Moore’s Law is Alive and Well
Charts show it may be dying at Intel, but others are picking up the slack.
The chart above scatter plots all of the complete data from the microprocessor section of the “Transistor count” Wikipedia article. This is charted on a logarithmic scale for the vertical access. I added a line from the bottom left dot to the top right dot, for reference. As you can see, transistor density has been increasing at a fairly even exponential rate, even into 2018. The red line on this chart is transistor density, which isn’t really Moore’s Law. From 1971 to 2018 it grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.12%. Instead of growing 2 fold every two years, it’s growing 1.746 fold every two years. (Moore’s Law was coined because of an article written by Gordon Moore about this doubling, but reader Loránd Kedves pointed out that he believes that Doug Engelbart, an amazing inventor, first came up with the original version of Moore’s Law.)
Right now the smallest process node in production is 7 nanometer (nm) from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). But Samsung has announced process nodes all the way down to 3 nm, and just yesterday we learned that TSMC is approved to build the world’s first 3 nm plant, with production of chips to start “in late 2022 or early 2023.” To illustrate TSMC’s dominance, consider that right now I think all 7 nm chips are made by TSMC, many or all 10 nm chips are made by TSMC, and Intel is still stuck around the 14 nm node, and that node has less transistor density than most or all processors from any manufacturer at the 10 and 7 nm nodes.
Moore’s law is not dead. It may be dying at Intel, but TSMC and possibly Samsung are picking up the slack.
Moore’s Law states that transistors on a chip double about every two years. Here’s a chart with the same processors as the chart above but showing total transistor count instead of transistors per square millimeter. This is actually a better representation of how well Moore’s Law is doing. I again added a straight line by going from the bottom left dot to the top right dot on the chart:
The red line on the above chart is indicative of Moore’s Law. It grew from 1971 to 2018 at a CAGR of 40.99%. Instead of growing 2 fold every 2 years, it grew by 1.9878 fold every two years. Incredibly close to the actual prediction in the law.
By the way, this article wouldn’t be complete without giving you a sneak peak about the “crazy” new Cerebras chip. Here’s an article about it, and here’s the chip added to the chart, for reference:
Below is all of the raw data that I created these charts from. It’s sorted by transistor density.
