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by runnerup 1241 days ago
Moore's law isn't dead. Only Dennard's law. See slide 13 here[0]. Moore's law stated that the number of transistors per area will double every n months. That's still happening. Besides, neither Moore's law nor Dennard scaling are even the most critical scaling law to be concerned about...

...that's probably Koomey's law[1], which looks well on track to hold for the rest of our careers. But eventually as computing approaches the Landauer limit[2] it must asymptotically level off as well. Probably starting around year 2050. Then we'll need to actually start "doing more with less" and minimizing the number of computations done for specific tasks. That will begin a very very productive time for custom silicon that is very task-specialized and low-level algorithmic optimization.

[0] Shows that Moore's law (green line) is expected to start leveling off soon, but it has not yet slowed down. It also shows Koomey's law (orange line) holding indefinitely. Fun fact, if Koomey's law holds, we'll have exaflop power in <20W in about 20 years. That's equivalent to a whole OpenAI/DeepMind-worth of power in every smartphone.

0: (Slide 13) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/937966/0001193125212...

1: "The constant rate of doubling of the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koomey%27s_law

2: "The thermodynamic limit for the minimum amount of energy theoretically necessary to perform an irreversible single-bit operation." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

1 comments

Also even MHz increases have had a bit of a comeback lately, with the fastest mid-2000's Pentium 4's reaching 3.8-4.2GHz and the latest Ryzen 7000's reaching 6GHz.