End of Moore's law?

[David Kramer]

Jerry Natowitz wrote:
> This brings up a somewhat new point.  Looking at data comm 
> infrastructure, what has been the relationship between Moore's Law and 
> speed and capacity of switching fabric?  When I was involved in that 
> segment, about 10 years ago, fat pipe switches/routers were built with 
> state of the art technology custom ASICS.  When manufacturing processes 
> shrunk, the ASICS were often die shrunk, with varying results.  Have 
> they been able to re-work ASICS for higher speeds, or is bleeding edge 
> networking still reinventing the wheel every time wire speeds increase?

I think the big problem with network speed is not coming up with spiffy
new technologies that are blindingly faster, but the political and
economic realities of updating the infrastructure so that people can use
it.  And there's very little incentive for internet providers to focus
on that with flat-fee unlimited internet service.