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Moore's Law is indeed dying. But consider this... The valuations of Intel, Nvidia, AMD and other chip makers are tied to Moore's Law, right? What's the point

Moore's Law is indeed dying. But consider this... The valuations of Intel, Nvidia, AMD and other chip makers are tied to Moore's Law, right? What's the point of buying a new GPU card, if your old one is good enough to play games? Their stock price depends on the continued belief that they can continue to produce something with some combination of better, faster and cheaper than what's currently available, and thereby have increasing sales. If Moore's Law comes to an end, their stock prices should crash, because then computing is a "boring" utility service, and doesn't warrant the massive R&D or stock valuations we have now. Ditto for the companies that depend on the chip makers: Apple, Samsung, Google, LG, Dell, etc. (yes, some of these make chips themselves) What's the point of buying a new PC that isn't faster than the old one? Or a new phone? They'd also be relegated to a maintenance mode as well, and their stock prices should also fall considerably, because future growth isn't there. And then there's all the companies that depend on those above. Game companies, etc. So now we're talking about billions and billions of dollars of investment. And are these shareholders of Intel and everyone going to be content with seeing valuations fall? No, I tell you they won't. If the current management of Intel can't promise new growth via new technology, they will be replaced by people who do promise it. If they can deliver on that promise is another story... So companies will be researching new a better computing substrates. And so the tech will move on. And get better, faster, denser, and more cost effective.

mnemonicsloth 7y ago
A lot of research has already been generated looking for better materials than silicon, asynchronous logic synthesis strategies, post-von Neumann architectures, methods for writing non-traditional, and especially parallel software. If any of them worked we'd be using them right now. They didn't. We aren't. And no amount of research is going to give us transistors less than 30 atoms on a side (we're around 100 now). There will be no chips that signal faster than the speed of light, which means no chip will be able to get bigger than a few centimeters across. Between those two constraints the design space is pretty much bounded.

mnemonicsloth 7y ago

A lot of research has already been generated looking for better materials than silicon, asynchronous logic synthesis strategies, post-von Neumann architectures, methods for writing non-traditional, and especially parallel software. If any of them worked we'd be using them right now. They didn't. We aren't. And no amount of research is going to give us transistors less than 30 atoms on a side (we're around 100 now). There will be no chips that signal faster than the speed of light, which means no chip will be able to get bigger than a few centimeters across. Between those two constraints the design space is pretty much bounded.