A few years ago, an ex-Intel buffin held a talk on chipmaking at the end of Moore's law. He predicted it would come at 2016-2020 and around 10nm.
That's really it then. We'll get another node at 7nm (eventually) but after that? Slow, incremental improvement.
Few people understand how big of a deal this is, but think about this. All of us grew up in a world where the power and speed of computers and electronics would double roughly every two years.
This exponential growth was a virtual certainty and it fed the biggest prosperity engine in human history. There isn't many fields and businesses that didn't in some way benefit from it.
And that's almost over. There's a few years left where it almost seems like nothing has changed, but it has.
Some of us have children. Those children won't live in a world with electronics doubling in speed and capability every few years.
The next generation of video games for them will look pretty much like the last one, unless you'll know where to look.
For them, it'll be nothing but slow, incremental improvement year after year: A 2% improvement here. A 1% improvement there. The way it was before the transistor.
The scariest thing is, what will happen to the economy. Trillions of dollars and billions of man hours have been spent in the shadow of Moore's law the past decades. What will happen, once there isn't a reason to get a new TV every 4 years? If computers only get a few percent faster every year, will computers become a thing you buy once a decade?
-- V900
[my emphasis]
The other half of the problem is that ole amortization boogie man. The article does recognize that bit of horror:
Development of leading-edge process technologies is extremely expensive. Every new node requires billions of dollars in investments. Those costs are eventually amortized over each chip the company makes, so to keep increasing R&D costs from driving up chip prices, foundries need to produce more chips.
And, naturally, chip makers need customers who make things with the chips that raw civilians buy with their incomes. More concentration of incomes to the 1% leaves an ever diminishing pile for the rest to buy things with said cheeps. The frog is beginning to feel the boil.
[update]
Just got back from my FNYT and coffee to find this new comment:
"Some of us have children. Those children won’t live in a world with electronics doubling in speed and capability every few years."
Oh....the.....horror.....
-- Manch
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