Gordon Moore's prediction that transistor cost would decrease exponentially over time seems to apply to a wide range of technologies. Pictured: the vacuum tube, a precursor of the transistor.
Image: Flickr/John Miller
-
The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
Read More »
Predicting the future of technology often seems a fool’s game. In 1946 for example, Thomas J. Watson, founder of International Business Machines — now known simply as IBM — is said to have made the prediction that the world would need just five computers. But US researchers now say that technological progress really is predictable — and back up the claim with evidence regarding 62 different technologies.
The claim is nothing new. But what a group of researchers at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have done is to put it to the test.
In a study published in PLoS ONE, they compared several mathematical laws that purport to describe how the costs of technologies evolve, and found that the most accurate was one proposed as early as 1936.
That proposal was made by aeronautical engineer Theodore Wright, who pointed out that the cost of airplanes fell as the number of planes manufactured rose. Specifically, he said that the cost was proportional to the inverse of the number of planes manufactured raised to some power. This theory has since been put forward as a more general law that governs the costs of technological products, and is often explained on the basis that, the more we make, the better and more efficient we get at making.
But much more famous than Wright’s law is a relationship proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of the microelectronics company Intel. He observed that computer power per dollar was increasing exponentially over time — which means, in effect, that the cost per transistor was falling exponentially.
Economies of scale
Several other relationships between scale and cost of production have been suggested: for example, that costs fall purely because of economies of scale. All these ‘laws’ predict that costs will fall over time, but each suggests a slightly different rate.
“These hypotheses haven’t really been tested against data before,” says MIT's Jessika Trancik. She and her collaborators collected data for 62 technologies, ranging from chemicals production to energy devices (such as photovoltaic cells) and information technologies, spanning periods of between 10 and 39 years. “Assembling a large enough data set was a big challenge,” says Trancik.
The researchers evaluated the performance of each six such ‘laws’ using hindcasts — use of earlier data to predict later costs — and then looked at how these compared with the actual figures.
In fact, the laws didn't differ much at all. The most accurate was Wright’s law, but Moore’s law was close behind, at least for a relatively modest time horizon of a few decades. The predictions were so similar for these two laws, in fact, that the researchers suspected they might be related.
A link seems quite likely. In 1979, political scientist Devendra Sahal pointed out that if production of an item grows at an exponential rate, then Wright’s law and Moore’s law are equivalent. The data confirm that production does indeed grow exponentially for a wide range of products. “You wouldn’t necessarily expect that,” says Trancik.
That Moore’s law applies at all to so many different industries is a surprise, since computing has often been regarded as a special case. “It’s a much more general thing,” says author Doyne Farmer, currently at the University of Oxford, UK.
Market forces
Economist William Nordhaus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, warns that almost by definition the laws will work only for technologies that survive, so they can’t predict the trajectory of very young technologies. “History is written only about the victors,” he says. “Those technologies that didn’t make it in the market don't make it into the data set. This is one reason why it is so difficult to forecast which of many nascent energy technologies will survive.”
See what we're tweeting about
6 Comments
Add CommentActually, Moore simply noted early on that the number of transistors that could be configured on an integrated circuit had been doubling every two years. The cost implications are a corollary since discrete IC manufacturing costs are nearly flat.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMoore's Law was initially developed to characterize the historical increase in the density of transistors that had been configured in integrated circuits over time – by manufacturers of integrated circuits.
This historical increase in circuit density has been employed as a factor in determining the design objectives and investment schedules in R&D and development of increasingly dense production equipment, and their equipment depreciation schedules.
Moore's law has been a self-fulfilling prophesy, a historical relationship used to set technological development and return on investment expectations. It's natural then that Moore's 'Law' should therefore apply to many activities that are directly dependent on the rate of development in electronic circuit densities, but any more general applicability would likely depend more on indirect relations with technological development.
