End of Moore's law?

[Rich Braun]

Stephen Adler <adler-wRvlPVLobi1/31tCrMuHxg at public.gmane.org>
> I have no need to upgrade, or rather, I don't know what I could get in
> the same price range ...
> Personally, as a desktop user, I feel that Moore's law is in decline.

This insight is how I felt when I read Ray Kurzweil's 2-book series "The Age
of Spiritual Machines" for which the initial research was done in the
mid-1990s during the heyday of Moore's Law.

Kurzweil's central argument at the time was that the doubling and redoubling
of computer horsepower would lead inevitably to machines which surpass us
humans, and that the date on which this happens could be predicted sometime in
the 2020s.  (He then surmises that such intelligent systems would augment our
society rather than harrass us as in the old film "Demon Seed" or kill us off
as in the "Terminator" series.)

But I think Stephen's observations above are what will inevitably derail such
prognostications, at least during our lifetimes and our kids'.

There are two other key factor:  cost and competition in the computer
manufacturing business.  With each new generation of microchips, the doubling
of performance comes with it a doubling of cost--of the factories required to
make them.  Intel now has to pay roughly a billion dollars to build a fab
plant.  (This compares to $15 to $50 million for factories at the time of
Kurzweil's predictions.)

In order to sustain Moore's Law, the number and cost of factories built to
sustain growth of hte industry has increased geometrically right along with
performance.  As the industry consolidated over the years (there are fewer
CPU, RAM and disk drive companies) the barriers to entry by newcomers kept
rising with the price of factories.  (That price is not just fueled by
inflation--it's related directly to complexity of the products and the
increasing size of the customer base).

The whole thing runs out of gas once enough consumers make the same decision
that Stephen made:  what I have is good enough that I'll wait longer before
making the effort to do an upgrade.

What about corporate buyers?  I personally believe that industry innovations
since the first TRS-80 came out 30+ years ago have been led primarily by
consumers.  That trend continues today:  graphics adapters and subsystems are
front-and-center where the action is, not just today but for the past few
years.  VMware and its cousins can only go so far to drive demand on the
corporate side.  At my own workplace, demand is coming not from our internal
requirements but from--*consumers* who want to download more and more video.

Once you have enough computer capacity in your house to drive roughly 5
channels of 3-D HDTV to every room in the house, what else will you need?

-rich