Moore's Law held true over the next four decades thanks in part to dramatic improvements in the manufacturing processes used to make silicon chips. Chip fabricators like Intel and AMD and Samsung and TSMC—and many others that have come and gone—kept developing more and more advanced ways to cram more transistors into the same amount of physical space, making that continued doubling of transistor counts over time feasible.
Not everyone will declare in so many words that Moore's Law is "dead," and any given tech exec's opinion on that says just as much about that exec's motivations as anything else (Nvidia's Jensen Huang, who can sell GPUs for more money if Moore's Law is "dead,"
will tell you it's dead; Intel execs who are trying to convince you that Intel is on the road to being competitive manufacturer of high-end chips will
contest that).
But the fact remains that progress in new manufacturing technologies
has slowed, and developing new ones has gotten dramatically more time-consuming and
expensive. And unless people find a way to make transistors sub-atomic, we'll hit the boundaries of actual laws sooner or later: the laws of physics.
How does this relate to game consoles? We're getting to that.
A side effect of fitting more transistors into a given area is that power usage also goes down, because you need to use less electrical current to switch those transistors on and off. Taking any given silicon chip and making it on a newer, more efficient manufacturing process is commonly called a "die shrink," because you're making a functionally equivalent silicon die that uses less physical space.
For computer processors and GPUs, those power savings are usually "spent" by adding transistors, either to improve performance or add new capabilities—that's why a processor from 2020 can perform dramatically better than one from 2010 and consume about the same amount of power.
But game consoles are meant to be static, stable targets for game developers to aim at, so that their internal testing of a game and how it runs is always indicative of how the game will run on everyone's consoles.
So when you shrink the chips in a console, the benefit comes almost exclusively in the form of smaller physical chips that draw less power and put out less heat. You're also potentially getting more chips out of a single wafer of silicon, which theoretically can lower the price per chip (if the manufacturing process itself doesn't cost a ton more money).
arstechnica.com
