An observation from Gordon Moore (at Intel), made approximately 35 years ago that the number of transistors on computer chips will double every two years.
Clock speeds on CPUs also increased dramatically during this time (going from kHz to GHz) but these increases have levelled off over the past decade. The reason is mainly because of power dissipation — because the frequencies are so high, so much power is dissipated, so it’s less productive to continue increasing the speeds.1
As a result, the distance between the individual transistors in the chips have been driving performance gains over the past few years. We now fabricate at close to 3 nanometres — but this comes with unintended quantum side effects.
Moore’s law is over. The number of transistors per chip has not kept up since then, but the performance of each chip has continued to improve.
https://gwern.net/doc/cs/hardware/2020-leiserson.pdf
Footnotes
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From Prof Najm’s office hours. ↩