3 ms·
That's the thing about Moore's law - it has assumed from the beginning that our 'current understanding of basic physical limitations' is incomplete, and been pr
by mandmandam 1y ago
That's the thing about Moore's law - it has assumed from the beginning that our 'current understanding of basic physical limitations' is incomplete, and been proven correct on that front many times over.
- adrianN 1y agoOur understanding of basic physical limits seems reasonably good and hasn't changed for a couple of generations. Our understanding of engineering limitations on the other hand is not so good and subject to frequent change.
- Teever 1y agoI'm not sure I follow. can you elaborate on that? As I understand it Moore's Law doesn't address any sort of fundamental physical limitations other than perhaps an absolutely limit in terms of some fundamental limit on the smallness of an object, it's just an observation of the doubling of transistor density over a consistent period of time. It seems more like an economical or social observation than a physical one to me.
- mandmandam 1y agoI was using OP's terminology, pointing out that people (including Moore himself) have been warning of an imminent cap on Moore's law since at least 1975. Getting into fine detail of what constitutes a 'fundamental physical limit' as opposed to an engineering challenge wasn't really the point, though I personally believe that our understanding of physical limits will develop further. We don't know what we don't know - there's always the potential of radical technology coming from an upending of things which were 'established' for decades or centuries previously; that's just the nature of science.