One of the most famous representations of the technology industry is Moore's Law. It is an observation that the number of transistors in a chip has roughly doubled every 2 years.
Computing
As transistors in integrated circuits become more efficient, computers become smaller and faster. Chips and transistors are microscopic structures that contain carbon and silicon molecules, which are aligned perfectly to move electricity along the circuit faster. The faster a microchip processes electrical signals, the more efficient a computer becomes. The cost of higher-powered computers has been dropping annually, partly because of lower labour costs and reduced semiconductor prices.
Electronics
Practically every facet of a high-tech society benefits from Moore's Law in action. Mobile devices, such as smartphones and computer tablets would not work without tiny processors; neither would video games, spreadsheets, accurate weather forecasts, and global positioning systems (GPS).
All Sectors Benefit
Moreover, smaller and faster computers improve transportation, health care, education, and energy production—to name but a few of the industries that have progressed because of the increased power of computer chips.
It has been accurate for the past 40 years, but we are at its end and scaling isn't happening like it used to. What this means is that computers are projected to reach their limits because transistors will be unable to operate within smaller circuits at increasingly higher temperatures. This is because cooling the transistors will require more energy than the energy that passes through the transistor itself.
If we can't add more transistors to chips, one thought is that we could just make them bigger. The limitation here is getting enough power to the chip and then removing the heat it generates. Modern chips draw hundreds of Amps of current and generate hundreds of Watts of heat.
Today's cooling and power delivery systems are struggling to keep up and are close to the limit of what can be powered and cooled. That's why we can't simply make a bigger chip.
If we can't make a bigger chip, couldn't we just make the transistors on the chip smaller to add more performance? That concept has been valid for the past several decades, but we are approaching a fundamental limit of how small transistors can get.
With new 7nm and future 3nm processes, quantum effects start to become a huge issue and transistors stop behaving properly. There's still a little more room to shrink, but without serious innovation, we won't be able to go much smaller. So if we can't make chips much bigger and we can't make transistors much smaller, can't we just make those existing transistors run faster? This is yet another area that has given benefits in the past but isn't likely to continue.
While processor speed increased every generation for years, it has been stuck in the 3-5GHz range for the past decade. This is due to a combination of several things. It would increase power usage, but the main issue again has to do with the limitations of smaller transistors and the laws of physics.
As we make transistors smaller, we also have to make the wires that connect them smaller, which increases their resistance. We have traditionally been able to make transistors go faster by bringing their internal components closer together, but some are already separated by just an atom or two. There's no easy way to do any better.
Putting all of these reasons together, it's clear that we won't be seeing the kind of generational performance upgrades from the past, but rest assured there are lots of smart people working on these issues.
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