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How far can we push computing?

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On the evening of December 29, 1959, at an American Physical Society meeting at Caltech, the physicist Richard Feynman gave a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” on how we might manipulate and control things on an extremely small scale. There is no physical law stopping us from writing the entire Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin, he argued, or from storing every book ever written in something the size of a dust speck—or, ultimately, from arranging matter atom by atom.

1959年12月29日晚，在加州理工学院举行的美国物理学会会议上，物理学家理查德·费曼发表了题为《底部还有很大空间》的演讲，探讨了我们如何能在极小尺度上操纵和控制物质。他认为，没有任何物理定律能阻止我们将整部《大英百科全书》写在针头上，或者将有史以来写过的每一本书存储在尘埃大小的物体中，甚至最终实现原子级别的物质排列。

Biology already did versions of this (a living cell keeps its instructions in a wisp of DNA), so all of this was plainly permitted by the laws of physics. We simply had not built the tools yet. In other words, there was plenty of room at the bottom. He was right, and for decades we descended into that space almost for free.

生物学早已实现了类似的功能（活细胞将指令保存在一缕DNA中），因此这一切显然都是物理定律所允许的。我们只是尚未制造出相应的工具。换句话说，底部确实还有很大的空间。他是对的，几十年来，我们几乎不费吹灰之力就进入了那个领域。

The transistor—the switch at the heart of computer chips—repeatedly halved in size so that chips doubled in density; a computer that once filled a room now fits inside a watch. But that easy descent has now stalled, and the clearest sign is the buildout of data centers. Six of the biggest hyperscalers, the companies that run the world’s largest such facilities, are on track to spend more than $700 billion this year on computing infrastructure, about twice the record they set in 2025, pouring concrete and copper and silicon into new sites faster than the electrical grid can feed them.

晶体管——计算机芯片核心的开关——尺寸不断减半，使得芯片密度翻倍；曾经占据整个房间的计算机现在可以装进手表里。但这种轻松的下行趋势如今已经停滞，最明显的迹象就是数据中心的建设规模。全球六大超大规模云服务商（运营着全球最大的此类设施）今年在计算基础设施上的支出预计将超过7000亿美元，约为2025年创下的纪录的两倍，他们向新站点投入混凝土、铜和硅的速度，已经超过了电网的供电能力。

That buildout buys performance by brute force, adding more of what we already know how to make. The other kind of progress, the kind that made computer chips better, is the one that is quietly running out. The trend lines that tracked the dramatic improvements of the 20th-century information age are now bending—or breaking—with the dawn of the 21st century’s intelligence age.

这种建设是通过蛮力来换取性能，即增加我们已知如何制造的东西。而另一种进步，即那种让计算机芯片变得更好的进步，正在悄然耗尽。那些追踪20世纪信息时代巨大进步的趋势线，随着21世纪智能时代的到来，现在正在弯曲——甚至断裂。

Moore’s Law, which plots how densely transistors can be constructed on silicon, has slowed down; Dennard’s Law, which states that power consumption in a given patch of computer chip stays the same even as it gets more and more packed with smaller and smaller transistors, has ended; Koomey’s Law, which traces how much computation we can wring from each joule of energy, has begun to flag; Kryder’s Law, which describes how tightly bits can be packed to build magnetic storage, has slowed to a crawl; and Keck’s Law, which charts the exponential rise in the amount of information a single conventional optical fiber can carry, is flattening.

摩尔定律（描述硅片上晶体管的集成密度）已经放缓；登纳德缩放比例定律（指出在给定芯片区域内，即使晶体管变得越来越小、密度越来越高，功耗仍保持不变）已经终结；库米定律（追踪每焦耳能量能榨取多少计算量）已开始疲软；克莱德定律（描述磁存储中比特的紧密程度）已慢如蜗牛；而凯克定律（记录单根传统光纤所能承载的信息量的指数级增长）也正在趋于平缓。

But these scaling laws are merely observations about systems that we have engineered; they are not fundamental physical laws. The physical limits of computing and communications—dictated by quantum mechanics, general relativity, and information theory—lie far below anything in a data center today. The scaling laws chart the descent behind us. The fundamental physical limits chart the room that remains.

但这些缩放定律仅仅是对我们所设计系统的观察结果；它们并非基本的物理定律。计算和通信的物理极限——由量子力学、广义相对论和信息论所决定——远低于当今数据中心所能达到的水平。缩放定律描绘的是我们身后的下行路径，而基本的物理极限则描绘了尚存的空间。

Some of these limits may be far out of reach in practice. But they are still worth exploring, because the work pays twice: once in technology development and once in fundamental science. A proof-of-concept system that approaches a limit is at once a technology that forces stalled paradigms to give way and an experiment that deepens our understanding of the physical laws themselves.

