Moore's Law could enter the fourth dimension--via the third

Zvi Or-Bach, NuPGA Corp.
EETimes (12/23/2010 12:43 AM EST)

I was intrigued by Marvell CEO Sehat Sutardja's call in EE Times to "change and rethink Moore's Law to include the long-ignored fourth dimension" of power consumption efficiency. "What we need now is a new social contract," Sutardja wrote.

Calling Moore's Law a social contract is one way to look at it. Others see it as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or at least it has been so for the past 45 years. Ray Kurzweil claims it is a part of the Law of Accelerating Returns, whereby computing devices have been consistently multiplying their computational power at least since 1890 and possibly for centuries before that. I take Kurzweil's optimistic view; my rationale is that better computing power created in one generation enables us to develop a better computer with the next generation, thereby creating a positive feedback loop for an exponential growth of computing and related domains.

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