Does Moore’s Law still apply today?
Gordan Moore, Intel Co-founder has unfortunately passed, does his law still hold true today?
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Gordan Moore, Intel co-founder passed away on the 25th of March 2023, aged 94. Gordan Moore famously predicted that transistor counts within an integrated circuit (IC) would double every year, he then revised his prediction to two years. This insight known as “Moore’s Law” became the bedrock for the CPU industry and influenced a PC revolution. But does Moore’s Law still apply today?
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We’re not attacking the man or his life’s work, it just seems like a good time to take a look at Moore’s Law, to see if the legendary prediction holds true, or maybe we’ve surpassed expectations.
Intel co-founder Gordan Moore sadly passes aged 94
It was revealed that on the 25th of March 2023 Gordan Moore, Intel founder, sadly passed away. Gordan Moore was a visionary, whose prediction pushed semiconductor manufacturers to produce increasingly better chips. Without Gordan Moore, the CPU market would probably be a very grim, expensive affair.
What is Moore’s law?
During his tenure as the research and development (R&D) director at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1965, Moore was approached by Electronics Magazine to forecast developments in the semiconductor components industry for the next decade.
In his article published on April 19, 1965, Moore noted that the number of components such as transistors, resistors, diodes, or capacitors, in a compact integrated circuit had approximately doubled every year and predicted that it would continue to do so for the next ten years. Later in 1975, he adjusted the expected rate to approximately every two years.
The phrase “Moore’s law” was popularized by Carver Mead, and it has become a benchmark for miniaturization in the semiconductor industry and has had far-reaching implications in many fields of technological advancement.
Does Moore’s Law still apply today?
This is an interesting question, hopefully, one that does not come across as an attack on the words of a recently deceased man. If we use the Transistor count Wiki page as a baseline to start us off, we can see that Moore’s Law is alive and well, well into the early 200s.
After that, the CPU industry kicked it into high gear and started to exponentially increase the production of CPUs, all following Moore’s Law, or smashing it. From the early 2000s, the average increase in transistors (by our calculation) is around 2.2X. This jump is usually accompanied by a generational change in processor architecture and, or nm process.
However, we can go further. The recent Core i9-13900K has a transistor count of around 25.9 Billion transistors. The core i9-13900K was released in Q4 2022. If we compare this to the Core i9-10900K, which was released in Q3 2020, we can find that this CPU only has a transistor count of around 1.75 Billion. The same CPU from the same family, 2 years apart, yields a transistor increase of over 23 Billion. That’s a 15.2X difference, or if you prefer, a percentage difference of 1423.53%. Much more than Moore’s prediction.
The Core i9-11900K was the next i9 processor to be released, this time on the 7nm process node. the 11900K has a transistor count of 2.95 Billion, so we know that Moore’s Law is on track with its prediction so far from the 11900K. So why is the 13900K so high?
The increase started with the 12900K, as that was constructed on the same 7nm process technology, Intel found proficiency in the dual-core architecture known as LITTLE.big. This allowed the Transister count of the 12900K to reach 12.4 Billion.
Will Moore’s Law change?
Moore’s Law is still relevant, as we can still see doubling happen over 2 years, we just have some jumps that it can’t account for. We know that manufacturers such as TSMC are still developing to follow Moore’s Law, on this account, we should see the 2nm process yield around 35-37 Billion transistors.
Whilst this principle does not only apply to Intel, but it also served as a fitting example, since the creator of said law was Intel’s co-founder.
Final word
Moore’s Law is so legendary it’ll never die. Chip makers will always strive to double their power within 2 years because that’s the way it’s always been done.
As long as there is demand for more powerful and affordable computing devices, Moore’s Law will remain relevant as a guiding principle for the development of new technologies.
Additionally, advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and big data analysis will continue to drive the need for more powerful computing devices, ensuring that Moore’s Law will remain a relevant concept in the years to come.