In reality rather than myth Thomas J. Watson, Sr., reported to a stockholders meeting that they had made a road trip expecting to sell 5 computers (IBM 701) and came back with 18 orders.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's not just about exponential processes. After all, yeast grows exponentially, and yet beer has not dropped a million-fold in price.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChip-making is basically tee-shirt printing.
Hear me out. I worked several levels below Gordon Moore at Intel (1974-86). I did device physics, and worked on things related to memory chips and microprocessors. The 1K dynamic RAM was our bread and butter when I started and the megabit DRAM was common when I left.
When I say tee-shirt printing I mean lithography, the printing of circuit patterns on a substrate. Advances in optics, in photoresists, in step-and-repeat cameras, these have driven line widths from dimensions of tens of microns to microns to sub-micron, then down to hundreds of nanometers, and, currently, around 18-32 nm for consumer products.
I'm not taking anything away from Gordon Moore (a brilliant and kind manager), but "Moore's Law" is applied carelessly. The learning curve is of course real, likewise economies of scale, but cars have not dropped in price from $2000 in 1964 to tiny fractions of that. Ditto for a zillion other examples.
Most of the things that have dropped several orders of magnitude in price, even 6-8 orders of magnitude, have involved the lithographic or patterning process. Disk drive densities, for example. (Disk drives also got a "second wind" with a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, called "giant magneto-resistance" (GMR). But it's still an aerial density phenomenon.
Airplanes, cars, jet engines, ocean liners, all of these things have benefitted from advances in metallurgy, materials, the learning process, factory efficiency. But not the type of doubling over short periods seen with Moore's Law.
--Tim May
Tom Watson never made the statement about there only being a world market for five computers.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAccording to IBM "the statement [attributed] to Thomas Watson is a misunderstanding of remarks made at IBM’s annual stockholders meeting on April 28, 1953. In referring specifically and only to the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine -- which had been introduced the year before as the company’s first production computer designed for scientific calculations -- Thomas Watson, Jr., told stockholders that 'IBM had developed a paper plan for such a machine and took this paper plan across the country to some 20 concerns that we thought could use such a machine. I would like to tell you that the machine rents for between $12,000 and $18,000 a month, so it was not the type of thing that could be sold from place to place. But, as a result of our trip, on which we expected to get orders for five machines, we came home with orders for 18.'”
At the same time IBM was marketing the 702 and 650 commercial computers for which they expected much better sales.
Another example of exponential growth is solar power. If you haven't heard of him then I suggest you do google search for Ray Kurzweil. He is my favorite futurist, and his law of accelerating returns states that Moore's law applies to a wide variety of technologies (the author of this article was obviously inspired by Ray Kurzweil).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOnce you comprehend the revolutionary concept that technology improves exponentially, not linearly, it opens the door to all sorts of unintuitive implications. For instance, extreme longevity treatments within twenty years, or AGI smarter than Einstein in two decades.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe old fashion Malthusian belief that we all must compete over limited resources will give way to the future belief of abundance. For instance in the case of energy (demand for energy is expected to double in the next twenty years):
"A volume about the size of a #2 pencil eraser of water provides as much energy as two 48-gallon drums of gasoline. That is 355,000 times the amount of energy per volume – five orders of magnitude." ( http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/New-LENR-Machine-is-the-Best-Yet.html ).
This phenomenon (LENR) has been confirmed in hundreds of published scientific papers: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf
"Over 2 decades with over 100 experiments worldwide indicate LENR is real, much greater than chemical..." --Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center
"Total replacement of fossil fuels for everything but synthetic organic chemistry." --Dr. Joseph M. Zawodny, NASA
By the way, here is a survey of some of the companies that are bringing LENR to commercialization: http://www.cleantechblog.com/2011/08/the-new-breed-of-energy-catalyzers-ready-for-commercialization.html
For those who still aren't convinced, here is a paper I wrote that contains some pretty convincing evidence: http://coldfusionnow.org/the-evidence-for-lenr/