Moore's law—as we know it—just got a new lease of life. It's surprising that there has been so little discussion about this among the technorati.

Even though the original statement by Gordon Moore was: that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every 18 months, almost everyone thinks of Moore's law as the prediction that the performance of computers will double and the price will come down by 50 percent every 18 months. Amazingly, Gordon Moore's prediction has held for over 40 years. But, physics has been catching up with Moore's law and it has been under "threat" for at least the last five years because of the heat that's generated by faster chips with more and more transistors.

Here's a simplistic version of the story: For the last 15 years or so, performance enhancements have been achieved by running the clock on the computer chip faster and faster. Remember the 25 Megahertz Intel 486 chip? Its clock ran at the speed of 25 Megahertz or ticked 25 million times per second. Loosely speaking, every 25 millionth of a second, something happened in the chip. Today's fastest Intel chips run at 3 Gigahertz. Every 3 billionth of a second, the clock ticks and sets something in motion inside the chip.

As it turns out, increasing the clock speed also increases the heat generated within the chip. Measured in watts per square centimeter, the power flux inside an Intel Pentium IV chip is higher than that inside a nuclear reactor! To make matters worse, a physical phenomenon called thermal runaway makes heat dissipation inside a computer chip a self-critical problem and hence exponential—i.e., the higher the temperature at a transistor junction, the higher is the threshold leakage; therefore the heat dissipation becomes even higher. And as we pack more and more transistors per square centimeter every 18 months, heat generation has been increasing so fast that heat sinks can no longer keep up.

So, finally Intel is giving up. So is AMD. So are Sun and IBM.

Here's the punch line. The clock inside our processor chips will not be running any faster any longer. Does this mean Moore's law has finally been repealed? Has the clock literally stopped on Moore's law?