The Mystery of Computer Parts Doubling in 18 Months

[theallknower]

how come some computer parts double they're power once in like 18 months or so?
it's kind of weird...alwais +100% and in 18 months or so...for example take the RAM memory...they came like this(in MB):
8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096,8192!
I didn't cheked,but the 16 GB RAM stick might be allready availabe(the 18 months have pased)...so how come?

 

[mgb_phys]

Money.
Generally the cost of making silicon depends on the area.
As you make a part 1/2 as big you can fit 4x as many on the same area of a wafer for the same cost.

 

[LURCH]

Just chalk it up to the cleverness of humankind. Moore's law seemed overly optmistic to a lot of people at first, and every once in a while some new frontier of engineering comes up against a barrier that looks like it will put a stop to this rate of increase, but some clever fellow allways finds a way to overcome the obsticle, and someone else comes up with an improvement on that guy's solution, and the rapid advancement continues with no end in sight.

 

[Proton Soup]

yeah, but without some new physics, they'll hit a brick wall wrt to moore's law, soon.

the next big thing looks like it will be parallelization, tho. we may not be able to sustain the current rate of processor speed and transistor density, but we can make more of them. already, you've got home PCs with dual processing cores, and video boards with 128 or so cores. the age of supercomputers on your desktop with 128 processors is just around the corner. and maybe we don't want this, there are already concerns voiced about it. personally, i don't think we can stop it. we've already exported all the technology to do it. perhaps we will be the ones finding we can't import the latest and greatest technology.

 

[theallknower]

Just chalk it up to the cleverness of humankind. Moore's law seemed overly optmistic to a lot of people at first, and every once in a while some new frontier of engineering comes up against a barrier that looks like it will put a stop to this rate of increase, but some clever fellow allways finds a way to overcome the obsticle, and someone else comes up with an improvement on that guy's solution, and the rapid advancement continues with no end in sight.

it is natural to evolve,but I find it very unlikley to have double power at every 18 months(also,it's kind of strange to consider this a law,because it dosn't have a certan background,it should be rather a prediction)
imagine you buy a car with a top speed of 100 mph...in 18 months a new car will be avalable with a top speed of 200 mph,in another 18 months 400mph,800mph,1600mph,3200mph and so on,till c...(witch reminds me of a funny thing I saw on tv...a group of policemen were asigned with a radar to give speed tickets,and they found that a car was driving with 500 km/h,and the police was sued:) )
the only option that might've work is that they could alwais produce 8GB RAM sticks,but they started from 8 MB to gain as much money as posible,but this failes,because others would sale a better version...
I wonder how a computer would look line in 1 milion years:)
(if more's law would still be valid,you could buy youself a RAM stick of 16^666666 GB,required to play diablo 100000(considering a new diablo apears in 10 years)
till then they would anyway run out of names...if you go to buy a procesor or something,you have to ask something like "scuse me,do you have a super hiper extra mega turbo platinum edition procesor?)