Discussion on:

Moore's law: About to fail or ticking along nicely?

Good article in general, however I hope I misread that you meant that about the human brain, because if you did, I believe you are dead-wrong. While computers may be faster in what they can do, there's a lot that we can't make them do yet, that our brains can do. Simple example - place a piece of paper half-way over a line of text (cover the bottom half of the line). Our brains easily filter out the 'noise' and we can read the line. Try to get a standard OCR to do that, I've not seen a system that can. It could quite possibly be done if expressly programmed to do it. The amazing thing is, you've probably never done that before, yet your brain was able to cope with the noise. No-one had to expressly program the brain to do that, it learnt it all by itself.

Man has managed to in isolation, mimic certain features of our brains, but no system exists that can fully reach the brain's potential. We have an incredible ability to do massively multi-tasking, the brain checks/confirms/discards millions of links all the time, building up our world-view. While the outcome may be flawed due to garbage-in, the ability of the brain to do all of this is unique, and really beautiful and amazing.

The same trick works with misspelled words. As long as the first few and last few letters are correct, we can mostly figure out what the word is.

Especially hard drive secondary storage is really slow. SSD's are a step in the right direction but are still slow compared to RAM.

This is true of silicon and biological systems! The next big advance is to put processing into the memory function and to get away from current architectures.

Absolutely, the next big thing to work on would be chemical and biological addressing buses, like human brain as processor.

We are coming to the end of Moors Law. It will be larger than the 5 atoms listed in the Article.

Experiments from the mid 1990's on showed what the limits of miniaturization really are. For a transistor, it is 7 atoms. For a capacitor, it's around 100 times that. For a wire, metal wires have to be at least 60 atoms wide to reliably carry current. The proposals to use Nano tubes are about that size. So, the limit on lithography will be established with the minimum size that can connect trace wires that are 60 Atoms wide, or around 5 to 10 nanometers. That's about eight times denser than anything we can achieve today.

We have already reached one limit on Moors Law. The increases in clock speed that were expected and commonplace 20 years ago are no longer happening. the reason is that the heat dissipated in the circuit is a function of the frequency. by 2002, the fastest chips were literally melting the microprocessor. That's the whole reason for water based cooling, and other attempts to increase cooling.

To be able to increase the clock speeds again, we will need to replace silicone with carbon. That lets us raise the temperature of the chips by over an order of magnitude.

Moors law will not stop, it will instead just slow down.

For example, between 1980 and 1990, microprocessor speed went from 3 MHZ on the original PC, to 100 MHZ on the Pentium. From 1990 to 2000, microprocessor speed went from 100 MHZ to 400 MHZ. From 2000 to 2010, microprocessor speed went from 400 MHZ to around 2 to 3 GHZ. There it stalled since around 2004. Intel doesn't even advertize it's products any more based on processor speed. There have been increases in processor speed, but, they are not dramatic any more.

@peter
You are absolutely correct, and my resulting conclusion is that perhaps we are limiting ourselves too much by staying in 2 dimensions. Perhaps the only way to now move forward is to go into the 3rd, possibly using holography, don't know, I'm not a semiconductor expert - that goes back to 1987 when I finished my engineering degree...

Interesting though, as one starts to compare the brain architecture to computer architecture. The benefit of the brain is that it's like building the rules engine plus an ability to self-learn and change the rules, in real time, in hardware as opposed to our normal software implementation where the memory is separate from the processing unit. It's like comparing graphics processors to X86 CPUs trying to do graphics via software - there's just no performance comparison.

I still however can't stop marveling at the brain. If you start to look at supercomputers, compare the size and capability to the size and capability of the brain. Consider energy consumption and the heat problem referred to above. The only way to get a similar result in a computer is to also go massively parallel. The problem with heat is that if you serialise the processing, you have to increase the speed with which you can do 1 thing at a time in order to improve performance - and that's when you have to start increasing power, thus generating heat. With massively parallel you can slow down the individual processors in order to cut power, and still get a huge amount of processing done in a short space of time.