Technology laws about hardware

Everyone is probably familiar with Moore's First Law: the price-quality ratio (computing power) of chips (ICs) doubles approximately every two years. Inventor Gordon Moore was one of the first to manufacture computer chips on a large scale (he was Director of Research & Development at Fairchild, a predecessor of today's chip giant Intel). In fact, Moore's First Law was about the number of transistors in an integrated circuit. In 1971 there were about 2,300. Forty years later (twenty blocks from two years later, in 2011), that number had grown to more than 2,600,000,000 (2.6 billion). For the calculators: 2,300*220 = 2.4 billion. If Moore's First Law were applied to cars, there would be an average fuel consumption of 1 in 250,000 and a Rolls Royce would cost a quarter (nice!) And ... also be only 1 centimeter in size (and that's a pity). Moore's First Law has been in effect since the early 1970s. The Act has also been the subject of debate for years (“How long will this continue?”). A parody of Moore's First Law states, "The number of people predicting the end of Moore's First Law doubles every year." However, the consensus is that this law will remain in force for at least another two decades. The so-called 14 nanometer technology is gradually being replaced by 10, 7 and 5 nanometer technology. Research teams are already working on single-atom transistors. And TU Delft wants to make a working prototype of a quantum computer by 2020 at the latest . In terms of length, the first transistors from the early 1970s would be the size of a human being and the processors of today would be the size of an ant.

Not only the price-quality ratio of chips doubles every two years. With other technologies this is at a comparable level or higher: there is Kryder's Law. Mark Kryder was Senior Vice President of Research & Development at a leading data storage company, Seagate. The law states that the storage capacity per cm2 doubles every thirteen months. A gigabyte of storage capacity cost about a million euros in 1980; today 10 cents. Just as with Moore's First Law, Kryder's Law is also predicted with some regularity. Yet this law also seems to continue for another decade, partly due to the application of new storage techniques, such as Flash memory and the stacking of storage cells to get more memory on the same surface.

In addition to the computing power of chips and storage capacity for data, bandwidth (the speed of the internet when you log in) is also developing exponentially, both for wireless (your smartphone), nomadic (Wi-Fi) and wired (Ethernet at the office) internet. This law is named after Phil Edholm, a Chief Technology Officer of Nortel, a Canadian telecommunications equipment manufacturer.Koomey's Law When IBM's Deep Blue defeated then-reigning world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1986, the computer consumed thousands of times more energy than Kasparov himself. Computing power and artificial intelligence are fantastic, but if the energy bill spirals out of control or if you have to charge every ten minutes, the fun is quickly over. Data centers already consume 2 percent of all energy on earth and that will triple in the next ten years . Fortunately, there is Jonathan Koomey's Law, a professor at Stanford University in California. He states: “For the same computational load of a chip, the amount of power will halve every two and a half years”.

The development of ever smaller and more powerful chips is something that fewer and fewer parties can do. Wealthy parties, that is. This is evident from Moore's second law: “The cost of a chip factory doubles every year”. A new chip factory currently costs between 15 and 20 billion dollars. A new chip design costs tens to hundreds of millions of euros. Interpreted more broadly, this law also applies to software: it seems to cost more and more to build software that works more efficiently, faster and more powerfully than the competition. Ultimately, Moore's Second Law leads to a monopoly.