Can first-principles thinking resolve the bottleneck of Moore's Law in chip design?

I find this question very interesting, and we can discuss it in simple terms.

First, you have to take "First Principles Thinking" and "Moore's Law" off their pedestals.

Moore's Law, simply put, is an industry observation: roughly every two years, the number of transistors on a chip of the same size can double, and performance improves accordingly. This is more like an "aspirational goal" or a summary of "development speed," rather than a physical law. It's like setting a goal for yourself to double your savings every year. For the first few years, you might actually achieve it by working hard and saving diligently. But eventually, your salary growth will slow down, and there will be a limit to how much you can save, at which point this "savings doubling law" will naturally become invalid.

Chips are now facing this very situation. Transistors are already almost as small as atoms; if they get any smaller, electrons become unruly and start scattering everywhere (quantum tunneling effect), generating alarming amounts of heat, and the cost becomes prohibitively high. Therefore, trying to continue down the same path, relying on "making transistors smaller" to sustain Moore's Law, has essentially reached its limit. This is the so-called "bottleneck."

So, what can First Principles Thinking do?

Its core isn't to "solve" an old law, but to "start anew."

You can understand it this way: our original task was "to build more habitable houses on limited land."

• Traditional thinking (continuing Moore's Law): Build houses smaller and more crowded. From large villas, to townhouses, to small apartments, and then to capsule hotels. Now, capsule hotels can barely get any smaller, so what do we do?
• First Principles Thinking: It would first ask some fundamental questions:
  1. What is our objective? — It's "to house people," not "to build houses."
  2. What is the essence of "housing people"? — To provide a safe, stable private space.
  3. To achieve this essence, are there other ways besides "building small houses on the ground"?

Asking these questions opens up new avenues:

• Can we build upwards? (Corresponding to 3D stacking technology in chips, turning chips from "single-story houses" into "multi-story buildings")
• Can we build on water? (Corresponding to finding new materials, not using sand (silicon), but switching to something else, like carbon nanotubes or graphene, which are superior materials for transistors)
• Do we absolutely need "houses"? Can we invent an "anti-gravity personal force field" so everyone has their own space? (Corresponding to entirely new computing architectures, such as neuromorphic computing that mimics the brain, or quantum computing that fundamentally changes the principles of computation)

So you see, First Principles Thinking isn't about stubbornly pushing the "making houses smaller" approach to "save" the law of "houses getting smaller." Its role is to return to the most fundamental need of "housing people" and then devise entirely new, disruptive solutions.

The conclusion is:

First Principles Thinking cannot "solve" the bottleneck of Moore's Law, because the path Moore's Law describes—improving performance by shrinking transistors—is itself nearing its end; it can't be saved.

However, it can "bypass" this bottleneck, pointing towards entirely new and potentially more promising paths for chip development. It tells us that when one path reaches its end, instead of always thinking about how to extend it by another meter, we should go back to the starting point and see if there are other directions we can take.

In essence, it's not a panacea for prolonging an old era, but a key to unlocking a new one. Future chip advancements might no longer be measured by "nanometers" or "transistor count," but by their energy efficiency in specific tasks (like AI computing) or their ability to solve problems classical computers cannot. And these are precisely what First Principles Thinking is driving.