Intel hosted a five-hour event where 100 participants from start-ups, venture capital and technology giants tasted cocktails of semiconductor topics and detailed explanations of how Moore’s Law is not dead.
Intel: Moore’s law isn’t dead, but if that’s what you think, you’re stupid.
The marketing concept behind the meeting was to celebrate how updates in the chip industry have driven advances in technology and society over the past 50 years. The event was hosted by Intel’s senior vice president of silicon engineering, Jim Keller, who said this development was not complete.
The great title of Keller’s lecture was: “Moore’s law is not dead, in fact, but if you think so, you’re stupid,” he said. He said Intel could keep it running and provide technology companies with more and more computing power.
Moore’s law applied to technology states that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 24 months. However, this is becoming increasingly difficult as nodes shrink. Intel says it will continue to make chips more complex under Moore’s law.
“I’m not pedantic about Moore’s Law talking only about transistor contraction, I’m interested in technological trends and physics and metaphysics,” says Keller, adding, “Moore’s Law is a collective illusion shared by millions of people.
Intel highlighted the extreme ultraviolet lithography technology that can record miniaturised features on chips and smaller, wire-based transistor designs on a manometric scale that will arrive in the 2020s. Commenting also on other techniques to make chips more complex, such as the ability to build chips vertically using layers of transistors or chips on top of each other.
We’ll see how they do it, but at the moment Intel is barely designing the first chips in 10 nanometers while AMD is about to launch the first consumer processors in 7 nanometers.