In the beginning, everything good correlated with more transistors: decreased pitch led to lower power per transistor, faster clock frequency (implying faster RAM), more RAM, and lower cost per transistor. In the decades since pretty much everything but "number of transistors" has fallen off. Pitch doesn't mean pitch, clock speeds are a function of cooling, cost is going up.
One thing that has correlated well with Moore's Law still is exponential cost to open a new fab, and fewer companies chasing the latest node. As Moore's Law slows, and possibly eventually ends, the end is going to be caused by economics, not just physics.
Yeah, to some extent- how much I'm not sure- Moore's Law became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because everyone knew that transistor count was about to double, everyone- including the Wall Street investors- agreed that you needed to spend all that money to build that new fab, because if you didn't you can be damn sure your competition would. So the semiconductor industry "was allowed" by investors to continue making enormous investments in the next generation of fabs. If there was some similar law for, say, rockets, could we have had that sort of progression in space travel instead?
No, because the economics are different. To put some things in context:
- Cost of the Saturn V development program: $6.417bn then / $35.4bn in 2020 dollars
- Cost of TSMC's Arizona fab: $12bn now
- The Saturn V program launched a handful of humans into space for $0.185bn then / $1.23bn now per launch.
TSMC's fab may cost a lot, but it produces a very large number of chips and, most importantly, it's reusable. The most density- and performance-sensitive applications use the newest fabs first, but the fabs are not thrown out immediately after a newer process is developed. Instead, the older fabs start making cheaper chips that don't need leading-edge performance. All of that up-front cost is amortized over a decade of continuous use.
If investors had poured money into rockets instead of chip fabs, we wouldn't have had everyone going to space. The investors would have just lost their shirt. Space has inherent costs we can't engineer around (e.g. fuel) and getting there is primarily a scientific endeavor rather than a consumer good. Keep in mind, there's nowhere to go[0] in space once you get there, except back to Earth.
Meanwhile, chips are something everyone needs now, and owning a fab is still a profitable venture even when the R&D costs go up - at least, for as long as the manufacturing technology works and people are willing to pay a premium for better chips. It's not purely an R&D arms race.
[0] I am leaving the possibility of terraforming Mars out of this, as that has enormous problems on its own.
Cost per device might have flattened at the leading edge (where fabbing processes are increasingly customized, so skyrocketing costs are to be expected) but the trailing edge is seeing more improvement, AIUI.
One thing that has correlated well with Moore's Law still is exponential cost to open a new fab, and fewer companies chasing the latest node. As Moore's Law slows, and possibly eventually ends, the end is going to be caused by economics, not just physics.