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To repeat: Moore’s law is about transistor count, not size. From the Wikipedia article linked in the comment above yours: “Moore's law is the observation that t

To repeat: Moore’s law is about transistor count, not size. From the Wikipedia article linked in the comment above yours: “Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.” Transistors can stay the exact same size for twenty years as long as the die size grows, and Moore’s law still holds.

opencl 8y ago
But the die size didn't grow at nearly that rate, large dies remain very expensive to make. For example, comparing the HD7970 and RX 390X, similarly positioned GPUs released 4 years apart in 2011 and 2015, transistor count grew ~50% from 4.3 billion to 6.2 billion. https://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-revie... https://www.anandtech.com/show/9387/amd-radeon-300-series/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9387/amd-radeon-300-series/3
- SlowBro 8y ago
  > But the die size didn't grow at nearly that rate, large dies remain very expensive to make. But again, did transistors double in count on any processor, not just GPUs? If so, Moore held. Yes, according to this chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#/media/File%3AMoore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2016.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#/media/File%3AMo...
  - opencl 8y ago
    I mean if you want to go with the highest transistor count chip currently in existence, that would obviously be the 512Gb flash chips with ~170 billion transistors. Or if you want to constrain it to 'processors' that would be the 30 billion transistor Altera FPGAs. Which have been available for 3 years. No CPU yet has exceeded the 10 billion transistor count of the Sparc M7, also released 3 years ago. The Tesla P100, two years old, retains the highest GPU transistor count at 15 billion. It's meaningless to compare these totally different types of chips that end up with extremely different transistor densities on the same node due to the wiring requirements.
    - SlowBro 8y ago
      I'm just the messenger. Apparently there is some sort of criteria for what a "dense integrated circuit" is for the chart previously pasted, and apparently all of the listed processors passed the required criteria for charting the law through time. What that criteria is, I couldn't tell you. Couldn't find it on the Wikipedia page. "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years." (Wikipedia)
      - opencl 8y ago
        Yes. I read the wikipedia quote the first time you posted it. No need to say the exact same thing 5 times. The chart is clearly restricted to CPUs and ends in 2016. It's 2018 and the top chip on that chart still has the highest transistor count of any CPU on the market. Absolutely zero increase in transistor count for the type of chip that would go on that chart. Every category is seeing the exact same stagnation, Moore's law has been nowhere close to being matched in the past few years. Every chipmaker is struggling with their new nodes and falling way behind schedule on improvements. High-volume chips that normal people buy are really a far more realistic and useful barometer for Moore's law, and again you see the stagnation. Skylake and Kaby Lake are near-identical chips. Coffee Lake is ~25% bigger. There is no doubling of transistor counts going on in anything resembling an 18 month time frame.
        SlowBro 8y ago
        Okay, so the comment is then that you believe Moore's law no longer holds because for the past two years transistor counts on CPUs have not increased. On that basis, I might agree. Not (as you were stating earlier) about the sizes of the transistors themselves, or about GPUs from 2011 to 2015, or about 512Gb flash chips. None of that applied to this conversation, hence the desire to repeat myself. Thank you for finally clearing that up. Now that we're finally on the same page, I might agree. Are there no CPUs with higher transistor counts out there? Maybe ones you are not aware of yet?
        8y ago

opencl 8y ago

But the die size didn't grow at nearly that rate, large dies remain very expensive to make. For example, comparing the HD7970 and RX 390X, similarly positioned GPUs released 4 years apart in 2011 and 2015, transistor count grew ~50% from 4.3 billion to 6.2 billion. https://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-revie... https://www.anandtech.com/show/9387/amd-radeon-300-series/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/9387/amd-radeon-300-series/3

SlowBro 8y ago
> But the die size didn't grow at nearly that rate, large dies remain very expensive to make. But again, did transistors double in count on any processor, not just GPUs? If so, Moore held. Yes, according to this chart: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#/media/File%3AMoore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2016.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#/media/File%3AMo...
- opencl 8y ago
  I mean if you want to go with the highest transistor count chip currently in existence, that would obviously be the 512Gb flash chips with ~170 billion transistors. Or if you want to constrain it to 'processors' that would be the 30 billion transistor Altera FPGAs. Which have been available for 3 years. No CPU yet has exceeded the 10 billion transistor count of the Sparc M7, also released 3 years ago. The Tesla P100, two years old, retains the highest GPU transistor count at 15 billion. It's meaningless to compare these totally different types of chips that end up with extremely different transistor densities on the same node due to the wiring requirements.
  - SlowBro 8y ago
    I'm just the messenger. Apparently there is some sort of criteria for what a "dense integrated circuit" is for the chart previously pasted, and apparently all of the listed processors passed the required criteria for charting the law through time. What that criteria is, I couldn't tell you. Couldn't find it on the Wikipedia page. "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years." (Wikipedia)
    - opencl 8y ago
      Yes. I read the wikipedia quote the first time you posted it. No need to say the exact same thing 5 times. The chart is clearly restricted to CPUs and ends in 2016. It's 2018 and the top chip on that chart still has the highest transistor count of any CPU on the market. Absolutely zero increase in transistor count for the type of chip that would go on that chart. Every category is seeing the exact same stagnation, Moore's law has been nowhere close to being matched in the past few years. Every chipmaker is struggling with their new nodes and falling way behind schedule on improvements. High-volume chips that normal people buy are really a far more realistic and useful barometer for Moore's law, and again you see the stagnation. Skylake and Kaby Lake are near-identical chips. Coffee Lake is ~25% bigger. There is no doubling of transistor counts going on in anything resembling an 18 month time frame.
      - SlowBro 8y ago
        Okay, so the comment is then that you believe Moore's law no longer holds because for the past two years transistor counts on CPUs have not increased. On that basis, I might agree. Not (as you were stating earlier) about the sizes of the transistors themselves, or about GPUs from 2011 to 2015, or about 512Gb flash chips. None of that applied to this conversation, hence the desire to repeat myself. Thank you for finally clearing that up. Now that we're finally on the same page, I might agree. Are there no CPUs with higher transistor counts out there? Maybe ones you are not aware of yet?
        8y ago