On his blog, Charles Stross explores the long-term implications of Moore’s Law (the doubling of computer circuits every two years) and Koomey’s Law (the energy efficiency of computers doubles every eighteen months):
A couple of basic physical rules underly the dizzying progress in electronics that we have seen over the past fifty years. Moore’s Law, attributed to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, postulates that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit of constant size doubles approximately every two years. Originally coined in 1965, Moore’s law has run more or less constantly ever since. It can’t continue indefinitely, if only because we’re getting close to the atomic scale; a silicon atom has a Van der Waals radius of around 200 picometres, and to build circuits that mediate electron transport we need discrete atomic-scale structures. It is not obvious that we can build electronics (or other molecular structures) with a resolution below one nanometre. So it’s possible that Moore’s law will expire within another decade.
Having said that, predictions of the imminent demise of Moore’s Law within a decade go back to the 1970s. And if we can’t increase the two-dimensional structure count on an integrated circuit, we may still be able to increase the number of structures by building vertically.
A newer, and more interesting formulation than mere circuit count is Koomey’s Law, proposed by Jonathan Koomey at Stanford University: that the energy efficiency of computers doubles every 18 months.
This efficiency improvement has held true for a long time; today’s high-end microprocessors require far less power per instruction than those of a decade ago, much less two or three decades ago. A regular ARM-powered smartphone, such as an iPhone 4S, is some 12-13 orders of magnitude more powerful as a computing device than a late 1970s-vintage Cray 1 supercomputer, but consumes milliwatts of power for computing (rather than radio) operations, rather than the 115 kilowatts of the Cray.
Taking them together, what do these two laws imply about the not-too-distant future?
