Will End of Moore's Law Impair ISP Ability to Rapidly Grow Bandwidth?

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku believes Moore's Law has about 10 years of life left before ever-shrinking transistor sizes smack up against limitations imposed by the laws of thermodynamics and quantum physics.

Signs of the coming end are already here, according to AMD. AMD Chief Product Architect John Gustafson believes AMD’s difficulties in transitioning from 28-nanometer chips to 20-nanometer silicon shows we’ve reached the beginning of the end.

"You can see how Moore's Law is slowing down," Gustafson said. "We've been waiting for that transition from 28nm to 20nm to happen and it's taking longer than Moore's Law would have predicted.”

The coming limits mean processing power will not double every 18 months, Broadcom believes.

Some say we will postpone hitting the wall by tweaking architecture. Others think a non-silicon approach might shift us to a new curve.

Maybe it will be proteins or other molecules or something else that provides the physical basis for a new wave of computing advances.

Some think chip manufacturing economics will be a bigger problem. At some point, it might not make financial sense to produce a faster processor or denser memory, because buyers will not pay what that latest group of devices would cost, at retail.

Whether an end to Moore’s Law will have dire consequences for access and transport providers is not clear. Much of the cost of communications infrastructure comes from construction, not the cost of processing and storage.