Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

This story about a bold new type of computer processor called TRIPS pleases me two different ways:

1. Like a goodly number of my editorial colleagues here at Hoover’s, I’m a University of Texas graduate. (Icing on the cake: these days I’m back at alma mater as a Ph.D. student.) So any time I see UT researchers announcing an important advance in knowledge, it makes me happy.

2. These days, our main semiconductor writer is the estimable Jeff Dorsch, who knows approximately 40,000 times more about the microchip business than I ever will. But for several years before Jeff came on board, I was our primary writer on the chip beat, so technical advances like this — and one trillion calculations per second by 2012 would be a serious breakthrough — still have the capacity to geek me out.

Well, now that I think about, there’s even a third reason:

3. The announcement of TRIPS should put to rest, at least for a while, premature reports of the death of Moore’s Law. This “law” is the venerable observation, made long ago by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, that computing power on microchips tends to double every 18 to 24 months. As Jeff and I have discussed probably dozens of times, you can always tell it’s a slow month in the chip industry when you see stories raising the alarm that Moore’s Law will run aground. Very soon! We really mean it this time! Because the electrons are already having to line up in single file! There’s no way to shrink the transistors any smaller!

Maybe someday Moore’s Law will run out of steam, but it’s uncanny how the alarms sounded over, say, the circuitry limitations of copper or the incredible heat put out by top-end processor are answered by the best semiconductor R&D shops in the world. Maybe it’s Intel announcing chips with 80 cores. Maybe it’s IBM announcing that chips with 45-nanometer features (i.e. gee-whiz small) will be available by late this year. Maybe it’s the wizards from the Forty Acres coming out with TRIPS. But whether in a company or a university, some lab somewhere always seems to be coming up with fascinating technology that gives new life to Moore’s old observation.

There’s a lot of money at stake for the chip industry to keep the Moore’s Law trains running on time. Plus, as even a glance at the staff responsible for TRIPS illustrates, there are lots of super-duper-smart people working on the perennial problem of getting tiny bits of silicon to move bits of data super-duper-fast. With so many resources available for so many smart and motivated people, no wonder Moore’s Law keeps chugging along.