Moore's law kicks processor speeds where it hurts.
Processors have increased in sheer performance year on year ever since the inception of the very first design many years ago, bringing in faster speeds and more advanced designs that have pushed the industry onwards faster than many could have predicted.
However all this improvement is eerily linear, following the prediction that Gordon Moore made forty years ago that computing speeds would double every two years - first shown with simple clockspeed increases to almost 4GHz stock, and shown today with additional processing cores.
But all this seems to be coming to a potential close in the future as physicists Lev Levitin and Tommaso Toffoli, both from Boston University in Massachusetts, threw a deadline of 75 years down based on pure theoretical knowledge.
Pointing at the properties of the materials we're using today and even at the Quantum processors that appear to be the next step, they believe that the boundary will be reached in a single lifetime - bringing Moore's Law to a close.
Publishing the minimum possible time for a basic calculation to finish gave their paper some weight, highlighting the fact that Quantum processors become unstable with increasing external components; in other words, they become increasingly unreliable as they become more complex.
This theory is of course just a theory for now and there remains a slim possibility that we'll discover knowledge in the future to get around that hurdle, but for processor designers now they've got a performance ceiling to aim for.
It's described in much more detail at InsideScience, and if we're lucky we'll see this limit within our lifetimes.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009