Moore's Law progress report

Moore's Law predicts exponential growth in the number of transistors on microchips, with a doubling time of roughly 1-2 years. As discussed here, the prediction continunes to hold for transistors but not necessarily for the overall performance of the chip, as clock speeds have lagged of late. There is some hope that through concurrency (multi-threading of processes), the performance gain can be made up, but this will require fundamental changes in software design.

Moore's Law is at the intersection of physics and economics. We haven't yet reached the point of fundamental physical limitations on chip performance, although we may be only a decade or two away (people have been saying that since Moore formulated his law). But perhaps economic factors are beginning to intrude - the rate at which new fabs are brought on line is determined in part by market demand for bleeding edge performance. Only a very small subset of the market runs applications that need a 4GHz chip.