其中一些极限在实践中可能遥不可及。但它们仍然值得探索，因为这项工作有双重回报：一是技术发展，二是基础科学。一个接近极限的概念验证系统，既是一种迫使停滞的范式让路的技术，也是一个加深我们对物理定律本身理解的实验。

The descent: During his 1959 lecture, Feynman offered two prizes of $1,000 each out of his own pocket. One would go to the first person to build a working electric motor smaller than a 0.4-millimeter cube. He expected the challenge to force someone to invent a genuinely new microtechnology. Instead, about a year later, a Caltech-trained engineer named William McLellan turned up with the motor built and running.

下行之路：在1959年的演讲中，费曼自掏腰包设立了两个1000美元的奖项。其中一个奖项将授予第一个制造出小于0.4毫米立方体的工作电动机的人。他希望这个挑战能促使某人发明一种真正的新微技术。然而，大约一年后，一位名叫威廉·麦克莱伦的加州理工学院培养的工程师带着制造好并能运转的电动机出现了。

The quarter-milligram machine, roughly the size of a grain of sand, had been assembled by hand with a toothpick and a watchmaker’s lathe, under a microscope. Feynman, by his own account, was only slightly disappointed. The prize had proved his point in the least interesting way imaginable. The room really was down there, but reaching this first milestone had taken no new technology at all—just an unusually patient man with steady hands.

这台四分之一毫克的机器大约只有沙粒大小，是在显微镜下用牙签和钟表匠的车床手工组装而成的。据费曼自己说，他只是感到有些失望。这个奖项以一种最无趣的方式证明了他的观点。底部确实有空间，但达到这个第一个里程碑根本不需要任何新技术——只需要一个格外耐心且手稳的人。

The second prize aged differently, and more instructively. It was offered to whoever could shrink a page of text by a factor of 25,000 in each direction, small enough for the whole Britannica to fit on a pinhead. That one stood unclaimed for a quarter of a century. It was finally won in 1985 by Tom Newman, a Stanford graduate student who used an electron-beam lithography machine—an ancestor of pattern-making tools used in chipmaking today—to transcribe the opening page of A Tale of Two Cities at the required scale.

第二个奖项的意义则不同，也更具启发性。它授予能够将一页文本在每个方向上缩小25000倍的人，使其小到足以将整部《大英百科全书》装进针头。这个奖项空缺了四分之一个世纪。直到1985年，斯坦福大学的研究生汤姆·纽曼才赢得了它，他使用了一台电子束光刻机（当今芯片制造中图案制作工具的鼻祖），按要求的比例转录了《双城记》的首页。

The descent was already well underway, however. The year before Feynman’s talk, Jack Kilby, newly hired at Texas Instruments and with no vacation yet to take, spent that July nearly alone in the lab while his colleagues enjoyed time off, and by that September he had wired together a transistor, a capacitor, and three resistors, all made from a single sliver of germanium. This proved that an entire circuit could be carved from one block of semiconductor.

然而，下行之路早已开启。在费曼演讲的前一年，刚被德州仪器聘用且尚未休假的杰克·基尔比，在同事们享受假期时，几乎独自在实验室度过了那个七月。到了九月，他已经将一个晶体管、一个电容器和三个电阻器连接在一起，所有这些都由一片锗制成。这证明了整个电路可以从一块半导体上雕刻出来。

The idea took off, and the number of components on a chip kept doubling on a schedule so regular that Gordon Moore, in a 1965 trade-magazine article, simply drew a line through the trend and extended it into the future. That line became Moore’s Law. Moore, though, never claimed transistors could shrink forever. He observed that at any given moment there is a certain number of components that makes each one of them as cheap as possible to manufacture. In 1965, that number was 50. Put in too few transistors and you waste the chip; cram in too many and manufacturing errors multiply and yields.

这个想法迅速流行起来，芯片上的组件数量以如此规律的时间表翻倍，以至于戈登·摩尔在1965年的一篇行业杂志文章中，直接画了一条线来代表这一趋势，并将其延伸到未来。那条线就成了摩尔定律。然而，摩尔从未声称晶体管可以永远缩小。他观察到，在任何特定时刻，都存在一个特定的组件数量，使得每个组件的制造成本尽可能低。1965年，这个数字是50。晶体管放得太少会浪费芯片；塞得太多则会导致制造错误增加，成品率下降。