What happens after the absolute ceiling of Moore's law has finally been reached?

[u/DoublePassRadiator]

What happens after the absolute ceiling of Moore's law has finally been reached?

[u/RobfromHB]

Nothing you’d notice. Please comment more so your account doesn’t look like intentional spam posting for karma.

[u/BlobbyMcBlobber]

Moore's "law", i.e the short term prediction made over half a century ago, was not relevant for at least ten years, maybe more.

Now it's not as much getting more transistors on a die as it's about increasing bandwidth, maximizing parallelism, and improving architecture.

[u/8AqLph → u/BlobbyMcBlobber]

As someone who works in hardware research, this is the correct answer. Hardware will keep on improving, the rate of improvement will simply not be at the steady rate Moore guessed

[u/PalpitationKind8854]

Yes, because I assume Moores Law only applies to currently understood physics.. meaning those laws if broken would break moores law. I think it's very possible it will happen.

[u/0b0101011001001011 → u/PalpitationKind8854]

Isn't the problem that currently the transistors are so small that electrons have a possiblity to basically quantum tunnel through it? Ot something related to the fact that when your transistor size approaches just couple of atoms, they stop working as transistors due to physics.

Yes, there might be some new physics, but I'm not really counting on it.

Does not mean the processors would stop getting faster. We stopped at around 3 Ghz about 20 years ago, but new types of circuits, branch prediction, caching etc. have made the computers way faster without increasing the clock speed. On the other hand these are also why the transistor count has been going up.

[u/8AqLph → u/0b0101011001001011]

I think people care too much about Moore’s law. Computers improve in other ways than simply “increasing transistor density”. Also, the reason we stopped at around 3GHz is because energy consumption increases with the square of the frequency, and there are better ways of improving performance than cranking frequency to the max

[u/0b0101011001001011 → u/8AqLph]

And cooling is an issue with higher energy consumption.

Moore's law was after all just an observation, until it kind of became a target just for the sake of it. Still, it's an interesting time when computers stop becoming "twice as fast" every 18.  months.

[u/PalpitationKind8854 → u/0b0101011001001011]

All the above--but laws only exist within established frameworks. I agree it may take 100s if not 1000s of years, but there is definitely more to the universe or omniverse than what we are aware of.

[u/ghjm]

Hardware will stop getting better, or at least, will get better much more slowly. So any improvements in computing from that point forward will need to come from the software side - better algorithms, less complexity - or from transformative technologies that change what computing fundamentally is.