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Future of HPC: Is the Moore’s Law failing?

The Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a processor doubles about every two years. Gordon Moore (a former CEO of Intel) made this observation (and it was also a prediction) in 1975.  Did his prediction hold true because of his position as the  CEO of Intel and the chip manufacturers tried to follow his prediction over the years? Maybe.    More than a decade ago, the Moore’s Law has been reinterpreted as the number of cores doubling every two years and seemed to be working fine. But the current trends indicate that it might be failing [1]. This, however, brings  opportunities [1], not the end of High Performance Computing (HPC). In the meantime, IBM has just announced [2] that they managed to go down to as small as 2nm chips. We will see if the Moore’s Law will catch up or continue to fail but either way there is still plenty of room at the top.

[1] Leiserson, C. E., Thompson, N. C., Emer, J. S., Kuszmaul, B. C., Lampson, B. W., Sanchez, D., & Schardl, T. B. (2020). There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law? Science, 368(6495)

[2] https://newsroom.ibm.com/2021-05-06-IBM-Unveils-Worlds-First-2-Nanometer-Chip-Technology,-Opening-a-New-Frontier-for-Semiconductors