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: Three Eras of Moore's Law: From Free Lunch to Software Hell(2 posts)→
More from Infra
- Jensen Huang: a 1GW NVIDIA AI factory costs $50-60B but generates ~$50B in annual rental revenue — rohanpaul_ai · 2026-09-17
- Ilya warns neoclouds' weak cybersecurity invites rogue AI agents to hijack compute — Miles_Brundage · 2026-09-17
- AMD's free AI Developer Program: $100 cloud credits, Discord access, hardware raffles — wkmyrhang · 2026-09-17
- After AWS me-central-1 loss, dev jokes about explaining the outage to Codex weekly — andersonbcdefg · 2026-09-17
- Crusoe runs 512 AMD MI355X GPUs at 5.75M tok/s in largest MLPerf inference entry — wkmyrhang · 2026-09-17
- Perovskite could lift solar efficiency ceiling from 30% to 45% — and give the US a shot against China — kyliebytes · 2026-09-17