Moore’s Law has ended, but no one noticed

I noticed that the 2014 MacBook Air is barely much faster, according to benchmarks, than the 2012 MacBook Air. What happened? Isn’t Moore’s Law supposed to make computers twice as fast every two years?

Well it turns out that Moore’s Law actually came to an end in 2012. This does not mean that there has been absolutely no progress in microprocessors, but the process has slowed down significantly. There have been bigger improvements in battery life, LCD quality, and solid-sate storage has become less expensive, but raw computing power is not increasing according to Moore’s Law!

The problem is already known in the industry. In the past, improvements in computing power have come from shrinking the transistor size. But now that transistors have shrunk down to 28nm, it’s proving difficult to make [chips with smaller transistors that are as inexpensive per transistor as chips with 28nm transistors. (This has been edited to remove inaccuracies in the original post.)]

Once again, this doesn’t mean that microprocessors will remain frozen in time, but it does mean that they are progressing a lot slower than they did in the past.

This has significant implications for the coming age of robots. Futurists imagined that the robots of the future will be powered by exponentially more powerful computer chips, but if the chips of ten years from now are only twice as powerful as current models, that’s a big difference than them being 32 times as powerful as current models (which is what would happen if computing power doubled every two years).

Maybe we should be happy about the end of Moore’s Law, because this means that computers won’t become super-smart, develop evil self-awareness, and enslave humans. The downside is that this could delay the coming of the singularity (or an upside for people who fear that the singularity would mean the loss of our humanity).

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Also note that clock speeds have been stuck at around 3 GHz for the last decade. Up until the early part of this century, it was an easy speed boost for computers to increase the clock speed. When the clock speed increased from 3 MHz to 3 GHz from the 1980s to the early 200s, that was an easy thousand-fold increase in performance!