AI And Moore's Law: It's The Chips, Stupid
I, Cringely, Thursday, June 15,2023
Moore's Law, which began with a random observation by the late Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that transistor densities on silicon substrates were doubling every 18 months, has over the intervening 60+ years been both borne-out yet also changed from a lithography technical feature to an economic law.
It's getting harder to etch ever-thinner lines, so we've taken as a culture to emphasizing the cost part of Moore's Law (chips drop in price by 50 percent on an area basis (dollars per acre of silicon) every 18 months). We can accomplish this economic effect through a variety of techniques including multiple cores, System-On-Chip design, and unified memory - anything to keep prices going-down.
I predict that Generative Artificial Intelligence is going to go a long way toward keeping Moore's Law in force and the way this is going to happen says a lot about the chip business, global economics, and Artificial Intelligence, itself.