Ted, What about Moore's Law?
CJ had an excellent response, but I'll give my perspective as well.
Moore's Law, first of all, was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing wrong with that, since the industry benefitted a lot from having Moore's Law serve as a driving force behind research and development. Of course, we all know that Moore's Law can't continue forever, since we can't continue shrinking transistors below the atomic level. (IBM and others are experimenting with quantum computers, but if that ever works, that will probably be the barrier itself.)
Second, I'll share with you a little "secret." As we push forward from the current 90nm technology to 65nm, 40nm, and beyond, transistors themselves are going to be less reliable. Already we have to build in internal fault tolerance and detection logic in areas we never had to worry about before, because the process guys can't guarantee that the transistors we use to build our designs will be able to work as well as they used to. Fortunately, the smaller transistors mean we have room to add such logic, but then that starts eating away at the benefits of miniaturization. At some point, it's just not going to be worth it.
The image of a guy rolling a boulder up a steeper and steeper slope comes to mind. Pretty soon, we're going to reach a point where we can't roll that boulder up any further.
Tenchusatsu |
