The computer industry has been growing exponentially ever since the development of transistor based chips. However, things have been slowing down lately as companies have tried to circumvent barriers by other means. It seems that the inevitable end may be near for advancements in processor technology.

I remember learning about Moore’s Law during my computer science class in the ’90s. Moore’s Law states that the numbers of transistors on a processor will exponentially double every two years. With advancement in miniaturization this will be possible as engineers are able to fit over 40 million transistors on a chip today. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel noticed this phenomenon back in 1965 and published a white paper based on this theory.

According to a report on EE Times, Carl Anderson an IBM researcher is indicating that Moore’s Law is near its end. He spoke during the International Symposium on Physical Design, which is a venue where researchers from all over the world gather to discuss exponential scaling down of semiconductors.

He stated that Moore’s Law is running out of steam as researchers have hit a barrier on fitting more into a processor. The only companies to make major leaps in the near future will be select leading-edge research firms investing heavily into this area. However, many companies will not follow suit as the benefits do not outweigh the costs. Most applications today can be run on technology that is 10 years old.

Lately many companies have tried to compensate for the loss in growth by expanding into the multi-core area. I suppose it makes sense to grow horizontally if one can’t grow vertically (there’s a joke in there somewhere). Anderson predicted that the next generation advancements will be made in other areas such as optical interconnects, 3-D chips and accelerator-based processing, which is all fairly new technology areas. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for the home computer in the coming years.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 9:02 pm under Intel, Science and technology, Technology.

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