THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING MOORE OR LESS

IT’S H AD A V ERY GOOD RUN, BUT MOORE’S LAW IS DONE, DUSTED, AND DEAD. JEREMY LAIRD INVESTIGATES THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING IN THE POST- EXPONENTIAL ERA.

Fifty years is a long time for any prediction to hold true. It’s an aeon when it comes to predicting the future of cutting-edge technology. But it’s pretty much how long Moore’s Law has held together as a predictor of progress in computing power. But now just about everybody agrees that Moore’s Law is done. Computer chips are no longer doubling in complexity every two years. Intel’s most recent roadmap update, to take just one example, pushed volume shipments of its next-gen 10nm processors out to 2019. That’s almost five years after Intel began pumping out 14nm chips in significant volumes. Likewise, Intel’s 14nm node came three years after 22nm. Welcome to the post Moore’s Law era, where faster computing for less money is no longer an automatic assumption. That’s a radical change that could threaten progress well beyond conventional computing. Advances in everything from AI and self-driving cars to medicine, biotechnology, and engineering are all predicated, at least in part, on the assumption that available computing power increases not only reliably but exponentially. It’s the latter implication that has been most revolutionary. The exponential increase in computing power for nearly 50 years was unlike anything the world had seen before. And it begs the question of whether we’ll ever see anything like it again. The simple answer is almost certainly no. The regular cadence of Moore’s Law as it pertains to integrated circuit engineering is over, and there’s no obvious candidate to replace it. The good news, however, is that there is no shortage of candidate technologies that could provide anything from incremental improvements to revolutions so radical they could render the very notion of increasing compute power redundant. The future of computing will no longer be a model of serene progress; it will very likely be measured in paralysing fits and dramatic starts.