5 ms·
It depends what you call Moore's Law. For me, Moore's Law was essentially that the cost per transistor was divided by two every 18 month. Nowadays, it's not tru
by boyadjian 7y ago
It depends what you call Moore's Law. For me, Moore's Law was essentially that the cost per transistor was divided by two every 18 month. Nowadays, it's not true anymore. But of course, it doesn't mean that progress has stopped.
- Fnoord 7y agoYou wrote: > [..] divided by two every 18 months [..] Wikipedia wrote: > [..] whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit [..] Godfrey Cheng, Head of Global Marketing, TSMC wrote: > [..] The number of transistors in an integrated device or chip doubles about every 2 years. [..] (Even if we ignore the difference on the cost versus number of transistors or components.) 12 months, 18 months, 24 months. How long is it? I have no clue with regards to the answer. It seems to me we first need to agree on the definition of a law before we can discuss it.
- kingosticks 7y ago> Moore also affirmed he never said transistor count would double every 18 months, as is commonly said. Initially, he said transistors on a chip would double every year. He then recalibrated it to every two years in 1975. David House, an Intel executive at the time, noted that the changes would cause computer performance to double every 18 months. From https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-to-roll-on-for-another-decade/ https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-to-roll-on-for-another-... (a source for the the Wikipedia page).
- boyadjian 7y ago18 month or 24 month, this is not very important. I was essentially talking about the fact that the cost per transistor was steadily going down, which is almost finished now.
- tim333 7y agoIs there any data on the cost per transistor not going down? They seem to be able to pack an awful lot onto chips these days, the current record apparently being Samsungs 1tb memory chip with 2 trillion.
- mrep 7y agoI cannot find a source for this outside of HN, but I have read here that R&D costs to build the next generations fabrication plants double each iteration which limits the total number of sustainable independent chipmakers. Currently, only 3 are left (TSMC, Samsung and Intel) and they all might give up within a few generations when it gets too expensive to scale down further.
- xiphias2 7y agoIt's quite easy to compute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count 2019 - Epyc ROME: 32B transistors 2009 - Six-core Opteron 2400 - 0.9B transistors (32/0.9)^(1/5) = 2.04, so it seems that Moore's law is actually working well.
- rrss 7y agoRome exists in a gray area between "single integrated device" and "9 integrated devices tightly coupled together."
- robdachshund 7y agoI think it's a bit dubious to look at it that way. Claiming the law is dead implies that increasing performance at the rate we used to is now impossible. I agree that we are not able to just keep increasing density to maintain this pattern, but we are able to do so with other methods. So while "Moore's law is dead" in a semantic sense, it's not dead in the sense that we can still maintain performance gains if you use other methods than increasing density alone. I think this distinction is important. Intel declared the law dead and used it as an excuse to avoid innovating when they had no competition. AMDs zen 3 launch proves that we can still achieve architectural leaps in line with Moore's law, but withou relying solely on the process size.
- perl4ever 7y agoI don't see what difference 12/18/24 makes, as it's still exponential regardless.
- Fnoord 7y agoBig difference is impact of the law. If it was once 100 years it was also still exponential.