Moore's Law Alive And Well, Intel CEO SaysMoore's Law Alive And Well, Intel CEO Says

Intel CEO Craig Barrett used the opening keynote of the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Moore's Law and pledge that the company will continue to push the innovation envelope with platform-level products derived from accelerated investments in research and development.

"You have two choices with R&D, lead or be led," Barrett said. "R&D drives the next level of innovation. You can have the best business model in the world, but if it's creating last year's technology, it will not be successful."

Former Intel CEO Gordon Moore in 1965 first wrote the supposition that would become known as Moore's Law. That law states that the available transistor budget for computer processors would roughly double every 18 months.

Barrett said that the timetable has expanded slightly from about 12 to 18 months between generations in the '70s and '80s, to about 18 to 24 months currently. "Moore's Law is not slowing down," he said. "It is the foundation of what we are all about: innovation and integration."

Barrett laid out the road map for the shrinking of the silicon manufacturing process for the next six years. This year, the transition from a 90-nanometer to a 60-nanometer process will be completed. In 2007, Intel plans to move to a 45-nanometer process, to 32 nanometers in 2009, and 22 nanometers in 2011.

There should be no change in the shrinking process until geometries reach about 5 nanometers around 2020, at which time new manufacturing capabilities, such as the use of quantum dots, may be necessary.

"There is lots of life left" on the current process road map, Barrett said. "Every time it seems we have met a roadblock, we find a way to circumvent it We've been forecasting the end of [traditional] CMOS transistors to be 15 years out for the last 30 years."

Intel has multiple research projects under way, so it will have a replacement technology ready when and if a threshold is met for traditional manufacturing processes, he said. Even with possible future technologies such as quantum dots or nanotubes, "the silicon production machinery will not be that different."

The latest move from 90 nanometers to 65 nanometers is enabling the transition this year from traditional single-core processors to dual-core processors in 2005, and multicore processors in the years ahead.

In general, Barrett emphasized Intel's push to refocus attention away from transistors and processors, to platform-level products. As the pressure for ever-increasing clock speeds is lifted, it is being replaced by increased performance through the use of multiple cores and other integrated performance improvements such as on-chip virtualization, he said.

Said Barrett: "We are not running hell-bent for 4 or 5 GHz clock speed, but there is no slow down in the transition to increased innovation and productivity."