E
The Expected World
expired
0000
Written
2001
Addressed to
2019
Category
Technology

“After sixty years of devoted service, Moore's Law will die a dignified death no later than the year 2019. By that time, transistor features will be just a few atoms in width, and the strategy of ever finer photolithography will have run its course.”

Ray Kurzweil

The Law of Accelerating Returns

Annotation

Kurzweil was roughly right that traditional scaling would hit physical limits around this period — Dennard scaling broke down in 2006, ending the era of automatic clock-speed increases — but Moore's Law in the strict transistor-density sense proved more stubborn than expected. TSMC shipped 5nm chips in 2020 and 3nm in 2022, and Apple's M2 Ultra packed 134 billion transistors onto a single die. The 'dignified death' turned out to be a long, inventive hospice of FinFETs, gate-all-around architectures, and chiplet packaging.

What Actually Happened

Moore's Law did not die by 2019. Dennard scaling broke down in 2006, ending automatic clock-speed increases, but transistor density continued advancing through FinFETs, extreme ultraviolet lithography, and gate-all-around architectures. TSMC shipped 5nm chips in 2020 and 3nm in 2022. Apple's M2 Ultra packed 134 billion transistors onto a single die. The semiconductor industry kept finding engineering workarounds that extended density scaling well past Kurzweil's deadline.

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