3 ms·

I thought Moore's Law was dead long ago. I don't understand why some people still bring it up from time to time. I remember reading in a magazine when I was a

I thought Moore's Law was dead long ago. I don't understand why some people still bring it up from time to time. I remember reading in a magazine when I was a kid that Pentium 4 Extreme failed to reach 4.0 GHz in 2003 or 2004. Since then, it took Intel quite some years to hit 4.0 GHz. Instead, the industry shifted to multi-core CPU, starting with the Core 2 series. Does multi-core CPU count? I would say it's a bit of a stretch. It's more about horizontal scaling, where multi-CPU or even cluster also work in similar ways - there's no hard limit on how many CPUs you can add as long as you can cool them down. You can also make it much larger and sparse then put it in a large box to deal with the heating problem. P.S. From the perspective of programming paradigm, people would then find "share nothing" and "message passing" is the way to harness concurrent and multi-core programming, after getting burned again and again with shared memory. These disciplines of not sharing RAM would further make multi-core more like programming on multi-CPU or clusters.

mpweiher 3y ago
What you are talking about is Dennard scaling, which had transistors being able to go faster as they got smaller. We still have Moore's law, which gives us more transistors. We just can't use them all at the same time and the individual transistors aren't getting faster (much). For a while, we were able to use those extra transistors to wring out more performance out of sequential instruction streams by creating ever more complex out-of-order execution engines to figure out parallelism dynamically at run time. That also appears to have run its course. Now we can use those extra transistors to add more cores, more cache and more specialised execution engines.