Moore's Law in three eras: from free lunch (1970-2005) to software hell (2015-now)
blelbach · x · 2026-09-17
Responding to norpadon's observation that AI arrived right as Moore's Law stopped working, blelbach breaks transistor-scaling history into three eras:
- 1970–2005: Free Lunch — clock speeds scaled, software got faster for free.
- 2005–2015: No More Free Lunch — core counts scaled, requiring parallelism.
- 2015–?: Software Hell — specialization took over: GPUs, low-precision compute, Tensor Cores.
Moore's Law never fully died by transistor count, but how it surfaced to developers kept changing — and AI's rise coincides with the era where only deep hardware-software co-design can extract gains.
Related event: Veteran: CMOS Scaling Is Tapped Out, Sparsity Is AI's Next 10x(4 posts)→
More from Infra
- Amazon's $215B capex exceeds $168B operating cash flow, FCF turns -$42B — thealexbanks · 2026-11-02
- BofA: B200 and H100 GPU rental prices hit new highs, up 47% and 31% YTD — TheZachMueller · 2026-11-02
- vikhyat predicts alternating compute oversupply and undersupply on the road to AGI — TheZachMueller · 2026-11-02
- PyTorch Mac downloads hit 3.29M in October, up 20.5% MoM — LysandreJik · 2026-11-02
- CVSS 9.8 ingress-nginx flaw lets unauthenticated attackers get RCE and steal cluster Secrets — evilsocket · 2026-11-02
- RAM prices tripled, so Tesla cut a third of memory from Optimus's brain — aakashgupta · 2026-11-02