Moore’s Law is breaking down

Chips and storage would get cheaper, faster and more powerful forever, they said. No limits. Every couple of years, Santa would arrive with twice the power at half the price. They called it Moore’s Law. For what seemed like an eternity—from the 1960s—chips were getting faster and smaller and cheaper. Then in the 2010s, things began to slow and the limits of physics came into sight. This changed a lot. For one thing, it meant even more data centers would be needed based on data growth because if the servers weren’t getting that much more powerful and cheap every year or so, you were going to need more of them for all that exploding data.

They called it Dennard Scaling. As the technology generations advanced, chips would halve in size and in power consumption requirements. You could thus double the number of transistors while maintaining the same power consumption. From about 2005, Denard Scaling stopped scaling quite like it used to. It seems things can only get so small before running up against those basic laws of physics. When the walls in the chip architecture get to a certain level of thinness, stuff begins to leak through. Inefficiencies and constraints emerge.

They called it Koomey’s Law. It proclaimed that “at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two roughly every eighteen months.” Great news for battery-driven devices getting smaller and more powerful. Except that after 2000, this law too began to show stress. It was negatively affected, of course, by the slowing of Moore’s Law and Denard Scaling. By those awkward laws of physics.

Toxic optimism is the fevered faith of Silicon Valley, as many still claimed that Moore’s Law was the law of the land. Acceleration forever. Impossible is nothing. Fake it till you make it. There is always a breakthrough waiting around the corner if you throw enough money, materials, energy, water, hype and dodgy practices at it. So, the tech faithful believed like the faithful at a Las Vegas roulette table believed. The frenzy of progress, with things doubling and halving every couple of years, the sheer rush of innovation that was churning up so much material and spitting out so much waste. No time for wisdom, for the slightest reflection or doubt. Caught up in the frenzy of intelligent design. Just doing it. Dragged along by the relentless speed of things.

It all ends as toxic waste. Almost all chips are discarded long before they ever even wear out. Silicon chips are designed from a single-use perspective focused on maximizing speed and functionality for a specific purpose at the lowest possible cost. Chips are expected to have a very short life and nobody thinks about value after that life has expired. Refurbishment, reuse or recycling are not considerations. The old chip is dead. Dump it. Burn it. Bury it. Long live the new chip. Driven by cost reduction concerns, generation after generation, the value of the materials in a chip declines. There is no money in recycling silicon. It is the ultimate throwaway toxic waste.