Depending on how you express it, Moore’s law has held up remarkably well over the past 40 years. In particular, chipmakers have been able to double the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a chip every two years. This explains why the mobile phone in your pocket is more powerful than the most advanced “supercomputers” of the early 1970s.
Round about 2004 however, one aspect of this exponential growth hit the buffers – it became very difficult to remove the vast amount of heat produced by all these tightly packed circuits. The result being that it is not possible to use all circuits to their full potential. This problem has the ominous moniker of “dark silicon”.
Looking into the not-so-distant future, another problem is expected to crop up when the size of insulating structures in circuits drops below about 4 nm. At this point, electron tunnelling between circuits is expected to put an end to Moore’s law.
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