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I'm not so sure you can disconnect Moore's Law from market demand. There is certainly no physical basis for Moore's Law. It is mainly an expression of the rat
by lesterbuck 15y ago
I'm not so sure you can disconnect Moore's Law from market demand. There is certainly no physical basis for Moore's Law. It is mainly an expression of the rate of capital investment and business profit cycles. It happens that spending the Moore's Law rate on R&D and new fabs approximately matches the profits needed to build the next cycle. If customers stopped needing more memory, for whatever reason, then the business investment cycle represented by Moore's Law would quickly come to a halt. Conversely, if there were a Manhattan Project style crash R&D effort that needed better memory chips, and lack of profit was no barrier, then the density could improve faster than Moore's Law for some time.