Category: Historical Perspectives

Experts from chip designer Arm on how chip design will evolve to ensure performance keeps advancing.

“Moore’s Law is dead. Moore’s Law is over.”

So says Mike Muller, chief technology officer at chip designer Arm, the Japanese-owned company whose processor cores are found inside nearly all mobile phones.

Given Moore’s Law has been the engine driving the breakneck pace at which computers have advanced over the past 50 years this statement might seem worrying.

But Muller is more sanguine.

“On one level it’s true, but I’d say, certainly from my perspective and Arm’s perspective, we don’t care,” he said, speaking at the Arm Research Summit 2018.

Muller and his colleagues have good reasons for their indifference to the end of Moore’s Law, the prediction that the number of transistors on computer processors will double every two years.

For one, the bulk of Arm-based processors are sold into the embedded computing market, where there is still plenty of scope for transistors to get smaller and chips to get faster.

But more importantly, Arm believes the regular boosts to computing performance that used to come from Moore’s Law will continue, and will instead stem from changes to how chips are designed.

Here are three ways that Arm expects processor design will evolve and advance.

Continue reading… “‘Moore’s Law is dead’: Three predictions about the computers of tomorrow”