I remember when Moore’s law was going strong. Every year or so computers got cheaper and cheaper. Good times.
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Weeeeeeell it does and it doesn't. The trend in chip design this days is to fabricate in three dimensions, which is more complex and expensive but does allow to pack more computing power onto a single chip. The old standard MOSFET transistor architecture hit the wall way back in like 2012, but chips are still getting smaller, just maybe not at the same rate
Yeah, physical issues on micro devices is a hard cap. I read someone believing we'll make things bigger, not by a lot, but to allot more space to reach greater speeds. So don't expect the old Pentium 1/2 big chip designs but more just being 25% increase in size of the chip. This might not have an effect on circuit boards but don't be surprised to see them getting a bit larger to compensate as well.
Needless to say, I believe we'll reach a point of that in my lifetime.
That definitely possible. There is still a lot of ongoing research into new transistor architectures and nanolithography techniques tho, so I wouldn't count out the possibility of moore's law continuing for a couple more decades. It's honestly astonishing how good at this stuff the tech industry really is, it's beyond anything that sci-fi could imagine.
(Moore's law also never was a law)
Lucky it's not an actual law of physics, just a business phrase.
just a business phrase.
Much more than a phrase. A hypothesis at least, maybe a theory. It could be observed, measured, and it was true for many years.
My slow watch is correct for a while sometimes too
I suspect it may be something midway between those things. The shape of the curve is the same as the shape of the curve of growth of most biological systems. There are physical laws that make Moore's Law a reasonable short-term hypothesis.
Eventually to maintain the law we would have to make the item bigger so it can contain more transistors. Which defeats the spirit of the law which is miniaturisation.
biological systems also become bottlenecked. Unbounded growth does not exist in reality. The actual curve is the sigmoid. We've just only been seeing the first half of the curve.
Do you think we're somewhere on the second part of the curve then?
Reading Moore's paper (which is the reference of the marketing person who coined the term), Moore's law isn't just miniaturisation, it was also an observation that's the economics would improve. ie that building N transistors is cheaper on the next smaller node than the previous.
And without the economics working, the shrinking would never have occurred at the rate it did for so long.
So yes, it getting bigger would be against the spirit of the law.
Since March 24 2023. That's when he passed away so he can't come kick our ass if we're not following his law.
You can only get smaller for so long until you run up against the limits of physics
I think she said that. But also this is 2026 so that's what she or he said.
iirc we hit the end of Moore's Law a couple of times already in my career.
Well the problem has no solution. You can do some fine tuning but we’ve been at the limit of solid state technology for a while.
The curve can continue if you use "money spent" instead of "time spent" as the horizontal axis.
Yeah I've been seeing Moore's law as a function of tech advancement basically, like its not s doubling of cpu specifically, it's a doubling of tech change rate
There should be a campaign to rename it to "Moore's Suggestion" or "Moore's Guideline"
It was more like Moore's Observation.
May I suggest: "Moore is less law"
Appreciate you not using fedopedia.
It physically can't, from what I can tell.