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Friday, June 15, 2012

The End Of The Silicon Age?

Friday, June 15, 2012
We have become used to the idea that every year computers get faster, chips get smaller and... well, our iPads get cooler.

But now we may be approaching a physical barrier to progress - and if it happens, the age of silicon might be come to a grinding halt.

According to the winner of this year's Millennium Technology Prize, Linux creator Linus Torvalds, the physical barrier beyond which transistors cannot get smaller, and chips cannot improve in the same way, is approaching faster than ever.

And that could have huge ramifications for computing.

The rule of thumb known as Moore's law posited in 1965 that the number of transistors able to be placed inexpensively on a circuit doubles every two years.

For about the last four decades that law has held roughly true, and the speed of computers progressed in a roughly equivalent way.

But now Torvalds, in an interview with the Huffington Post, says that we could soon reach "a completely new point" when computers cannot improve in the same way.

"I believe that within 10 to 20 years we'll hit a completely new point in computers which is when Moore's Law really stops working," he told HuffPost.

"What happens when we hit the wall of physics?"
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