[HH] The Death of Moore's Law Will Spur Innovation

[Tom Metro]

Here's an opinion piece by Andrew "bunnie" Huang (hardware lead at
Chumby, and I believe the guy I previously posted about who was building
an open hardware laptop design).

The Death of Moore's Law Will Spur Innovation
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-death-of-moores-law-will-spur-innovation

His assumption is that when semiconductors approach an "effective gate
length of about 5 nanometers sometime around 2020 or 2030", Moore's Law
will hit a wall and the doubling of transistor density will drop from 18
months to 36 months or more.

He argues that the current reality of 18 month time horizons to
substantially better silicon means that all the innovation is happening
at the large organizations designing and producing the silicon. All the
smaller companies making use of the silicon are better off waiting for
the next CPU advance, rather than investing effort into code
optimization and other performance optimizations that are within their
grasp.

But once the pace of big advances in silicon slows to something close to
36 months, it then makes sense for small organization to invest in such
optimizations.

Furthermore, he believes because we will be using the same silicon for
longer periods, that will lead to more standardized components (think
Google's modular Aria phone, or PC motherboards that aren't obsolete in
9 months), computers and electronics will be better built to last
longer, and we'll go back to a "repair culture" where schematics and
replacement parts are readily available.


This all sounds great for those rooting for open hardware, but all of
this flows from the starting assumption that Moore's Law will run out of
gas. The problem with that assumption, even though it is supported by
the laws of physics, is that there will be many highly motivated
organizations with deep pockets that will seek to redefine the problem.

 -Tom