Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead
Why Hacker News recommends it
The go-to citation in Moore's Law threads, a convincing counterargument from a top CPU designer.
What it is
Jim Keller gives a UC Berkeley EECS colloquium arguing that Moore's Law is not dead. He surveys upcoming technologies and the multiple innovation curves that can keep transistor density and performance scaling.
Recommended by 7 HN commenters across 8 different months, 2019 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec systemvoltage · 2021-12 · on “Moore's Law, AI, and the pace of progress”
They've been saying Moore's law is dead for 20+ years. Reasons usually quoted for Moore's law's death are quite narrowly focused on a particular technology stack, whereas semiconductor fabrication happens on a complex web of technologies all moving forward with their own S-curves. It is worth watching Jim Keller's lecture at UC Berkeley literally titled "Moore's law is not dead". He talks on a different level alltogether and far more convincing than the pedantic look at the details that enable Moore's law. [this video]
Strong rec timschmidt · 2025-12 · on “DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf]”
Someone always crawls out of the woodwork to repeat this supposed "fact" which hasn't been true for the entire half-century it's been repeated. Jim Keller (designer of most of the great CPUs of the last couple decades) gave a convincing presentation several years ago about just how not-true it is: [this video] Everything he says in it still applies today. Intel struggled for a decade, and folks think that means Moore's law died. But TSMC and Samsung just kept iterating. And hopefully Intel's 18a process will see them back in the game.
Recommends lliamander · 2019-10 · on “AMD Rome – is it for real? Architecture and initial HPC performance”
There's a good talk by him about how Moore's law isn't dead: [this video] . Obviously, people have different ideas about what they mean when they say "Moore's law is/is not dead", but I appreciate Jim's point that even if the current innovation curves we've been riding are slowing down, there are other innovation curves that we can take advantage of, and that the combination these curves mean that there's still plenty of innovation and improvement to be made in processor design. Of course, the question of whether the x86 architecture will be the foundation for that future improvement remains to be seen. ARM and RISC-V are both eating x86 from below, and the fact that both of the processor archite
Recommends WillPostForFood · 2019-11 · on “AMD is having its day”
Jim Keller recently spoke at UC, on the topic of Moore's law not being dead. Very impressive guy. [this video]
Recommends aklascheema · 2019-12 · on “Intel’s Manufacturing Roadmap from 2019 to 2029”
There is this interesting talk by Jim Keller. Talks about new approaches (different transistor tech, architecture, etc) to keep moores law going for another decade or so. You should defintely check it out if have time. [this video]
Recommends JB_Dev · 2023-12 · on “ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips”
I used to agree with you until I saw this presentation by Jim Keller, one of the biggest names in chip architecture. It really illustrates how many more options we have to improve performance. [this video]
Recommends gfody · 2024-03 · on “Moore on Moore – The past, present and uncertain future of Moore's Law”
Jim Keller gave a talk at Berkeley titled "Moore's Law is not dead" (2019) where he summarized a bunch of up and coming technologies that will enable the continued scaling of transistor density - [this video]
Recommends timschmidt · 2025-07 · on “TSMC to start building four new plants with 1.4nm technology”
> Moore's law is dead People have said this for decades. Jim Keller believes otherwise and brought receipts: [this video]