Hardware Isn't the Issue
Intel has definitely been asleep at the switch. But that doesn’t mean that Moore’s law is entirely dead.
AMD has continued to forge ahead. Also, Intel has recently (finally!) announced plans to move forward with new fab technologies, including increased use of techniques that could even lead to sub-nanometer fabrication.
But, more importantly, development in fab technology has become largely irrelevant.
The real bottleneck over the past two decades has been lack of innovation in software, not hardware. Windows and Office, in particular, continue on bloated, antiquated codebases that date back to the late 1990s. The monopolistic dominance of these two dysfunctional products has strongly discouraged more-aggressive hardware developments, since better silicon can’t make these most-used software applications more useful. (Far from exploiting newer chips, with Windows 8 Microsoft actually bragged that it had made the CPU do less work.)
This stagnant situation in software has resulted in steadily declining demand for newer and faster hardware. That decline in turn has discouraged chipmakers from investing as much in new chip technologies as they might otherwise have done. It stands to reason that Intel has been the most lethargic, since it had the most comfortable market share to rest on. Competitors like AMD and ARM, predictably, have been somewhat more aggressive. GPU makers moved much more rapidly, largely because gaming is the one software category not dominated by mouldy Microsoft products.
Apple, in particular, has recently proved that simply re-architecting today’s chip designs can lead to sizable gains in performance. But the PC world – thanks to Microsoft’s staggering lack of vision – has been stuck with an awkward hardware architecture that dates back to the early 1980s. MS should long ago have done what it did with Windows NT: introduce a parallel ‘advanced’ Windows track, portable to new silicon, and encourage gradual migration as compatibility issues are worked out. It also desperately needs to re-examine the functionality of its two core products, and start evolving them to exploit the full capability of today's processors, let alone tomorrow's.
Bottom line, the toxic combination of failed vision and monopolistic dominance by Microsoft, post-Windows-2000, is largely responsible for the flattening of the Moore’s Law curve. Until the world finally demands something better than the stagnant MS codebase, evolution in chip technology cannot be properly exploited, and will thus remain largely irrelevant.
TL; dr - we won't really know what Moore's Law can or cannot do, until we eliminate the software bottleneck.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
