http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/07/was_moores_law.php
It is quite a long article, but worth the time to read, I think. It does not have an abstract, but here is a partial summary from near the end: "The first thing to notice is that all these examples demonstrate the effects of scaling down, or working with the small. In this microcosmic realm energy is not very important. We don't see exponential improvement in efforts to scale up, to keep getting bigger, skyscrapers and space stations. Airplanes aren't getting bigger, flying faster, and more fuel efficient at an exponential rate. Gordon Moore jokes that if the technology of air travel experienced the same kind of progress as Intel chips, a modern day commercial aircraft would cost $500, circle the earth in 20 minutes, and only use five gallons of fuel for the trip. However, the plane would only be the size of a shoebox! We don't see a Moore's Law-type of progress at work while scaling up because energy needs scale up just as fast, and energy is a major limited constraint, unlike information. So our entire new economy is built around technologies that scale down well -- photons, electrons, bits, pixels, frequencies, and genes. As these inventions miniaturize, they reach closer to bare atoms, raw bits, and the essence of matter and information. And so the fixed and inevitable path of their progress derives from this elemental essence. The second thing to notice about this set of examples is the narrow range of slopes, or doubling time (in months). The particular power being optimized in these technologies is doubling between 8 and 30 months. Everyone of them is getting twice as better every year or two no matter the technology. What's up with that? Engineer Mark Kryder's explanation is that this "twice as better every two years" is an artifact of corporate structure where most of these inventions happen. It just takes 1-2 years of calendar time to conceive, design, prototype, test, manufacture and market a new improvement, and while a 5- or 10-fold increase is very difficult to achieve, almost any engineer can deliver a factor of two. Voila! Twice as better every two years. Engineers unleashed equals Moore's Law. But, as mentioned earlier, we see engineers unleashed in other departments of the technium without the appearance of exponential growth. And in fact not every aspect of semiconductor extrapolation resolves into a handy "law." Moore recalls that in a 1975 speech he forecasted the expected growth of other attributes of silicon chips "just to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to extrapolate exponentials." Extrapolating the maximum size of the wafer of silicon used to grow the chips (which was increasing as fast of the number of components) he calculated would yield a nearly 2-meter (6-foot) diameter crystal by 2000, which just seemed unlikely. That did not happen; they reached 300 mm (1 foot)." _______________________________________________ http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
