When Intel a few months from now launches a processor with 22-nanometer technology, it is further confirmation of the validity of Moore's Law. For over 50 years, the law predicted semiconductor chips exponential development. Using it may even be possible to calculate when machines surpass humans.
In early 2012 Intel is expected to release processors with architecture Ivy Bridge, which has components of dimension 22 nanometers, 10 nanometers less than the Core processors, which went on sale in January 2010.
The reduced dimensions keeps Moore's Law alive, formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in an article in Electronics Magazine in April 1965. He then noted the number of transistors that could be placed in an integrated circuit at the lowest possible cost has doubled every two years between 1958 and 1965.
In view of the transistors' increased performance has been the law since come to anticipate doubling the capacity of chips every 18 months, and then you have still not taken note of the fact that the circuits while falling in price, not just a transistor, and also uses less energy .
Periodically, Moore's Law has been considered stable for just another ten years, mainly thanks to technological advances in the production of integrated circuits - for example, CMOS technology and micro-lithography by laser which in itself has gradually evolved.
Still it seems to have a bright future. Just a few years ago an Intel manager claimed that the development can continue at the same rate for at least the 2029th
In addition to shrink the components further with today's technology will, among other things, to circuits that are built in three dimensions, which start at Intel's Ivy Bridge, and the longer term transistors in single molecules - a technique recently demonstrated in a laboratory environment.
But some future thinkers, as entrepreneur and author Ray Kurzweil and the author and mathematician Verner Vinge, see Moore's Law in a much larger context.
Kurzweil believes that semiconductor technology exponential development is just one piece in a larger perspective that started with the origins of life and eventually passed into the technology's emergence, with constant exponential character. But it is only now that we have begun to observe the clear acceleration of development. He also has a mathematical model for this.
In a future scenario indicates both Vinge and Kurzweil on what is called the technological singularity. It is not a singularity in the mathematical sense when the development would be infinitely fast, without a point in history where machines surpass human beings on all levels, both in terms of intelligence as emotionally and morally.
And it's not far off, they claim. Kurzweil coldly expects that it takes place around 2045, when the 1000 dollars will be able to buy computing power that surpasses all human brains, and also complete successfully simulate brain function in detail with the software.
The natural consequence of this is in accordance with Kurzweil that man then gradually integrate themselves with the machines in order to be able to keep up with the staggering development rate prevailing at the time.
In an even longer perspective, he believes that the universe's ultimate fate is that all matter is saturated with intelligent processes, partly based on that we on the way manage to get over the speed of light - an opportunity that we got a hint last week, when researchers at CERN reported the neutrinos that seemed to travel faster than light.
