BEYOND MOORE'S LAW

Moore's Law is mostly dead, yet it stumbles ominously forward. Jeremy Laird investigates whether the Lord of Light can revive computing's prospects or are they already zombified?

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MOORE'S LAW is dead. So says no less an authority on the subject than Nvidia CEO and leather jacket aficionado Jensen Huang (pictured below). Actually, Huang has been composing Moore's Law's obituary since at least 2017, when he expressed doubts over its long-term viability at the GPU Technology Conference in Beijing. Then at CES in 2019, Hunag unambiguously decreed "Moore's Law isn't possible anymore." It was last year during a Q&A to promote the then-hot new RTX 4090 GPU that Huang figuratively unloaded the final cap, simply saying "Moore's Law is dead." But here's the thing. If you plot the transistor count of cutting-edge chips right up to the present day, it doesn't seem like there's been any slowdown in technological progress. But surely Huang knows what he is talking about? Actually, Huang isn't wrong. And yet transistor density in the latest chips is still increasing. You only have to glance at that logarithmic graph plotting transistor count progress since the 1970s to see that perfect straight line extends right up to today. So what, exactly, is going on?

LET’S BEGIN with a tale of transistor counts. Specifically, in the 1970s, when transistor counts topped out at about 10,000 in a single chip. By the end of the 1980s, that count had exploded to about one million in the Intel 486 CPU. The late 1990s saw that increase to 50 million in the Pentium 4. The 2000s delivered 2.5 billion in an eight-core Nehalemclass Intel server CPU. And that RTX 4090 that Huang launched in 2022? The AD102 chip it uses packs about 75 billion of the tiny switches. And so the logarithmic increase in transistor density continues to this day.