Moore’s Law, as chip manufacturers generally refer to it today, is coming to an end, according to a recent research paper.
Granted, that end likely won’t come for about two decades, but Intel researchers have recently published a paper theorizing that chipmakers will hit a wall when it comes to shrinking the size of transistors, one of the chief methods for making chips that are smaller, more powerful and cheaper than their predecessors.
Manufacturers will be able to produce chips on the 16-nanometer manufacturing process, expected by conservative estimates to arrive in 2018, and maybe one or two manufacturing processes after that, but that’s it.
The critics would also change their minds as technologies become refined. Actually let me rephrase that, they will make new observation based on new data. Sometimes imagination becomes limited.
Lets first assume that wall exists, could someone tell me what speeds we are talking about in terms of processors and how that compares with what we have now? Also assuming parrallel processing picks up the speed of a chip may not really be the key thing to consider but rather the number and that can be quite large. The key driver will be well intel loses some of its monopoly power and chip prices fall. That has been one of the key drivers of the number of computers in households in the last 10 years with the coming of AMD into the market place.
