Per your link, Moore's law also doesn't state anything about density. Density is just one of the ways "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.", i.e. Moore's law only ever stated transistor count per a given price roughly doubled every 2 years.
Moore's original article on the topic in 1965[0], and the same with additional context interview form 2005[1].
> "The original Moore’s Law came out of an article I published in 1965...I had
no idea this was going to be an accurate prediction, but amazingly enough instead of ten doubling, we got 9 over the 10 years, but still followed pretty well along the curve. And one of my friends, Dr. Carver Mead, a Professor at Cal Tech, dubbed this Moore’s Law. So the original one was doubling every year in complexity now in 1975, I had to go back and revisit this... and I noticed we were losing one of the key factors that let us make this remarkable rate of progress... and it was one that was contributing about half of the advances were making. So then I changed it to looking forward, we’d only be doubling every couple of years, and that was really the two predictions I made. Now the one that gets quoted is doubling every 18 months...I think it was Dave House, who used to work here at Intel, did that, he decided that the complexity was doubling every two years and the transistors were getting faster, that computer performance was going to double every 18 months... but that’s what got on Intel’s Website... and everything else. I never said 18 months that’s the way it often gets quoted."
Anyways, See slide 13 here[2] (2021). "Pop-culture" Moore's law stated that the number of transistors per area will double every n months. That's still happening. Besides, neither Moore's law nor Dennard scaling are even the most critical scaling law to be concerned about...
...that's probably Koomey's law[3][5], which looks well on track to hold for the rest of our careers. But eventually as computing approaches the Landauer limit[4] it must asymptotically level off as well. Probably starting around year 2050. Then we'll need to actually start "doing more with less" and minimizing the number of computations done for specific tasks. That will begin a very very productive time for custom silicon that is very task-specialized and low-level algorithmic optimization.
[2] Shows that Moore's law (green line) is expected to start leveling off soon, but it has not yet slowed down. It also shows Koomey's law (orange line) holding indefinitely. Fun fact, if Koomey's law holds, we'll have exaflop power in <20W in about 20 years. Which should be enough for people to create ChatGPT-4 in their pocket.
Thank you for the detailed writeup with sources, I enjoyed this. I'd somehow never heard of Koomey's law despite working in tech, this is very interesting and directly relevant to the widespread deployment of AI (biological neural networks still blow silicon out of the water for computations per joule).
