After a 50 years, Moore’s law—which states that computer power doubles every two years at the same cost—is running out of steam. So what might replace it?
In 1965, Gordon E. Moore, the founder of Intel, noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year since their inception in 1958 and predicted that this annual doubling would continue for at least another ten years. Since that time, the power of computers has doubled every two years, yielding computers which are millions of time more powerful than their ancestors of a half century ago. The result is the digital revolution that we see around us, including the Internet, iPhones, social networks, and spam.
To keep making computers better and better, researchers are contemplating new technologies, including circuits modeled on the human brain, carbon nanotube computers, and processors that make do with approximate rather than exact answers. At SXSW 2017, held in March in Austin, Tx., IEEE Spectrum moderated a panel discussion with leaders in this space: Tom Conte of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Tsu-Jae King Liu of the University of California at Berkeley, and Greg Yeric of ARM Research. This short video featuring parts of the event as well as conversations afterward with the panelists.