Over the decades, some, including Moore himself at times, fretted that they could see the end in sight, as it got harder to make smaller and smaller transistors. In truth, it’s been more a gradual decline than a sudden death. In early 2019, the CEO of the large chipmaker Nvidia agreed. Moore’s Law, Leiserson says, was always about the rate of progress, and “we’re no longer on that rate.” Numerous other prominent computer scientists have also declared Moore’s Law dead in recent years. The newest Intel fabrication plant, meant to build chips with minimum feature sizes of 10 nanometers, was much delayed, delivering chips in 2019, five years after the previous generation of chips with 14-nanometer features. This year that became really clear,” says Charles Leiserson, a computer scientist at MIT and a pioneer of parallel computing, in which multiple calculations are performed simultaneously. It has also fueled today’s breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genetic medicine, by giving machine-learning techniques the ability to chew through massive amounts of data to find answers. Almost every technology we care about, from smartphones to cheap laptops to GPS, is a direct reflection of Moore’s prediction. A few years ago, leading economists credited the information technology made possible by integrated circuits with a third of US productivity growth since 1974. Soon these cheaper, more powerful chips would become what economists like to call a general purpose technology-one so fundamental that it spawns all sorts of other innovations and advances in multiple industries. Moore also saw that there was plenty of room for engineering advances to increase the number of transistors you could affordably and reliably put on a chip. Moore, the company’s R&D director, realized, as he wrote in 1965, that with these new integrated circuits, “the cost per component is nearly inversely proportional to the number of components.” It was a beautiful bargain-in theory, the more transistors you added, the cheaper each one got. Integrated circuits, with multiple transistors and other electronic devices interconnected with aluminum metal lines on a tiny square of silicon wafer, had been invented a few years earlier by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor.
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