3 ms·

It's starting to get a bit old that whenever I see Moore's law mentioned, I'll usually also run into a spiel about how people have the wrong idea about what it

It's starting to get a bit old that whenever I see Moore's law mentioned, I'll usually also run into a spiel about how people have the wrong idea about what it actually refers to, and that it's holding up just fine. This is despite the gen-on-gen and year-on-year performance improvements of computer hardware very clearly tapering off in recent memory. Maybe debating what always-somehow-wrong law to cite should not be the focus? Like it's very clear to me that being technically correct about what Moore's law or the Dennard scaling refers to is leaps and bounds less important than the actual, practical computing performance trends that have been observable in the market.

sitkack 2y ago
It is ultimately a market effect, the technical specifics are not really important and are even conflated by industry insiders. See my sibling comment.
Kon5ole 2y ago
What we see in the market is caused by software bloat. Chips are gaining performance faster than ever in absolute terms. I think Moore’s law should be avoided altogether when discussing progress in this area, because it’s hard to understand the effects of doubling intuitively. Rice grains on chessboards and all that. One might think ”Moore’s law is slowing down” means progress was faster before and slower now, when it is in fact completely opposite. If you consider the 20 years between the intel 286 and the pentium 3, transistor count went from about 150 thousand to 10 million. Today (using the ryzen 5950 and 7950 as examples), we got 5 Billion more transistors in just 2 years. So in 2 years we added 500 times more transistors to our cpus than the first 20 years of “prime Moore’s law” did. This enormous acceleration of progress is increasingly unnoticed due to even faster increases in software bloat, and the fact that most users aren’t doing things with their computers where they can notice any improvements in performance.
- perching_aix 2y ago
  > Chips are gaining performance faster than ever in absolute terms. But this is not what I as a consumer end up seeing at all. Consider the RTX 5090. Gen-on-gen (so, compared to the 4090), for 20-30% more money, using 20-30% more power, you get 20-30% more raster performance. Meaning the generational improvement is 0, software nonwithstanding. > If you consider the 20 years between the intel 286 and the pentium 3, transistor count went from about 150 thousand to 10 million. Today (using the ryzen 5950 and 7950 as examples), we got 5 Billion more transistors in just 2 years. Why would you bring absolute values into comparison with a relative value? Why compare the 286 and the P3 and span 20 years when you can match the 2 year timespan of your Ryzen comparison, and pit the P2 ('97) against the P3 ('99) instead? Mind you, that would reveal a generational improvement of 7.5M -> 28M transistors, a relative difference of +273%! Those Ryzens went from 8.3B to 13.2B, a +59% difference. But even this is misleading, because we're not considering die area or any other parameter.
  - relaxing 2y ago
    Moore’s law never mentioned die area, and not because Gordon thought die sizes would never grow.
  - Kon5ole 2y ago
    >But this is not what I as a consumer end up seeing at all. Consider the RTX 5090. Gen-on-gen (so, compared to the 4090), for 20-30% more money, using 20-30% more power, you get 20-30% more raster performance. Meaning the generational improvement is 0, software nonwithstanding. The 4090 and 5090 are the same generation in reality, using the same process node. The 5090 is a bit larger but only has about 20% more transistors of the same type compared to the 4090. Which of course explains the modest performance boosts. Nvidia could have made the 5090 on a more advanced node but they are in a market position where they can keep making the best products on an older (cheaper) node this time. >Why would you bring absolute values into comparison with a relative value? Why compare the 286 and the P3 and span 20 years when you can match the 2 year timespan of your Ryzen comparison, and pit the P2 ('97) against the P3 ('99) instead? Mind you, that would reveal a generational improvement of 7.5M -> 28M transistors, a relative difference of +273%! That was my point though, to highlight how relative differences in percentages represent vastly different actual performance jumps. It quickly becomes meaningless since it's not the percentages that matter, it is the actual number of transistors. To put it another way - If you take the first pentium with about 3 million transistors as a baseline, you can express performance increases in "how many pentiums are we adding" instead of using percentages, and note that we are adding orders of magnitude more "pentiums of performance" per generation now than we did 10 years ago.
    - perching_aix 2y ago
      > That was my point though, to highlight how relative differences in percentages represent vastly different actual performance jumps. It quickly becomes meaningless since it's not the percentages that matter, it is the actual number of transistors. But it is the percentage that matters? If I have 10B transistors and I add 1B to it, the speedup I can expect is 10%. If I have 1B transistors and add 1B to it, the speedup I can expect is 100%. Tremendous difference. Why would I ever care about the absolute number of transistors added?
- _0ffh 2y ago
  > This enormous acceleration of progress is increasingly unnoticed due to even faster increases in software bloat Can't resist to throw in this quote (from one of Wirth's students I think): "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."
brookst 2y ago
The spirit of Moore’s law is alive and well. It’s just that it doesn’t cover the whole story; it ignores efficiency, because that wasn’t a huge concern back then. Sure, it’s not literally true of literal transistor density, but it feels arrogant to invent new names for the overall phenomenon that Moore observed. Like the way we still talk about Newton’s laws despite very valid “actually technically” incompleteness.

