For Moore's law, life goes on at 40

Prasanto Kumar Roy and Nitya Shukla

NEW DELHI: Gordon Moore didn't expect his law to become such a precise, scientific principle measuring and even driving the growth of computing chip power and density. He'd stated it more as a thumb-rule, a sort of guiding principle, he told a group of Asian press, including CyberMedia.






On the fortieth anniversary of Moore's Law, Gordon E Moore (who's Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corp) held a conference call from Hawaii this week. Now, however, Moore is convinced that the law is good for several generations more of processors - or something like another 20 years - despite frequent discussions about the law hitting a wall - of fundamental physics, and silicon capability.





In a paper published in the now-defunct journal Electronics in 1965 Moore had predicted that the number of transistors the industry would be able to place on a computer chip would double every year. He updated his prediction in 1975 to once every two years. A British engineer sold his copy of that issue of Electronics to Intel for $10,000, after the chipmaker posted an auction on eBay.





Excerpts from the conference call:






CyberMedia:
Could the spinoffs of Moore's Law have been better applied to drive down cost rather than develop newer products? Is it likely that if specs were stabilized over a longer intervals, we could have had much cheaper laptops today...few seem to believe in the $100 laptop...






Moore: This is a very important question. The industry requires essentially growing revenue to continue making investments. If what we did was use the technology to lower the cost to a particular level of technology...so if we sold only the same number of laptops at $100 instead of $1000...the money coming into the industry wouldn't allow us to continue work toward making progress. We depend upon the fact that the market is elastic, and as we make more capable electronics, the market continues to expand. Once that stops being the case, the industry's economics collapse very rapidly.





CyberMedia: People benefit hugely from more capable electronics but often find it daunting that products become 'obsolete' before they wear out. This is driven by the rapid advances the Moore's Law has 'measured' so well. How should we balance the need for power with the need to stabilize product life cycles­-and by the way also minimize e-waste, such as with all those mobile phones rapidly reaching the landfills?





Moore: Yes, well, I guess one of the things that makes up this kind of hardware is that it lasts for a very long time! It doesn't wear out ... in the conventional sense. The things that wears it out is the software which requires more and more memory, and more and more processing power in order to use it. So the user upgrades his computer to get the additional capabilities that new applications take up. I think this is kind of the nature of the beast! I never quite know what to do with an old computer. Most of them go back to Intel. But I have a few at home from way back... I'm sure they still work, but I just don't use them any more!