‘Twilight’ of Moore’s Law Will Bring ‘Plenty of Creative Destruction,’ Paper Says

After 50 “glorious years,” Moore’s law is “running out of steam,” said a paper published Friday in The Economist. Moore’s law, which holds that computing power doubles every two years with no uptick in cost, has resulted in a modern smartphone that today packs more computing punch than a supercomputer did two decades ago, the paper said. “But after half a century of blistering progress, the end is now in sight.” Fifty years of Moore's law “have made computers cheap, powerful and tiny, but the exponential increase in computing power has been slowing for some time,” it said. “With transistors getting ever smaller, each successive shrinking is bringing fewer benefits while costs are rising dramatically.” The “twilight” of Moore’s law “will bring change, disorder and plenty of creative destruction,” it said. “An industry that used to rely on steady improvements in a handful of devices will splinter. Software firms may begin to dabble in hardware; hardware makers will have to tailor their offerings more closely to their customers’ increasingly diverse needs.”