Follow-up: Moore's Law Is Dead?

As a follow-up to the post from yesterday on how semiconductor industry is moving away from a long-withstanding incumbent like Intel, one of my favorite tech columnists, Christopher Mims has provided his insight into such trend.

In the past, semiconductor industry was governed by a popular conception called Moore's Law. In short, it is a notion that every two years or so, the number of transistors in a chip doubles. Computers keep getting faster, smaller and more power-efficient. However, the chips have reached their physical limitations (i.e. got smaller to the extent possible) and the limelight is shifting to the "specialized computing" vs. do-it-all CPU's. It is now more about the chip design / architecture and software than the size of the chips. More and more tasks require intensive processing, examples including artificial intelligence, image recognition, and even bitcoin mining. Those specific tasks are diverted to specialized chips, while the CPU is running absolutely required tasks in parallel. As such, each chip is tailored to particular tasks, optimizing every nanometer to the function assigned.

Now that customization has become the key purchasing criteria, a more flexible Arm Holdings has been excelling in catering to the customer's needs. Unlike Arm, Intel traditionally does not give away its chip design and rarely customize them. On top of that, Intel made a fatal mistake back when Steve Jobs asked Intel to customize the chips for iPhones. The CEO refused and Apple switched to IBM and started making their own chips, as Steve Jobs' famous saying goes, paraphrasing computer scientist Alan Kay : “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

The competition is expanding to the cloud computing space now, although the demand for Intel chips for such use has not slackened. Arm Holdings can't be complacent either, given how upstarts are taking away shares with more open source code and innovation, like the case of RISC-V, a chip architecture incubated in UC Berkeley. No time to catch one's breath as the industry is evolving at the speed of light with the emergence of new technology such as 5G, AI / ML, and autonomous vehicles!

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-not-inside-how-mobile-chips-overtook-the-semiconductor-giant-11607749203#comments_sector