摩爾定律50歲了 它將很快壽終正寢嗎

In 1950, at a time when there were fewer than 10 digital computers worldwide, Bill Pfann, a 33-year-old scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, discovered a method that could be used to purify elements, such as germanium and silicon. He could not possibly have imagined then that this discovery would enable the silicon micro-chip and the rise of the computer industry, the Internet, and the emergence of the information age. Today, there are about 10 billion Internet-connected devices in the world, such as laptops and mobile phones, and at the heart of each of these devices, there is at least one such micro-chip that acts as its “engine”.

1950年時，全球只有不到10臺數字計算機。時年33歲的新澤西貝爾實驗室科學家比爾o芬尼在這一年發現了一種提純鍺、硅等元素的方法。他當時可能想不到，這一發現促成了硅制微芯片的誕生，推動了計算機和互聯網的發展，導致了信息時代的出現。如今，全球已有超過100億臺聯網設備。而所有這些設備中，都至少有一塊這樣的微芯片充當“引擎”作用。

The reason behind this relentless progress is neatly contained in a prophetic law that was announced 50 years ago this Sunday, called Moore’s Law. The micro-chip is built with tiny electrical switches made of purified silicon called transistors and the law stated that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year. In 1975, Gordon Moore revised his forecast to state that the count would double every two years. The law has held true since.

50年前，一個預言式的定律巧妙地揭示了科技不斷進步背後的原因，它就是摩爾定律。微芯片上有許多由純淨硅製成的微型電子開關，它們被稱作晶體管。而摩爾定律認爲芯片上的晶體管數量每年都會翻倍。1975年，戈登o摩爾修正了他的預測，認爲晶體管數量會每兩年翻一倍。從此以後，這一定律從未失準。

Why is Moore’s Law relevant? Because this doubling of the number of transistors led to computer chips that could be packed with increasingly sophisticated circuitry that was both energy efficient and cheap. This led to the widespread adoption of computers, mobile phones, and the information technology revolution.

爲何摩爾定律經年不衰？因爲晶體管數量的倍增讓計算機芯片能夠搭載越來越複雜的電路系統，它們不僅節能，還十分便宜。這導致了計算機、手機的普及，推動了信息技術的革命。

The price of computation is about 10 million times cheaper than it was 40 years ago, and the computing power held in a smart phone outstrips the workstations that computer scientists used in their offices in the 1990s. That we have been able to so far hold true to Moore’s Law is the reason that the electronic circulation of information has been commoditized, changing the way many of us learn, bank, travel, communicate and socialize.

計算機的價格比起40年前，已然便宜了一千萬倍，而一部智能手機擁有的計算能力，已經超過了20世紀90年代計算機科學家使用的工作站。至今爲止，摩爾定律依然適用，也因爲如此，信息的電子流通變得商品化，改變了我們當中許多人學習、儲蓄、旅行、溝通和社交的方式。

Take the example of social networking using a mobile phone. It works because the cost of a transistor has dropped a million fold and computing is about 10,000 times more energy efficient since 1980, when this writer first went to engineering school. Consequently, a $200 smart phone powered by a biscuit-sized battery contains a micro-chip with a few billion transistors in it and enough computing power to digitally process an image, and then upload and share it wirelessly using powerful mathematics to encode the data. This is a consequence of Moore’s Law in action.

以使用手機進行社交爲例。之所以能實現這一點，是因爲從1980年（當時筆者纔剛進入工程學院）至今，晶體管的價格降低了幾百萬倍，計算的能效提高了幾萬倍。因此，售價200美元、由一塊餅乾大小的電池作爲能源的智能手機中，擁有一塊包含幾十億晶體管的微芯片，其計算能力足以對圖片進行數字化加工，運用強大的數學運算能力編碼其數據，再通過無線網絡上傳和分享它。這就是摩爾定律作用下的成果。

Yet, on its 50th anniversary, there are tell-tale signs that Moore’s Law is slowing, and we are almost certain that the law will cease to hold within a decade. With further miniaturization silicon transistors will attain dimensions of the order of only a handful of atoms and the laws of physics dictate that the transistors and electronic circuits will cease to work efficiently at that point. As Moore’s Law’s slows down, innovations in other areas, such as developments in software, will pick up the slack in the short-term.

然而，在它誕生50週年之際，已有跡象表明摩爾定律下的增長開始放緩，我們也幾乎可以確定，在接下來的十年內，它恐怕將不復成立。硅晶體管繼續微型化下去，將達到僅含有少量原子排列的維度，根據物理定律，這種情況下晶體管和電子電路將無法有效工作。隨着摩爾定律下的增長放緩，其他領域的創新，如軟件方面的發展，將在短期內補上這一缺口。

But in the longer-term, there will be fundamental changes in the essential design of the classical computer that, remarkably, has remained unchanged since the 1950s. Designed for precise calculations, today’s computing machines do not make inferences, and qualitative decisions, or recognize patterns from large amounts of data efficiently. The next substantive leap forward will be in computers with human-like cognitive capabilities that are also energy efficient. IBM’s Watson, the computing system that won the television game show Jeopardy! in 2011, consumed about 4000 times more energy than its human competitors. This experience reinforced the need for new energy efficient computing machines that are designed differently from the sequential, calculative methodology of classical computers and are inspired, perhaps, by the way biological brains work.

但從長期來看，從20世紀50年代至今未曾改變的傳統計算機的基本設計，將會出現根本性的變革。如今的計算機可用來進行精確計算，但它們無法高效地從大量數據中得出推斷，做出定性決策或識別模式。下一個實質性的飛越將會出現在那些擁有類人認知能力且高能效的計算機上。IBM的計算機系統沃森在2011年的智力挑戰節目“Jeopardy!”上取得勝利，但它消耗的能量是與它同臺對壘的人類選手的4000倍。這一經歷凸顯了對新型高能效計算機的需求。它們要與使用順序計算方法的經典計算機有所區別，設計者也許將從生物大腦的運轉方式中汲取靈感。

A journalist recently asked me whether the continuation of Moore’s Law was indispensable. It is the beauty of the collective enterprise of human innovation that which ensures that nothing is indispensable indefinitely for technology to progress. Decades later one might look at the era of Moore’s Law as a golden period where computers came of age through a masterful display of an industry’s ability to miniaturize and create billions of flawless and identical copies of tiny circuits at factories throughout the world. But, much as a pack of migratory birds flying in V-formation rotate in at the lead position, there will, at that future time, be many other technologies that will have carried us forward in the information age.

一位記者最近問我，摩爾定律的持續是不是不可或缺的。人類創新這項集體活動之美，就在於保證了沒有什麼對於技術進步而言是不可或缺的。幾十年後，人們或許會將摩爾定律的年代看作黃金時代，這個年代的計算機起初是一個行業實力的體現，後來計算機逐漸小型化，全球的工廠製造了數以億計一模一樣的完美微型電路。但就像候鳥羣會以V字隊列盤旋在領頭者旁邊一樣，未來會有許多其他技術引領着我們在信息時代繼續前進。