There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law?

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Over the past 50 years, the miniaturization of semiconductor devices has been at the heart of improvements in computer performance, as was foreseen by physicist Richard Feynman in his 1959 address to the American Physical Society, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” Intel founder Gordon Moore observed a steady rate of miniaturization and predicted  that the number of transistors per computer chip would double every 2 years—a cadence, called Moore’s law, that has held up considerably well until recently. Moreover, until about 2004, new transistors were not only smaller, they were also faster and more energy efficient, providing computers with ever more speed and storage capacity. Moore’s law has driven economic progress ubiquitously.

We refer to these technologies (software, algorithms and hardware architecture) as the “Top” of the computing stack to distinguish them from the traditional technologies at the “Bottom”: semiconductor physics and silicon-fabrication technology.

In the post-Moore era, the "Top" of the computing stack, encompassing software, algorithms, and innovative hardware, will drive substantial performance gains. Big system components offer a promising avenue for addressing the complexities and unlocking the full potential of these advanced technologies, ensuring continuous breakthroughs in computing performance despite the end of Moore's Law.

Read the full discussion of Charles E. Leiserson, Neil Thompson, Joel S. Emer, Bradley C. Kuszmaul, Butler W. Lampson, Daniel Sanchez and Tao B. Schardl in the article