Just wait 10 years?
Just wait 10 years?
If you take those out, there is a very clear stagnation on that graphic.
Look at the actual transistor sizes. In 2009 we were at 32 nm. We're now in 2021, so if transistor sizes had kept halving every two years we would be at 0.5 nm. Clearly, we are not anywhere close to that--we're off by a factor of 10, and that's only with the very latest and greatest manufacturing processes that almost no consumer chips use (not to mention that the 5nm process used by AMD is not the same as a 5nm process used by Intel). As the article itself notes:
> Microprocessor architects report that semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide since around 2010, below the pace predicted by Moore's law.
Of course transistor companies are happy to claim that they are secretly keeping pace, but in terms of commercially available microprocessors it is unquestionably false. Anyone using the "doubling every two years" approximation to decide how much more computing power is available now than 10 years ago, or how much more will be available 10 years in the future, is not going to arrive at correct figures.
This can equate to a faster chip because you now can do more at once. However, we hit the frequency limits a while ago for silicon. Particularly, parasitic capacitance is a huge limiting factor. A capacitor will start to act like a short circuit the faster your clock is.
Moore's law has a little more life, although the rate seems to have slowed. However, at the end of the day it can't go one forever you can only make something so small. One gets to a point they have so few atoms to constructing something useful becomes impossible. Like current transistors are finFETs because the third dimension gives them more atoms to reduce leakage current, compared to the relatively planar designs on older process nodes. However, these finFets still take up less area on a die.
Moore's law does help with efficiency to some degree, small transistors generally require less power to switch. However, most the power is last due to the miles of wiring in a modern chip when running at such high clock cycles. Again, it's the parasitic capacitance.