In 1965 Gordon Moore stated that every two years computer chips would get half as small and twice as powerful, and so started the driving force behind the computer industry later coined as; Moore's Law.
Today, we stand on the precipice of that law, some say it has already died, others (myself included) say that it will end at some point between 2022 and 2025.
Even though we may disagree as to whether it's ended quite yet or not, we can all agree on the fact that the law simply cannot go on forever.
For fifty three years we have seen computers get smaller and faster, keeping pace with the law that Gordon Moore iterated all those years ago, now it is coming to the end we ask:
Moore's Law An Economic Whimper or A Quantum Bang?
There can be little or no doubt the impact of economics has had on the technological evolution within the human race. From the development of the internal combustion engine to the synthesising of new drugs, the pursuit of profit has been the fuel for innovation.
Don't get me wrong, profit is not the be all, Marie Curie did not embark on her groundbreaking work in the field of radiology because she wanted to be rich. The NASA space program wasn't started and pursued to make money. Rather both these endeavours were taken on in the spirit of discovery.
However profit is the end all, after innovation comes the fruit of technology, and it is this very fruit that we so hunger for. Our appetites never being sated for faster, sleeker, more impressive gadgetry.
Without the lure of profits it's doubtful that the computer industry would be as powerful as it is today. Profits are what encourage speculative investment into areas that are at first dark and difficult to navigate.
Look back to the early days of the automobile, slow and messy, difficult to operate and not as good as a horse and cart. Without the lure of the profits that were to come, Henry Ford and co might not have bothered.
Computers were huge cumbersome things, the first one took around two weeks to do a calculation that a third grade primary school child could do on her fingers in seconds. In fact as late as 1977 Ken Olsen of Digital - *the company bought by Compaq - stated that he could see no reason why anyone would want a computer in their house.
Of course Olsen later clarified that he was talking about a central computer that controlled everything in the house from lights to heating. But however you look at it, he was wrong.
Inspiration Vs Innovation An Economic Death Match
In 1960 when President John F. Kennedy made his famous 'We Go To The Moon' speech, there was less money in the world and so conversely it was worth more. Ten dollars back then would get you roughly what around eighty would get you today.
Back then the idea of going to the moon was still castigated by a few, however by and large it was considered as something that had to be done.
After a while however, around the time we moved from the gold standard to fractional reserve banking. A move that dramatically increased the amount of money in the system, the Americans stopped going to the moon.
Why?
Quite simply put; economics.
There was no clear economic advantage to carry on going to the moon. Scientifically NASA had achieved all they were going to, and there was no money to be made either then, or the foreseeable future.
In fact, with no clear legal guidelines set in place determining ownership rights and protections, until recently private industry has been reluctant to take on the heavy lifting of space exploration.
In other words, with no clear idea how to turn space exploration into profits, why should we invest money into this?
The Fiscal Physics Of Slowdown
Plot of transistor counts against dates of introduction. The curve shows counts doubling every two years, per Moore's law.
In the past it was thought that physics would be the brick wall that brought about the end of Moore's Law. More recently it was suggested that it would actually be quantum physics that hastened its end.
Ultimately a computer processor's power is bound in the amount of transistors it has crammed into it. From 1965 to 1967 that amount doubled as the transistor size halved. However back then the space between the anode and cathode (the on and off plates) could be measured in millimetres (thousandths of a metre).
Today that same space can be measured in nanometres (billionths of a metre), this has taken the number of transistors you can fit on an integrated chip from thousands to billions. Nobody in their right mind could argue that computers have benefited from this internal arms race.
Now however things are different, the difference between a computer in the year 2000 and one in 2008 after four cycles of Moore's Law was vast. The difference between one in 2010 and 2018 is still significant, however not quite as cavernous, and therein lies the problem.
In the year 2000 Intel was happy to pour billions of dollars into the pursuit of Moore's Law. Of course; why wouldn't they? The billions poured in, equated to billions paid out at the other end. Those profits were generated because the supercomputers created as a result of that billions of dollars R&D were superior to what had come before.
Now though it seems we are at a point whereby not only has Moore's Law slowed down. The advantages of having smaller transistors within an integrated circuit have reached a negligible point.
In other words the difference between having 2.6 billion transistors on a microprocessor, and say 4 billion will not make the computer that more impressive. Much more to the point however, is that the increase comes with an exponential cost.
The cost of pushing the transistor count any higher is now at a point whereby it is no longer economically viable. Computers will not be that more powerful, ergo they will not cost that much more. In fact the laws of supply and demand will mean that the end product will come down in price, not go up.
Make no mistake, today Moore's Law is being driven purely by economics not by some altruistic desire to maintain the scientific status quo. No nonprofit organisation on the planet could afford to keep Moore's Law alive, and it is beginning to look that way for private enterprise as well.
A Quantum Desire
An Osborne Executive portable computer, from 1982, with a Zilog Z80 4 MHz CPU, and a 2007 Apple iPhone with a 412 MHz ARM11 CPU; the Executive weighs 100 times as much, has nearly 500 times the volume, costs approximately 10 times as much (adjusted for inflation), and has about 1/100th the clock frequency of the smartphone.
Of course the latest innovation in computing that we are all waiting for is quantum computing. That area does still hold untold trillions of dollars of unrealised profit potential. So money will be spent and innovation will continue to flourish within that industry.
We shouldn't be so quick to abandon Moore's Law though. The most accepted hypotheses surrounding quantum computing are whereby the nuclei of atoms are manipulated and 'spun' in order to create superpositions.
These take the place of silicon chips producing ones and zeroes, and leave in their place the language of qubits, which can be both one and zero at the same time.
However there is a smaller school of thought that says once we get to the lower limits of Moore's Law, whereby standard transistors are so small that the quantum uncertainty principle comes into play. We will be able to usher in a new era of quantum computing via the back door.
At the end of the day we can just hope that Intel will carry on investing money into this area and developing the technology not purely for profit, but because they can. To quote JFK, hopefully they carry on not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
For our sake's let us hope that the end of Moore's Law end's with the quantum bang it deserves.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.- T.S. Eliot
Sources:
End of Moore's Law: It's not just about physics - Scientific American
Death notice: Moore’s Law. 19 April 1965 – 2 January 2018
Ken Olsen personal computer claim - Snopes
Image Sources:
Title image: JC Gellidon on Unsplash
Insert image - Transistor Count: [ourworldindata.org - Original text-](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_countURL:
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Insert image - Osborne Executive computer and 2007 iphone: creative commons license By Casey Fleser - Flickr: Evolution (34 / 365), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16420557