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Yes, that’s how Moore’s law has worked for 60 years: incremental advancements. The past 15 years have actually involved far more radical step changes than the 4

Yes, that’s how Moore’s law has worked for 60 years: incremental advancements. The past 15 years have actually involved far more radical step changes than the 45 years prior.

ilaksh 4y ago
This seems false to me. For example, electromechanical to relays, to tubes,transistors, integrated circuits, highly parallel ICs are all paradigm shifts rather than incremental, and yielded multiple orders of magnitude rather than incremental improvements in price/performance. The next really significant boost is likely something like optical transistors, memristors, analog computing, bio-electrical computing, or anything that is highly divergent from the current base concept. I mean, if the organization of the current basic idea of silicon and the software can align with a compute-in-memory paradigm, I guess that would be more than incremental in a way. But the lady seems to be talking about doing that in still kind of a half-assed way as far as that part.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  Moore’s Law (formulated 57 years ago) by definition applies to dense ICs. It’s true, there were a bunch of advancements before the invention of ICs, but those were 60-80 years ago.
- sroussey 4y ago
  Memristors are finding interesting application in AI specific chip design. Will be interesting to see these tape out in a couple of years.
- timerol 4y ago
  The Apollo Guidance Computer was a 16 bit computer operating at 2 MHz in 1966, costing $200,000 per unit. It was made out of many individual ICs, based on fab limitations at the time. A single IC today with the same functionality costs under $2 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electronics-america-inc/R5F1006DASP-30/10060949 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electroni... That's 5 orders of magnitude in cost over 56 years, with the only "paradigm shift" being "we can now fit the whole functionality on 1 IC".

Yes, that’s how Moore’s law has worked for 60 years: incremental advancements. The past 15 years have actually involved far more radical step changes than the 45 years prior.

ilaksh 4y ago

This seems false to me. For example, electromechanical to relays, to tubes,transistors, integrated circuits, highly parallel ICs are all paradigm shifts rather than incremental, and yielded multiple orders of magnitude rather than incremental improvements in price/performance. The next really significant boost is likely something like optical transistors, memristors, analog computing, bio-electrical computing, or anything that is highly divergent from the current base concept. I mean, if the organization of the current basic idea of silicon and the software can align with a compute-in-memory paradigm, I guess that would be more than incremental in a way. But the lady seems to be talking about doing that in still kind of a half-assed way as far as that part.

xadhominemx 4y ago
Moore’s Law (formulated 57 years ago) by definition applies to dense ICs. It’s true, there were a bunch of advancements before the invention of ICs, but those were 60-80 years ago.
sroussey 4y ago
Memristors are finding interesting application in AI specific chip design. Will be interesting to see these tape out in a couple of years.
timerol 4y ago
The Apollo Guidance Computer was a 16 bit computer operating at 2 MHz in 1966, costing $200,000 per unit. It was made out of many individual ICs, based on fab limitations at the time. A single IC today with the same functionality costs under $2 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electronics-america-inc/R5F1006DASP-30/10060949 https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electroni... That's 5 orders of magnitude in cost over 56 years, with the only "paradigm shift" being "we can now fit the whole functionality on 1 IC".