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From an interesting historical perspective, I mark the end of Moore's Law in 2001 with Intel's prediction of a 5GHz "Netburst" in 2005, which could not keep its
by ChuckMcM 7y ago
From an interesting historical perspective, I mark the end of Moore's Law in 2001 with Intel's prediction of a 5GHz "Netburst" in 2005, which could not keep itself from melting. Somewhere I have a marketing road map of 5GHz in 2005, 10GHz in 2010. It was aspirational of course, but seeing what had to happen between then and now in order to get a chip that runs at 5GHz all the time based on their architecture is illuminating of the challenges they face.
- earenndil 7y agoThat's an overexaggeration, IMO. Moore's law didn't really start losing steam until 2014-2015.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoPerhaps, and perhaps it is just a difference of how we internalize what "Moores Law" means. Granted when Gordon postulated it, he was strictly talking about numbers of transistors, and the implication was that transistors were a leading indicator of performance. Since I lean more on the 'performance' side of things, that was the end of 'single thread performance scaling', or put another way, that was when the performance of a single core stopped doubling every 18 months or so. And everyone switched over to dealing with Amdahl's law instead.
- ricardobeat 7y agoIf you look at transistor count, yes. But single-core performance has stagnated since ~2003, that’s when we hit the 3Ghz mark. Progress since then has been a lot slower.
- earenndil 7y agoGHz are basically meaningless. The 2GHz CPU in my laptop is an order of magnitude faster than anything 3GHz from 2003.
- ricardobeat 7y agoTrue for practical uses, most of the performance increase comes from more bandwidth and parallelism. But it's a mere 2-4x increase for single-thread performance, over 15+ years: https://preshing.com/images/integer-perf.png https://preshing.com/images/integer-perf.png
- fwip 7y agoIPC's gone up quite a bit though, right?
- chimpburger 7y agoMoore's law is specifically about transistor count/density only.
- dfrage 7y agoAmplifying the other current replies, what you're bemoaning and what slagged the Netburst "marchitecture" is the end of MOSFET Dennard Scaling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling Moore's Law is "the number of lowest cost transistors doubles at X interval", and 193nm UV immersion lithography limits have been hitting it hard lately (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_patterning). But chip manufacturing equipment makers haven't run out of tricks quite yet.