The decline of Moore’s law may have doomed the economy but it may lead to better video games.
Gordon Moore looked into his proverbial crystal ball one day in 1965 and authored one of the 20th century’s most defining principles. Observing the pace of innovation in computing for the magazine Electronics, he predicted that the number of transistors on a circuit would double each year from the present until 1975.
What he didn’t know at the time was that Moore’s law would continue to hold true for a bit longer than that. In the intervening decades, that pace of growth of the number of transistors per circuit continued to remain steady, utterly transforming the modern world in the process. This technological revolution has been responsible for about a third of all productivity-based growth in the United States since 1974, according to MIT Technology Review (opens in new tab). Moore supposed that it might lead to wonders like computers in our own homes, and here we are in 2022 trading NFTs on our smartphones. Dream bigger, Gordon. Jeez.
But nothing lasts forever. Not The Undertaker’s Wrestlemania streak, not your friend’s conversation about their holiday, and, most pertinently, not Moore’s law. There wasn’t a particular moment when the graph suddenly flatlined after decades of upwards diagonal trajectory. Instead, it’s been a slow tapering off, an increasing struggle to achieve the next microscopic manufacturing process.
Intel’s 10nm manufacturing process was severely delayed, arriving in 2019 with poor die yields and leading to a four-year generational gap between it and Intel’s previous 14nm chips. The company’s designers agree that their rate of progress is no longer consistent with Moore’s law. Nvidia has recently said the same.
What’s more, it’s taking exponentially more effort to reach the next rung on the ladder. The amount of research and development required to bring about smaller, denser microchips has risen by a factor of 18 since 1971, say economists at Stanford and MIT.
Most computing experts are in agreement by now: Moore’s law is dead. And while that spells trouble for a western world that’s been largely driven by that innovation, with entire economies propped up on it, where we are now is a safe space. We’re only here to talk about games.
