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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

That's the best estimate I can provide. Besides it maps well with the past thirty years of computing history.

And ignores what Moore's Law is.

In a (simplified) nutshell: We can fit more transistors in a given unit of area because we make them smaller. That used to just mean we increased clock frequencies (make it faster) but comparatively recently (decade or two) meant we increased parallelism.

Moore's Law is expected to fail because we are now reaching the point where smaller transistors are very heavily impacted by actual limitations imposed by physics.

So while it is possible we'll have a technology shift and see similar performance gains, it won't really be Moore's Law anymore (unless we start using Pym Particles or something).

>Pym Particles

For those reading along, this is a fictional particle named after Hank Pym - AntMan - from Marvel comics. It's not a technology in a lab somewhere.

The economic implications of Moore's Law are quite clear to me. Roughly one observes that every 18 months the expected computing power one can buy per unit currency doubles. Of course this is predicated upon physical possibility. 32 years would imply another 21 process halving or so, and that would take features down from 14 nm to an untenable 0.7 nm. However, if you have a better estimate, I'd be glad to hear it.

Note that 21 halvings doesn't take you from 14nm to 0.7nm, but rather to about 7 femtometers, or about 0.000007nm. For comparison, that's roughly 10x the size of a single proton.

I'd say a better estimate would be to assume density stops increasing around the point when feature size is the size of a silicon atom. I'm sure that'll be way off, but closer than estimating 21 more doublings.

Yes. Economically, my bank account gets larger every year. Ergo, I must be saving up all my birthday cash

I don't have an estimate. My point was simply to explain to you why your logic was flawed as we are nearing the limits of what Moore's Law can give us without some pretty massive changes. This isn't a case of "Clock speeds are capped. We are doomed. Oh, wait, we can just put two slower ones on the same die" and is more "So... we are out of physical space..."

Trends are great when you are trying to make sense of data and estimate how to move forward. But they should not be used in a manner that ignores actual data.

> So while it is possible we'll have a technology shift and see similar performance gain

What kind of technology shift do you mean? Like a totally different computing paradigm?

There is some work regarding making transistors out of different materials as a way to eke a bit more out. Similarly, there is a lot of work regarding layering circuitry to an even greater degree. And, of course, there is the usual pie in the sky solutions.

But none seem all that promising and my gut is that we'll focus more on interconnects and algorithmic improvements.

But time will tell.

Computing using coupled magnetic spin. Or photonics. Or nanomechanical rod logic. Or nano-electro-mechanical logic. Or ballistic electrons. Or single electrons in nano-structures similar to what a cell uses in the Krebbs cycle.

It also ignores that we're likely entering a period of anti-rational and anti-science thought, technology may have a few pull-backs before continuing its rise.

I think this is a relatively mild period of anti-science. Religion is largely on the decline. Fake news is being called out as "fake". College educations are valued even by those without them in general, and the job market certainly values them.

I think it seem like there is a much larger anti-science sentiment then there is because these people have been given a fresh voice with social media and for the first time in a long time they can connect with each other and build echo chambers to shout at eachother in.

Some of this spilled out in the last election and provided a non-trivial number of votes for a candidate who was clearly a demogogue, instead of voting for a different demogogue who appealed less to the uneducated.

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