Should Moore's Law Apply Elsewhere (Technology Doubling Every 2 Years) In Science and Technology?

Wikipedia explains Moore's Law as......
Since the early 1970s, the increase in capacity of microprocessors has followed Moore's law; this originally suggested that the number of transistors that can be fitted onto a chip doubles every year, though Moore later refined the period to two years.....

Now, certainly I wouldn't think this type of success is reasonable to hold true for all technology, but wouldn't it be correct to expect it in some other fields outside the computer chip industry? If so, which ones? Which sciences would we expect to evolve so rapidly? What tech appears to have failed most spectacularly? THEN, did it really fall short or was success covered up by TPTB?

For example, many people say that we probably should have cars running on water or even air by now. Of course, I have seen a number of conspiracies stating that it has been done and the people involved were killed off, bought off, or silenced in one way or another. We can all see how technology has exploded in the public view over the last 20-40-60-80-100 years, etc. Where would we most want Moore's Law to apply?

Sorry if I have been too vague, but in my mind the subject matter opens a gazillion possibilities. I was hoping this would be a productive "what if" exercise. Thanks for input.

Education.

2nd.

reply to post by samstone11

I could afford gas even at $100 a gallon if Moores Law applied to cars:

www-users.cselabs.umn.edu...

cars would get 100,000 mpg and it would be cheaper to buy a Rolls Royce than to park it.

The mileage sounds good, but I don't know if it's practical to buy a new Rolls instead of parking it

Pollack's Rule states that microprocessor "performance increase due to microarchitecture advances is roughly proportional to [the] square root of [the] increase in complexity". This contrasts with power consumption increase, which is roughly linearly proportional to the increase in complexity. Complexity in this context means processor logic, i.e its area.

en.wikipedia.org...'s_Rule

Just want to point out that doubling the amount of transistors in a given area is not that same as doubling performance.

reply to post by C0bzz


Also, Moores Law has been predicted to be coming to an end. I can't remember exactly, but it was something to do with how they make the processors, there's only so much they can shrink the transistors. But with the ever more closeness of other chips such as silicon for example, who knows...

news.cnet.com...

Originally posted by scottlpool2003
reply to post by C0bzz

 

Also, Moores Law has been predicted to be coming to an end. I can't remember exactly, but it was something to do with how they make the processors, there's only so much they can shrink the transistors. But with the ever more closeness of other chips such as silicon for example, who knows...

news.cnet.com...

I think the answer to that is mixed. But another answer is, notice how a "speed limit" seems to have been reached about the time CPUs went to multiple cores? They kept getting faster and faster until they hit around 3 Ghz and now I haven't seen much over 5Ghz.

So the way around this in hardware is to add more cores, but there's at least a temporary problem with this. Some of the software I use can't use more than one core for CPU intensive tasks. So Moore's law has hit a brick wall for me in that application until and if the software maker revises the software to use multiple cores.

I don't think Moore's Law can go on forever, but it's actually outlasted previous predictions of its demise.

reply to post by scottlpool2003

Understood and agreed. I was just looking around at other concepts, theories, science, technology, etc to see if we should have evolved a bit faster. Wanting to see if we are behind or ahead of the curve in certain areas of interest to my comrades here at ATS.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

You are certainly correct that we have to hit a wall somewhere. I have friends in deep, deep, deep research and development for quantum entanglement. If we ever truly harness that in a productive manner speed and number of chips, etc, become an afterthought, would you agree?

Bucky Fuller and Robert Anton Wilson wrote extensively about this subject. The keyword to search for is "ephemeralization" or "doing more and more with less and less". It's a result of the technological snowball effect -- the more we learn the more quickly we learn new things. Fuller in particular included much numerical data on this subject. Try his book "Critical Path" for charts and such.