4 ms·

Moore's Law is about transistor count, not clock frequency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2018.png

by clarry 7y ago

Moore's Law is about transistor count, not clock frequency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2018.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law#/media/File:Moor...

coldtea 7y ago
That's the "technically correct" version nobody cares about. What people cared about, and referred to as "Moore's law" was the cheap automatic doubling of performance (mostly due to clock frequency increases). That's long gone with multicore...
- newswasboring 7y ago
  That's such a reductive argument. I work in semiconductor manufacturing and trust me nobody cares about clock frequency.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    That's a "virtue out of necessity" kind of situation -- why would they care for that now that it wont advance as much anymore? Back in the day though, all the "semiconductor manufacturing" industry touted and advertised strongly was its annual clock frequency advances (similar to how the camera industry switched from touting megapixel advances to low-light performance, video codecs, and other features).
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      AMD used to name their chips after the speed increase over some 1MHz chip to highlight their IPC advantage over Intel.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  That's Dennard scaling, which indeed failed in the early 2000s. But Moore's law has been quite relevant in other ways, even in the post-Dennard scaling world - even if you discount multiple cores, I don't think "nobody cares about" increased memory/cache sizes, cheap GPU-like accelerators, specialized blocks for e.g. media decompression etc. etc.! If that sort of progress starts slowing down dramatically (and arguably it has in the past few years, especially if you take costs/economic feasibility into account and don't just look at the leading nodes) it's an even bigger change for the industry.
- Nokinside 7y ago
  Hey, just because layman don't care does not mean that there are not people who actually care and use terminology correctly and discuss it. You should never be proud about dumbing down concepts in Hacker News. This is not consumer forum.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    >Hey, just because layman don't care does not mean that there are not people who actually care and use terminology correctly and discuss it. What matters is the way the grandparent meant it, since that's what we are discussing here, not the etymology or lexicographical definition of the term. That said... >You should never be proud about dumbing down concepts in Hacker News. This is not consumer forum. Thanks for the sanctimonious sermon. If one actually did their research they would find out that it's not just some "layman doesn't care" thing, but that industry insiders, pundits, and others, have used Moore's law in several different ways over the decades, regardless of the original observation by Moore. Also note that the law was since forever linked with performance increases. Wikipedia: "Moore did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". Rather, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months. Note also despite the name it's neither a physical "law", nor a scientific or technical term or high concept to be closely guarded from laymen. It's just a casual ad-hoc statistical observation.
    - Nokinside 7y ago
      Everyone can go and check what was said: http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~agrawvd/COURSE/E7770_Spr07/READ/Gordon_Moore_1975_Speech.pdf http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~agrawvd/COURSE/E7770_Spr07/READ/G... It's all about complexity per chip. Complexity as number of components per chip.
      - coldtea 7y ago
        Not what TFA said, what "Quarrelsome" said that started this subthread: "I thought Moore's Law effectively ended over a decade ago when we switched to multi-core chips? This ruined all sorts of single-threaded architectures that relied on these performance increases over time and resulted in programmers being less able to realise performance gains in released chips without having to rework their code to accommodate the change." To which someone pedantically replied that Moore's Law is not about performance increases, but transistor count -- to which I replied that that's just one way it has been used (and not the most popular one either, or the more pertinent to the grandparent's question).
rhinoceraptor 7y ago
Moore observed (what is now called) Dennard scaling in his original paper: that smaller processes allow smaller power consumption (and therefore higher clock speeds).
Symmetry 7y ago
I have a photocopy of a memo from Gordon Moore as part of my computer systems lectures notes that endorses a broader meaning of Moore's law. And more to the point from the descriptivist standpoint, the phrase "Moore's Law" was first used in '75 shortly after people started thinking about Dennard scaling and I don't think there was every a time that the phrase was consistently used only to talk about transistor count since that, in practice for the first 30 years, always went together with transistor density, clock speed, and power efficiency.

by clarry 7y ago

coldtea 7y ago

That's the "technically correct" version nobody cares about. What people cared about, and referred to as "Moore's law" was the cheap automatic doubling of performance (mostly due to clock frequency increases). That's long gone with multicore...

newswasboring 7y ago
That's such a reductive argument. I work in semiconductor manufacturing and trust me nobody cares about clock frequency.
- coldtea 7y ago
  That's a "virtue out of necessity" kind of situation -- why would they care for that now that it wont advance as much anymore? Back in the day though, all the "semiconductor manufacturing" industry touted and advertised strongly was its annual clock frequency advances (similar to how the camera industry switched from touting megapixel advances to low-light performance, video codecs, and other features).
  - wongarsu 7y ago
    AMD used to name their chips after the speed increase over some 1MHz chip to highlight their IPC advantage over Intel.
zozbot234 7y ago
That's Dennard scaling, which indeed failed in the early 2000s. But Moore's law has been quite relevant in other ways, even in the post-Dennard scaling world - even if you discount multiple cores, I don't think "nobody cares about" increased memory/cache sizes, cheap GPU-like accelerators, specialized blocks for e.g. media decompression etc. etc.! If that sort of progress starts slowing down dramatically (and arguably it has in the past few years, especially if you take costs/economic feasibility into account and don't just look at the leading nodes) it's an even bigger change for the industry.
Nokinside 7y ago
Hey, just because layman don't care does not mean that there are not people who actually care and use terminology correctly and discuss it. You should never be proud about dumbing down concepts in Hacker News. This is not consumer forum.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >Hey, just because layman don't care does not mean that there are not people who actually care and use terminology correctly and discuss it. What matters is the way the grandparent meant it, since that's what we are discussing here, not the etymology or lexicographical definition of the term. That said... >You should never be proud about dumbing down concepts in Hacker News. This is not consumer forum. Thanks for the sanctimonious sermon. If one actually did their research they would find out that it's not just some "layman doesn't care" thing, but that industry insiders, pundits, and others, have used Moore's law in several different ways over the decades, regardless of the original observation by Moore. Also note that the law was since forever linked with performance increases. Wikipedia: "Moore did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". Rather, David House, an Intel colleague, had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months. Note also despite the name it's neither a physical "law", nor a scientific or technical term or high concept to be closely guarded from laymen. It's just a casual ad-hoc statistical observation.
  - Nokinside 7y ago
    Everyone can go and check what was said: http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~agrawvd/COURSE/E7770_Spr07/READ/Gordon_Moore_1975_Speech.pdf http://www.eng.auburn.edu/~agrawvd/COURSE/E7770_Spr07/READ/G... It's all about complexity per chip. Complexity as number of components per chip.
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Not what TFA said, what "Quarrelsome" said that started this subthread: "I thought Moore's Law effectively ended over a decade ago when we switched to multi-core chips? This ruined all sorts of single-threaded architectures that relied on these performance increases over time and resulted in programmers being less able to realise performance gains in released chips without having to rework their code to accommodate the change." To which someone pedantically replied that Moore's Law is not about performance increases, but transistor count -- to which I replied that that's just one way it has been used (and not the most popular one either, or the more pertinent to the grandparent's question).

rhinoceraptor 7y ago

Moore observed (what is now called) Dennard scaling in his original paper: that smaller processes allow smaller power consumption (and therefore higher clock speeds).

Symmetry 7y ago

I have a photocopy of a memo from Gordon Moore as part of my computer systems lectures notes that endorses a broader meaning of Moore's law. And more to the point from the descriptivist standpoint, the phrase "Moore's Law" was first used in '75 shortly after people started thinking about Dennard scaling and I don't think there was every a time that the phrase was consistently used only to talk about transistor count since that, in practice for the first 30 years, always went together with transistor density, clock speed, and power efficiency.