The End of Moore’s Law, and Beyond

Moore’s Law–which states that the number of transistors that can be placed in a circuit doubles every 18-24 months–is already coming to an end. The exponential growth in the the way silicon circuits are designed and manufactured has driven much of the technological progress of the last 40 years or so, but it can’t continue forever. This is why the techno-Utopians who prattle on about “exponential growth” weary me so: exponential growth is never sustainable. Eventually, you hit the limits of your materials, your creativity, your power, your programming, your economics, or any number of other factors that inhibit the uninterrupted development of technology.

Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, does quite a nice job in the embedded video of explaining the inevitable end of Moore’s law, and the challenges we face in moving seamlessly from silicon-based processors to other kinds of computing, such as molecular and quantum computers. He’s placing the “collapse” of Moore’s Law 10 years out. I think we’re already at the beginning of that collapse, and although there are some fascinating candidates for a post-silicon future, a lot of them remain little more than tantalizing theories and wonderful experiments.

And all of them run into a single blunt reality: there is no Moore’s Law for programming. Programming advances at a linear rate. There’s even a corollary for Moore’s Law–sometimes called May’s Law–which states that while processing speed doubles every two years, software efficiency halves in the same time period. Obviously, this is meant more as commentary on Moore’s Law and its limits than as a real corollary, but there is a kernel of truth in it: programming does not keep pace with processing. That’s just a hard fact of computing, and techno-Utopians have never understood it.