Alan Patterson, EETimes
6/1/2017 12:01 PM EDT
TAIPEI — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has become the first head of a major semiconductor company to say what academics have been suggesting for some time: Moore’s Law is dead.
Moore’s Law, named after Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, reflects his observation in 1965 that transistors were shrinking so fast that every year twice as many could fit onto the same surface of a semiconductor. In 1975, the pace shifted to a doubling every two years.
The enablers of an architectural advance every generation — increasing the size of pipelines, using superscalar tweaks and speculative execution — are among the techniques that are now lagging in the effort to keep pace with the expected 50 percent increase in transistor density each year, Huang told a gathering of reporters and analysts at the Computex show in Taipei.