Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

Every once in a while I see an article that seems to claim that Moore's Law is over, or slowing down, or about to be over. Then I see some counter-claim, that no, if you account for added cores, or GPUs, or some other third thing, that actually it's still right on track. This cycle has repeated every year for like the past 10 years, but the last few years feel like things have really started to slow down. Maybe that was partially illusory with the chip slowdown from the pandemic, but I figure now that we're several years out we should be able to say for sure.

It also seems like a pretty important question to answer because it has big implications for the advancement of AI technology which has everyone so freaked out.

So what's the consensus around here? Is Moore's Law actually over yet, or not?

General purpose CPUs can only get so good. With that said, there are still many advancements that can be made to shrink die sizes and/or shove more transistors more closely together (3D is hard due to heat… but…).

I’m excited about photon-based processors, but until that’s a reality we still have a ton of headway for application-specific scaling.

If you rip specific loops out of a general purpose CPU, there are still plenty of gains to be made!

In its original form as in "transistors double every two years" it certainly already seems over. Apple silicon is at 5mn today, and Intel claims they'll conquer 3mn by 2030, so even these facts and theoretical statements already don't fit anymore.

We'll probably have a couple more innovations and might get to making a transistor out of a single atom (silicon atom is 0.262nm; carbon atom is 0.3).

5nm / (2*2*2*2) =~ 0.3

So I don't think we're done making faster hardware just yet, but we're certainly getting to the boundaries of what appears to be physically possible.

Dead, but we're heading into new a new paradigm of hardware accelerators (encoders, decoders, AI-optimized chips, multi-die GPUs, ...) and new packaging systems (M1 SoC's, GPU Chiplets, ...), all powered by what was previously the big bottleneck, interconnection within these components (AMD's Infinity Fabric, Apple's UltraFusion, ...)

Transistor is scaling, for now. SRAM is not! TSMC N3E SRAM density is equal to N5 SRAM density. This is something of an inflection point.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/no-sram-scaling-implies-on...