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Moore's Law was originally about the number of transistors per unit area and that has absolutely stalled. They are comparing 72 and 64 core processors to singl
by Jweb_Guru 6y ago
Moore's Law was originally about the number of transistors per unit area and that has absolutely stalled. They are comparing 72 and 64 core processors to single core ones to try to make the claim that "transistors per chip" are doubling in accordance with Moore's Law (which they still aren't--you can plot a line through and see that we are falling short of linear on a log scale). Are you really arguing that simply making microprocessors larger, ignoring cost and density, is an improvement in processing power (especially for the average end user, who is on a machine with only a handful of cores)?
Look at the actual transistor sizes. In 2009 we were at 32 nm. We're now in 2021, so if transistor sizes had kept halving every two years we would be at 0.5 nm. Clearly, we are not anywhere close to that--we're off by a factor of 10, and that's only with the very latest and greatest manufacturing processes that almost no consumer chips use (not to mention that the 5nm process used by AMD is not the same as a 5nm process used by Intel). As the article itself notes:
> Microprocessor architects report that semiconductor advancement has slowed industry-wide since around 2010, below the pace predicted by Moore's law.
Of course transistor companies are happy to claim that they are secretly keeping pace, but in terms of commercially available microprocessors it is unquestionably false. Anyone using the "doubling every two years" approximation to decide how much more computing power is available now than 10 years ago, or how much more will be available 10 years in the future, is not going to arrive at correct figures.
- grkvlt 6y agoMoore's law was stated originally as the doublinkd of the number of transistors per integrated circuit per year, later modified by him to a doublingevery two years. Reading the article where he first proposed the rule (cited in the wikipedia article linked in parent) this confirms that definition, as opposed to transistors per unit area or other measures.
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoNo, it was per area per economic unit originally, and the definition was changed in ways that don't make a lot of sense. Clearly the performance of a 72-core machine has little relevance to personal computing.
- ebalit 6y agoNot commenting on Moore's law, but I don't see how the last part is true when GPU have become a main component of personal computing. They are in fact becoming more and more important with the need for AI inference and always more demanding rendering tasks (both in resolution and frame rate).
- Jweb_Guru 6y agoThe vast majority of software isn't written for the GPU. That's still true today, and it will likely be true in ten years as well. Unless we reach a point where that changes (and most software can fit its restricted paradigm), we should compare apples to apples. If we were talking solely about GPU performance, I would be more inclined to agree with claims about "80x more processing power than 10 years ago" etc, though.
- ebalit 6y agoApple GUI frameworks enable them to rely heavily on the GPU, and the smooth and slick GUI are definitely a big part of their value proposition. While I agree that the business logic of most apps aren't using the GPU for compute, I think most app will have a rendering side where it is important.