Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: So who the hell is still supporting BU?
by
jbreher
on 26/02/2017, 01:11:04 UTC
Moore's Law is no longer tenable, as microchip manufacturing has (ironically) hit it's the technological limits.

aww..... that's just precious.


Indeed... After decades of educated people making the same hurried conclusions that the human race has at various intervals and industries hit its technological limits only to be proven premature not much later in the future, we'll continue to have people we can rely on to make the same (misguided) conclusions.

I always find that precious=)

what you 2 lithographic etching engineers are failing to appreciate is that while Moore's law could be continued with a different paradigm, that paradigm does not exist yet. Until it does, Moore's law as described stopped working last year, it took ~24 months to get 14nm transistors, and will take longer than that to reach 10nm.

5nm transistors have been demonstrated in the lab fifteen years ago. 7nm fab pilot production has been achieved two years ago. Volume production this year. By at least three independent fab companies with different processes. And as pointed out earlier, yesterday's planar processes are giving way to the third dimension - which opens vast new frontiers for scaling. Chips built with 64 layers of cells (far more layers of lithography) are shipping -- in volume -- for regularly-ordered device technologies. Which will lead to a quantum leap in scaling, before settling back down to something approximating Moore's 'law'.

Incidentally, while I am not a lithographic engineer, my day gig has me exchanging research info with lithographic engineers as a regularly occurring interlock activity. You?

That's all very fascinating. But where's the part that illustrates Moore's Law is still in effect?

Oh yes, that's right, every step since the 14nm process has been taking LONGER than the 18 months of R&D time Gordon Moore predicted, so you've proven precisely nothing

Your statement was that "microchip manufacturing has (ironically) hit it's the technological limits". Which, of course, I have demonstrated to be objectively false.

Of course, Moore's 'law' is not what you claim it to be. If anyone would be able to define 'Moore's law', one would expect that logically to be Gordon Moore himself. The quote attributed to him, that serves as his vision of any sort of 'Moore's law' is "The number of transistors and resistors on a chip doubles every 24 months". Which remains pretty well on-track.

But in the context of Bitcoin, such is largely irrelevant. The only question that matters in this space is 'Is semiconductor technology improving at a rate that exceeds the expected rate of increase of Bitcoin usage, would Bitcoin have an unrestricted maxblocksize?' The answer to which would be an unqualified 'Indubitably'.