an observation by Mr. Moore, the founder of Intel, that the number of components in a chip doubled every two years. That was later revised to the 18 month figure. By extrapolation, it ... predicts that computing power will double on the same schedule.
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Moore's Law, 40 years old this month, is hailed as the foundation of the computer revolution — the first commandment of the tech industry. In its modern, popular form, it states that computer chips double in power for the same price every 18 months.
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SANTA CLARA, CA, September 19, 2006 (PodTech News) — Intel says its new experimental semiconductors could be the breakthrough the chip industry has been looking for — the one that will allow chips to keep pace with Moore's Law. They'll do this by using lasers instead of wires to shuttle around data. Semiconductor experts have been pointing to a possible end of the "Law" that predicts that chip performance will essentially double every 18 months.
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