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upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:

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from the where-did-it-ever-go? dept.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger says Moore's Law is back [cnet.com]:

Moore's Law [cnet.com], the gauge of steady processor progress from Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, has taken a beating in recent years. But it's making a comeback, Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said Wednesday.

"Moore's law is alive and well," Gelsinger said at the company's online Innovation Day event. "Today we are predicting that we will maintain or even go faster than Moore's law for the next decade."

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That's a bold statement from a company that's struggled to advance its chip manufacturing for the last half decade or so and that's lost its leadership to the two other top chipmakers, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung. It signals that Intel is willing to fight to reclaim its status and try to inject new excitement in a lackluster processor business.

Moore's Law, strictly speaking, was the observation in 1965 (somewhat updated in 1975) that the number of transistors on a processor doubles every two years. It's not a physical law, but instead a reflection of the economics of miniaturization: by improving manufacturing, more circuitry can be built onto a chip, making them more powerful and funding the next round of innovations.

But miniaturization has faltered as research and manufacturing grows ever more expensive. Chip elements are reaching atomic scales and power consumption problems limit the clock speeds that keep chip processing steps marching in lockstep.

As a result, people use Moore's Law these days often to refer to progress in performance and power consumption as well as the ability to pack more transistors more densely on a chip.

Gelsinger, though, was referring to the traditional definition referring to the number of transistors on a processor -- albeit a processor that could consist of several slices of silicon built into a single package. "We expect to even bend the curve faster than a doubling every two years," he said.

Success will mean Intel just catches up to rivals, a moment Gelsinger has pledged will happen in 2024. Intel struggled to move from its 14-nanometer manufacturing process to the 10nm while TSMC and Samsung maintained progress better.

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