4. Laptop? Notebook? Netbook? Tablet? Thanks to Moore\'s Law, computing devices

Question

4. Laptop? Notebook? Netbook? Tablet? Thanks to Moore's Law, computing devices are getting smaller, cheaper, and faster every year, allowing innovative companies to create new devices that are smaller and more powerful than current devices. Just look at desktop, laptop, notebook, and tablet computers. These are all different devices allowing users to connect and compute around the globe. Moore's Law has been accurate about computing power roughly doubling every 18 months. Do you agree or disagree that Moore's Law will continue to apply for the next 20 years? Why or why not?

Explanation / Answer

According to Gordon Moore, the transistor’s number doubles every 18 months onto an IC chip. This Moore’s law was proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel. The processor speed doubled every two years in the initial stages and the rule was widely accepted in the technology companies. Critics argue that Moore’s law has become obsolete as in the past decade from 2000 to 2009, the processor speed changed from 1.3 GHz to 2.8 GHz. This indicates that it has taken about ten years to double the speed of the processor making Moore’s law obsolete. The defenders of Moore’s law, however, state that the number of transistors increased from 37.5 million to 904 million over the past decade. The Moore’s law specifically talks about the transistors number in a chip to improve the processor speed. This indicates that Moore’s law has been in application for nearly 50 years in a successful manner. In this context, it can be said that Moore’s law holds good till 2009 but the real discussion arises about the validity of Moore’s law after 2010.
According to Dave Wilby, the limitation about Moore’s law is that transistors are going to be history in future with atomic particles replacing them in the processors. Hence Moore’s law cannot be applied for the next 20 years. The technology is evolving and new models are emerging. Engineers are working on creating processor components that run on hydrogen atoms giving rise to a new era of chip production. Experts in the industry comment that the chip industry has reached a saturation point and the processor speeds will double slowly. Cloud computing has changed the way of operation with computations occurring in a remote place with large data banks involving many parallel systems. New materials, technologies and configurations replace transistors with periodic table metals from third and fifth columns which are better conductors. Research is at full progress in identifying the next fastest semiconductor material or metal in the periodic table. Quantum computing is another technology innovation of fast processing transforming the mainstream computers to become more efficient and fast.
Based on the above discussions, I disagree with the application of Moore’s law in the next 20 years. I believe that the technological innovations in the future will decide the application of Moore’s law in the future. The law based on transistors may become obsolete but the rule of progress in processor speed will hold good for many years with new and emerging technologies.

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