#119 Moore's Law is not Dead!
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on 2022-01-19 00:00:00 +0000
with Darren W Pulsipher, Jason Dunn-Potter,
In this episode, Darren talks with Jason Dunn-Potter, solution architect for the public sector at Intel, about Moore’s law and how it continues to drive innovations across the public sector.
Keywords
#mooreslaw #spacetechnology #innovation #multicloud #artificialintelligence #moderncomputing #technology #process
Jason has been with Intel for a year, and during that time, he has seen impressive technological advancements. They discuss how technology is constantly changing and improving and that Moore’s Law applies not just to the compute evolution but to the entire technology evolution. They also mention how technological advancements can be seen in everyday items such as car back up and smartphone cameras. Jason believes that Moore’s Law is still in effect and that the improvements will continue even faster in the next few years. Jason surmised that Moore’s law would continue due to critical factors driving innovation: technological advances, competition, and customer demand.
Technological advances
Technological advances have had a significant effect on Moore’s law. However, not all technological advances are straightforward and apply directly to silicon manufacturing techniques or architectures. For example, chemical engineering, material science, and optics advancements are essential in silicon manufacturing. Additionally, advances in HVAC systems and IoT sensors can substantially impact Silicon manufacturing processes. Agile organizations that can leverage technological advancements quickly drive Moore’s law beyond what is possible with today’s perspective.
Competition
As organizations continue to innovate and adopt new technologies, they create healthy competition in the ecosystem, “raising all the boats in the harbor.” Jason provides a great example of the space race in the 1960s compared to the downturn of the space industry in the 1980s and 90s. At the beginning of 1960, The United States still hadn’t effectively launched a rocket into outer space, while the Soviet Union was years ahead of The United states. Within nine years, the competition between the Soviets and the Americans drove technological change substantial enough to put men on the moon for the first time. By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet Union fell, and the competition for the space race disintegrated. Without competition, space technology became stagnant, and the rising costs of the technology limited additional research and innovation in this space. Not until the late 2010s and early 2020s did we see increased competition drive innovation in the space industry again.
The same is true for the microelectronics industry, where the competition stagnated for decades. Innovation continued but at a slower pace. as competition increased in silicon manufacturing best practices, CPU architectures, and compute acceleration technologies, organizations began to compete feverishly, improving performance, decreasing the power, and increasing the density of microelectronics dramatically. Now silicon manufacturers are talking about transistors at the angstrom size, which a decade ago was considered impossible.
Customer Demand
The last critical factor driving Moore’s law is customer demand. When innovation is introduced into the marketplace, consumers quickly find new ways to leverage the technology in new and unusual ways. As these new use cases emerge, organizations quickly innovate to create new technologies to support the new use cases identified by their customers.
Conclusion
Jason concludes the podcast with the prediction that Moore’s law will continue to evolve even as we run out of elements in the periodic table. As technologists, we must keep an open mind and reach beyond the boundaries currently holding us back from breakthrough innovation and technology.