R. Colin Johnson at EE Times wrote that Moore’s Law is once again being predicted at the end of its life — but this time, the word is coming from an IBM Fellow named Carl Anderson.

Anderson, who’s involved Big Blue’s server products, spoke at the International Symposium on Physical Design 2009 conference, and said just like the railroad, car and aircraft industries, the computer chip industry will see an end to its exponential growth. Multicore processors may carry on for a while, but designers are starting to realize that they don’t need super-high-end processors in their machines, especially with the cost of research and design into the latest microprocessor chips.

Moore’s Law isn’t really a law at all. It’s an observation made and published by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore. He noticed that the transistors on microprocessors halved in size every 18 months (or so) and speed doubled. He’s revised the timeframe to about every two years, but microprocessor manufacturers have turned his observation into a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing newer, faster chips out the door at pretty regular intervals.