Every year, the quantity of data created throughout the globe doubles. As data and its collection and transport transcend beyond stationary computers, as many gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, and exabytes are created, processed, and gathered in 2018 as in all of human history previously to 2018.
Smart Phones, Smart Homes, Smart Clothes, Smart Factories, Smart Cities... the Internet is connecting numerous "smart" objects. And they're generating a growing amount of their own data.
- As a result, the demand for computer chip performance is increasing at an exponential rate.
- In fact, during the previous 50 years, their computational capacity has about quadrupled every 18 months.
- The number of components per unit space on integrated circuits grows in accordance with a law proposed in 1965 by Gordon Moore, Intel's future co-founder.
- The reason that the overall volume of data is growing faster than individual computer performance is due to the fact that the number of data-producing devices is growing at the same rate.
Concerns that "Moore's Law" will lose its validity at some time date back 25 years. The reason for this is because component miniaturization is causing issues:
- As electrons move through progressively smaller and more numerous circuits, the chips get more hot. But there's a bigger issue: electronic structures have shrunk to fewer than 10 nanometers in size. This is around 40 atoms.
- The principles of quantum physics rule in transistors this small, rendering electron behavior completely unpredictable. Moore himself forecast the conclusion of his legislation in 2007, giving it another 10 to 15 years.
- Indeed, for the first time ever, the semiconductor industry's 2016 plan for chip development for the next year did not follow Moore's law.
- However, thanks to nano-engineers' ingenuity, it is conceivable that even smaller and quicker electronic structures will be achievable in the future, delaying the end of “classical” shrinking for a few more years. But then what?
How long can we depend on the ability to simply increase the performance of computer chips?
The fact that Moore's Law will no longer be true does not indicate that we have reached the end of the road in terms of improving information processing efficiency.
However, there is a technique to make computers that are significantly quicker, even billions of times more powerful: quantum computers.
- These computers operate in a very different manner than traditional computers.
- Rather than ignoring electron quantum qualities and the challenges associated with ever-increasing component downsizing, a quantum computer overtly uses these qualities in how it processes data.
- We might tackle issues that are much too complicated for today's "supercomputers" in physics, biology, weather research, and other fields with the aid of such devices.
- The development of quantum computers might spark a technological revolution that will dominate the twenty-first century in the same way that digital circuits dominated the twentieth.
- Quantum computers are expected to offer computation speeds that are unimaginable today.
~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan
You may also want to read more about Quantum Computing here.
