Dr. Chris Mack Toasts the End of Moore's Law at SPIE Advanced Lithography 2014

This is where 450mm wafers and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) were supposed to come in. EUV relieves the need for double patterning and the tremendous additional costs that entails (and was used to manufacture this 7nm chip). The CEO of Applied Materials, Gary Dickerson, has stated that the 450mm wafer timeline “has definitely been pushed out from a timing standpoint.” That’s incredibly important, because the economics of 450mm wafers were tied directly to the economics of another struggling technology — EUV. EUV is the follow-up to 193nm lithography that’s used for etching wafers, but it’s a technology that’s spent over a decade mired in technological problems and major ramp-up concerns. Toasting to the death of Moore's Law: [this video]

Chris Mack has been vocal on this. And not only was he probably right about Moore's Law (defined as scaling that decreases the cost per transistor) being dead last year[1] (the cost per transistor curve has been flattening out), but now Intel can't even keep pace with process shrinks at any price the market will bear . That doesn't mean progress will stop , however[2], but rather that progress (and a revised definition of Moore's Law) will be defined by chip redesigns and particularly specialized functionality that doesn't take many gates to implement but makes chips more valuable. [1] [this video] [2] [link]

There's another completely different theory. I'm not saying it's strictly true but it's worth thinking. Moore's law has ended around 2016 or so. As progress is slowing, CPU technology is commoditizing. Successive Intel CPU models aren't much faster than previous ones anymore. So all the manufacturers will just end up in the same place and will only compete on price. We will end up running everything on very efficient cores, massively parallelized. The software frameworks for that will be very different from current ones. This is a polemic version from 2014: Cost of transistors stopped decreasing. [this video]