Reaching "the end of Moore's Law" is a super big deal, and I still don't understand why people aren't worried about it more in general.
It will cause a crash in the entire tech industry, which will throw the global economy into a depression.
It will cause a crash in the entire tech industry, which will throw the global economy into a depression.
We’ve gotten a bit of a reprieve because things like GPUs turn out to be good architectures for many compute intensive workloads.
Do you mean that future requirements will outstrip capacity? I don’t think this has been true for some time, we run a lot more systems and tend to scale horizontally; doubling compute power every n period isn’t a hard requirement imo.
For example Tesla is betting on conventional cameras and tries to overcome their shortcomings with computationally intensive machine vision. Tesla's custom chips allows them to have more processing power which means they can install more high resolution cameras and other sensors.
It was always going to end at some point, because we're down to just above 100 atoms gate thickness. What we're seeing is not an "end" but a soft landing that really started some years ago with massively multicore processors. The industry has started adapting to horizontal scaling rather than "free" process improvements. There is still an awful lot of low hanging fruit on the software side for performance improvements, but that's harder because it involves removing or adapting abstraction layers.
Why?
Well, what happens when next year's smartphone really isn't any better or cheaper than last year's smartphone? Sure, there will always be some business because people drop their phones all the time, but sales won't be as high without upgrades driving it.
Lots of people (investors) will be unhappy with the tech sector at that point.
I also dispute the scope you assign to this "upgrade" cycle. It's a huge overstatement to claim that the whole tech sector would "collapse". The tech sector is far larger than phones and personal computers.
Slightly cheaper, maybe, as the fab equipment depreciates.
> I also dispute the scope you assign to this "upgrade" cycle. It's a huge overstatement to claim that the whole tech sector would "collapse". The tech sector is far larger than phones and personal computers.
It used to be that new hardware would drive new software sales, and vice versa. You'd buy a new PC, because Windows XP ran too slow on your old one. And a couple years later, some awesome game comes out, and you'd need to buy a new PC to play it.
Expansion, not replacement (of broken systems) is what drove the PC segment. It was the foundation of the growth that affected everything that used or could benefit from PCs. And we've seen that with the mobile segment.
And we may yet see that with the VR/AR segment, but that's going to be a tough hill to climb if we can't count on continuing IC improvements.
Sure, but the same equipment would also be cheaper to replace than the capital required for the next generation fab, for the same reasons.
> Expansion, not replacement (of broken systems) is what drove the PC segment. It was the foundation of the growth that affected everything that used or could benefit from PCs. And we've seen that with the mobile segment.
Expansion into new sectors, not expansion into the same sectors. The same will still happen. Solutions will become more customized rather than remain general purpose. There remain considerable gains in parallel computation for instance (GPU), and ASICs will become the new hotness (again).
Furthermore, if clients cease to expand, then more computation will happen on server infrastructure. Your fat clients will become more thin clients again, repeating the same cycle that has happened multiple times so far.
You're also neglecting the investment in infrastructure (data centers, networks) that will continue to grow, if not accelerate. Current hardware is more than sufficient for most of this.
Between GPUs, more power efficient designs (due to heavy mainstream interest in mobile technology), more work put into algorithmic efficiency, and promising early developments in quantum computing, it appears the focus has shifted away from relying on more transistors per square inch for ensuring the industry's future growth.