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Comment by apienx | Hacker News Reader

The industry's currently shipping chips based on the 3nm process. I understand that it's mostly a marketing term (i.e. non-standardized), but I assume the actual transistor channel is within that order of magnitude.

Knowing that a silicon atom is larger than 0.1 nm, how can we possibly keep Moore's Law on track? It feels like we're close to hitting fundamental limits.

Any insights would be much appreciated. Thanks!

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We are ridiculously far from physical limits in our current artificial computers (both theoretical [1], and practical [2]). For more technical details see Jim Keller: [3] [4] [5].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limits_of_computation

[2] The ~12 watts computer inside each living human adult skull (and perhaps each eukaryote cell [6]) is still the state-of-the-art, for quite some time.

[3] 2021, Jim Keller: The Secret to Moore's Law, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x17jIKQf9hE

[4] 2019, Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc

[5] 2023, Change w/ Jim Keller, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzgyksS5pX8

[6] Our computers aren't yet able of polycomputation, where the computation topology, data, and functions depend on the observer, instead of computation in a passive implementation, once done forever set in s̶t̶o̶n̶e̶ silicon, 2023, Michael Levin, Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whZRH7IGAq0

Physical limits don't matter much when economic limits (transistor cost) are reached much earlier. What matters is not transistors per chip area (Moore's law) but FLOP/s per chip cost. Also FLOP per chip power draw.

Economic limits are imaginary, secondhand effects of the ideological goggles one's society decides to wear at a certain time for arbitrary reasons. USA during the Manhattan Project knew of no economic limits, i.e. they could arbitrarily push them according to the greater goal; China today, for instance, knows no economic limits. But yes, today, in the "Western" world a speech such as "we choose to get 160 zetaflops (10^21) [1] under your desk in 10 years because it is hard" [2] would be unimaginable, also because you can count on the fingers of an amputated arm how many politicians know what a FLOP is.

[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2023/04/26/a-per...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_choose_to_go_to_the_Moon

There is no use in making chips that are not cost effective.

There is no use in synthesizing (C6H6O·CH2O)n [1] (or LK-99, to be actual, real or not) that is not cost effective.

It's precisely this penny pusher rhetoric which in the end will make China win, deservedly so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite

"Penny pusher rhetoric" is an interesting name for capitalism. Because, for better or worse, that is what's being described. You're not wrong though.

Interestingly enough, penny pushing also destroys capitalism, see The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy [1].

[1] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Man-Who-Broke-Cap...

Sure, we are close to the end of silicon semiconductor improvements. And Moores law could be near its end. In fact the price per transistor has not been dropping recently, so it may be over already.

If there’s hope for the future, it’s that there are many other computing technologies besides traditional silicon that show potential, so maybe the torch will be passed to quantum, or superconductors or dna or something else.

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