Economic and Financial Implications of Moore's Law

One factor that may slow down the performance of processors, and has this time it's nothing physical, but it is financial. The cost of production chains also rises exponentially to the point that even giant competitors like IBM and Siemens had to pool their investments to come to follow suit.

The profitability of new generations of machines depends on an uncertain future, to say the least (many PC users, for example, are beginning to be taken as a criterion for selecting priority rather than the speed of a PC, but its noise level) and it may be that in these conditions it is a financial decision, not a physical level, which puts an end to Moore's Law.

Actual speed and subjective speed

Increasingly powerful machines made available to developers have perverse effects. At the time of "slow" processors of the 1980s and 1990s, developers invested much time to optimize programs and each line of code that could be saved to allow less clock cycles and therefore run more quickly. Today's computers offer a comfortable working environment to reduce the vigilance of developers. Furthermore, economic constraints require that always occur in the urgency and time spent once to optimize the code has been sacrificed. Thus we confronted today with a paradox: computers are faster, but software is increasingly heavy and increasingly slow. The end user does not have the sensation of a real increase in speed, especially for basic tasks like word processing. Many users complain computers are even more "rustic" which, deprived of all gadgets which systems are loaded with today, could prove more efficient in terms of productivity.

Economic

Moore's Law could also have an economic interest of controlling demand and supply. Indeed, the miniaturization progresses normally through discoveries and optimizations, little reality in line with the regularity of changes exponentially specified by Moore's Law. In keeping with time dissemination of new technological applications, it is possible that the giant semiconductor companies define themselves a stable model of consumption. Thereby ensuring a match between their innovation efforts and desire to renew their customers. The self-supply of forcing consumers to regularly update their equipment. To be effective, it is nevertheless that such restraint of supply can rely on a strong market cartelization.

In this case, quite unprecedented in the history of capitalism, market force to restrain innovation to provide a pension to the entire sector may have to be used.