Remembrance in Spacetime: Toujours la Moore's Law

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Toujours la Moore's Law

Posted by TheBigHenry • LABELS: Duuude, Lends a whole new meaning to the phrase, You had me at bacon

Western Civilization Loves Moore's Law

Image representing Intel as depicted in CrunchBase

Related source » Moore’s Law Lives: the Future Is Still Alive
Why your life and the lives of your children and grandchildren are going to be a whole lot better than they might have been.
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]

Intel Corp. announced Wednesday that Moore’s Law isn’t going to end anytime soon. Because of that, your life and the lives of your children and grandchildren are going to be a whole lot better than they might have been. Today, almost a half-century after it was first elucidated by legendary Fairchild and Intel co-founder Dr. Gordon Moore in an article for a trade magazine, it is increasingly apparent that Moore’s Law is the defining measure of the modern world. All other predictive tool[s] for understanding life in the developed world since WWII — demographics, productivity tables, literacy rates, econometrics, the cycles of history, Marxist analysis, and on and on — have failed to predict the trajectory of society over the decades … except Moore’s Law. Alone, this oddly narrow and technical dictum — that the power, miniaturization, size, and power of integrated circuit chips will, together, double every couple years — has done a better job than any other in determining the pace of daily life, the ups and downs of the economy, the pace of innovation, and the creation of new companies, fads, and lifestyles. It has been said many times that, beneath everything, Moore’s Law is ticking away as the metronome, the heartbeat, of the modern world. […] So, what made this week’s announcement — by Intel — so important? It is that almost from the moment the implications of Moore’s Law became understood, there has been a gnawing fear among technologists and those who understand technology that Moore’s Law will someday end — having snubbed up against the limits of, if not human ingenuity, then physics itself. Already compromises have been made — multiple processors instead of a single one on a chip, exotic new materials to stop leaking electrons — but as the channels get narrower and bumpier with molecules and the walls thinner and more permeable to atomic effects, the end seems to draw closer and closer. Five years away? Ten? And then what? What will it be like to live in a world without Moore’s Law … when every human institution now depends upon it? But the great lesson of Moore’s Law is not just that we can find a way to continuously better our lives — but that human ingenuity knows no bounds, nor can ever really be stopped. You probably haven’t noticed over the last decade the occasional brief scientific article about some lab at a university, or at IBM, Intel, or HP, coming up with a new way to produce a transistor or electronic gate out of just two or three atoms. Those stories are about saving Moore’s Law for yet another generation. But that’s the next chapter. Right here and now, the folks at Intel were almost giddy in announcing that what had been one of those little stories a decade ago — tri-gate transistors — would now be the technology in all new Intel chips.” [emphasis added]
— May 8, 2011, by Michael S. Malone (pajamasmedia.com)

Around 2020 or soon afterward, Moore's law will gradually cease to hold true and Silicon Valley may slowly turn into a rust belt unless a replacement technology is found. […] Transistors will be so small that quantum theory or atomic physics takes over and electrons leak out of the wires.

But somehow Intel's new architecture for its tri-gate transistor provides a workaround strategy that, at least for the time being, will enable Moore's law to operate beyond 2020, before the Heisenberg uncertainty principle again imposes its inexorable limitation for confining electrons within atomic-scale wires. Perhaps by that time, we will have solved the technological problems that currently confront quantum computing.

In any case, our technology giants such as Intel have extended the shelf life of the almighty Moore's Law, which has been keeping Western Civilization several steps ahead of those agents of mass-murder and seventh-century chaos arrayed against us. Long live human mind over human detritus.

Toujours la Moore's Law!

Apropos Moore's Law, M. Gordon Moore ranks #71 on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans, weighing-in at a net worth of 4.8 gigabucks (as of September 2012).