Moore’s Law, first hypothesised in 1965 by Intel founder Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit will double approximately every two years. The shrinking of transistors enables a larger number to be held within the same area, which results in a faster processor that can operate at lower power requirements.
Although the law was adhered to rigidly for half a century, in 2015 Intel admitted that the pace of advancement had started to slow down. Its eighth-generation Core CPUs, codenamed Coffee Lake, are set to launch in the second half of 2017 and will once again be built on the same 14-nanometre (nm) process used three generations prior for its Broadwell chips, originally released in 2014.
What this means for the future of Moore’s Law is currently undetermined. But while processor manufacturers may be facing some roadblocks ahead, they are far from giving up.
“I do think we are approaching the limits of conventional...