Intel Puts the Brakes on Moore’s Law

Intel – Slowing of Moore Law

A slowing of Moore’s Law which is a technological phenomenon that tends to play a role in mostmain advance in engineering and technology for years, has been signalled by chip maker Intel. Since 1970s, Intel had released chips which fit twice as many transistors in the similar space every two years with a goal of following an exponential curve called after Gordon Moor, one of the cofounders of the company.

Computer have become more powerful, compact and energy-efficient, due to continual shrinking and has helped in bringing about the smartphone, powerful Internet services together with breakthrough in fields like artificial intelligence and genetics. Moreover, Moore’s Law has become shorthand for notion that anything related to computing tends to get more accomplished over a period of time.

However, Intel had revealed in a regulatory filing last month that it intends slowing the pace where it launches new chip making technology. The breach between successive generations of chips with new, smaller transistor would widen and with the transistors in the latest chips of Intel, already as small as 14 nanometers, it is being more difficult to shrink them further in a way which would be cost effective for production.

Additional Performance Upgrades

The strategy of Intel to shift is not a surprise and it has already pushed back the debut of its first chips with 10 nanometer transistors from the end of this year to somewhere in 2017. However it is observed that the company has presently acknowledged that it was not a one-off and it cannot keep up the pace it used to keep.

This would mean Moore’s Law would be slowing down also. It does not mean that the devices would stop improving or ideas like driverless car would be stalled due to lack of processing power. Intel informs that it would deliver additional performance upgrades between generations of transistor technology with enhancement to the designing of the chips.

The Intel chips are basically immaterial to mobile devices, a market controlled by competitors who are usually behind in years with regards to terms of shrinking transistors and accepting new manufacturing technologies.

Intel – Switch Away From Silicon Transistors

It is also debatable that for several important new use incidents for computing like wearable devices or medical implants, chips have already been adequately powerful and consumption of power has become more important. However, raw computing power is still important and putting more of it behind machine learning procedure has been vital to the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, for instance and Intel will probably deliver more bad news regarding the future of chips and Moore’s Law very soon.

The chief of manufacturing of the company, had mentioned in February that Intel desires to switch away from silicon transistors in around four years and stated before admitting that Intel does not have a successor lined up yet, that `the new technology would be basically different’.

 There have been two leading candidates, technologies known as spintronics and tunnelling transistors, though they may not provide large upsurges in computing powers. Both are far from being ready for use in making processors in huge volumes.