The Death of Moore's Law

*It's going, but does Moore's Law taper off slowly, or does it suddenly crash? Also, might there be a retreat from Moore's Law, where the most advanced and generally capable chips are too expensive to find a market?

*The machinery would still get faster, but it would be purpose-built and fine-tuned for market-centric applications that will pay. General-purpose machines might be in abeyance, or even outlawed Cory-Doctorow style.

*I think one could argue that this is a final triumph of capitalism over technology here; it's not that engineers couldn't fulfill Moore's Law, more that the businesses that employ engineers couldn't afford to invest in it.

*The biggest new supercomputers are increasingly Chinese. Maybe the Chinese can afford Moore's Law – but would they sell their China-centric creations to anybody else? And if so, would other people dare to buy it?

*Also – it's not that you can't get plenty of highly capable computation nowadays. It's just – you don't own the hardware. Instead, you rent it from the likes of Amazon, from the commercial networks. The Law-As-A-Service.

*People love "deep learning" all of a sudden, and those systems can run on alarmingly small platforms. From a chip-engineering perspective there's something quite creepy and decadent about deep-learning.

Moore's Law is dead now what

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The chip industry has kept Moore’s prediction alive, with Intel leading the charge. And computing companies have found plenty to do with the continual supply of extra transistors. But Intel pushed back its next transistor technology, with features as small as 10 nanometers, from 2016 to late 2017. The company has also decided to increase the time between future generations (see “Intel Puts the Brakes on Moore’s Law”). And a technology roadmap for Moore’s Law maintained by an industry group, including the world’s largest chip makers, is being scrapped. Intel has suggested silicon transistors can only keep shrinking for another five years….