The Giga Age of Computing

It should happen this year, if it hasn't already happened and I missed it. According to Moore's law 2009 is the year when you should be able to walk into a store and buy a chip with a billion transistors on it.

Intel has already put 2 billion transistors on a chip. But, Moore's law says that every 2 years you should be able to put twice as many transistors on a chip for the same or lower price per transistor. (With an inflation adjustment.) Moore's law always allowed putting many more than twice as many transistors on a chip if you want to pay a premium price.

because it takes 2 years to double the number of transistors on a chip it takes 20 years to add 3 zeros to the number of transistors on a chip. (20 is 2*10 and 2¹⁰ = 1024.)  If you go back to 1989 you'll find the 486DX with 1.2 million transistors being sold.Go back to 1971 and you'll find the 4004 with 2.300 transistors. Go back the full 20 years to 1969 and you should find a 1,000 transistor chip being sold.

The eras of transistor based computing began with the second generation of computers and continues today.

• Single Age - 1949, the second generation of computers
• Kilo Age - 1969
• Mega Age - 1989
• Giga Age - 2009

Moore's law applies to integrated circuits; chips with more than one transistor on them. The first integrated circuit showed up at the end of 1958 and Moore's law was based on data from chips made from 1958 through 1965. But, the math says it should start around 1949 with the first transistor. I'll bet that the size of a transistor shrank by a factor of 2 every 2 years from the late 1940s until 1958 when it became possible to put more than one transistor on a chip. I don't have the data to prove it though. If you do, let me know.

Another way to look at Moore's law and my kilo, mega, and giga ages is to think about the kind of video games we got in different ages. The early Kilo Age gave us Pong The the Atari 2600 is a product of the mid Kilo age. The Mega Age came in with the original Doom. The Mega age is the age of the development of realistic 3D games. The end of the Mega Age is marked by the MMO. The Dawn of the Giga seems to be the dawn of stereoscopic games and stereoscopic movies. I believe it will be the age of AI and near perfect immersion.

The difference between Pong and a modern stereoscopic 3D MMO is the difference between the early Kilo Age and  late Mega Age computing. The difference between Doom and WOW is the difference between the early Mega Age and the end of the Mega Age.

The difference between the number of transistors in a Core 2 Kentsfield from 2006, and a Core i7 from 2008, 2 processors that are just 2 years apart, is equal to the number of transistors in 163 486DX chips from 1989 or 84,783 4004s from 1971. I am on talking about the difference in the number of transistors over a 2 year period. I am not making a comparison of total transistors counts. 

Here's hoping that I live long enough to see:

• Tera Age - 2029
• Peta Age - 2049

IMHO, Moore's law will keep going until we learn to make transistors the size off bucky tubes crossing each other and we have learned to stack layers of them in 3D nano structures. At that scale, we have a long way to go.

Programmers, as usual, have a hell of a lot of catching up to do.