sitkack 2y ago

It is ultimately a market effect, the technical specifics are not really important and are even conflated by industry insiders. See my sibling comment.

Kon5ole 2y ago

What we see in the market is caused by software bloat. Chips are gaining performance faster than ever in absolute terms. I think Moore’s law should be avoided altogether when discussing progress in this area, because it’s hard to understand the effects of doubling intuitively. Rice grains on chessboards and all that. One might think ”Moore’s law is slowing down” means progress was faster before and slower now, when it is in fact completely opposite. If you consider the 20 years between the intel 286 and the pentium 3, transistor count went from about 150 thousand to 10 million. Today (using the ryzen 5950 and 7950 as examples), we got 5 Billion more transistors in just 2 years. So in 2 years we added 500 times more transistors to our cpus than the first 20 years of “prime Moore’s law” did. This enormous acceleration of progress is increasingly unnoticed due to even faster increases in software bloat, and the fact that most users aren’t doing things with their computers where they can notice any improvements in performance.

perching_aix 2y ago
> Chips are gaining performance faster than ever in absolute terms. But this is not what I as a consumer end up seeing at all. Consider the RTX 5090. Gen-on-gen (so, compared to the 4090), for 20-30% more money, using 20-30% more power, you get 20-30% more raster performance. Meaning the generational improvement is 0, software nonwithstanding. > If you consider the 20 years between the intel 286 and the pentium 3, transistor count went from about 150 thousand to 10 million. Today (using the ryzen 5950 and 7950 as examples), we got 5 Billion more transistors in just 2 years. Why would you bring absolute values into comparison with a relative value? Why compare the 286 and the P3 and span 20 years when you can match the 2 year timespan of your Ryzen comparison, and pit the P2 ('97) against the P3 ('99) instead? Mind you, that would reveal a generational improvement of 7.5M -> 28M transistors, a relative difference of +273%! Those Ryzens went from 8.3B to 13.2B, a +59% difference. But even this is misleading, because we're not considering die area or any other parameter.
- relaxing 2y ago
  Moore’s law never mentioned die area, and not because Gordon thought die sizes would never grow.
- Kon5ole 2y ago
  >But this is not what I as a consumer end up seeing at all. Consider the RTX 5090. Gen-on-gen (so, compared to the 4090), for 20-30% more money, using 20-30% more power, you get 20-30% more raster performance. Meaning the generational improvement is 0, software nonwithstanding. The 4090 and 5090 are the same generation in reality, using the same process node. The 5090 is a bit larger but only has about 20% more transistors of the same type compared to the 4090. Which of course explains the modest performance boosts. Nvidia could have made the 5090 on a more advanced node but they are in a market position where they can keep making the best products on an older (cheaper) node this time. >Why would you bring absolute values into comparison with a relative value? Why compare the 286 and the P3 and span 20 years when you can match the 2 year timespan of your Ryzen comparison, and pit the P2 ('97) against the P3 ('99) instead? Mind you, that would reveal a generational improvement of 7.5M -> 28M transistors, a relative difference of +273%! That was my point though, to highlight how relative differences in percentages represent vastly different actual performance jumps. It quickly becomes meaningless since it's not the percentages that matter, it is the actual number of transistors. To put it another way - If you take the first pentium with about 3 million transistors as a baseline, you can express performance increases in "how many pentiums are we adding" instead of using percentages, and note that we are adding orders of magnitude more "pentiums of performance" per generation now than we did 10 years ago.
  - perching_aix 2y ago
    > That was my point though, to highlight how relative differences in percentages represent vastly different actual performance jumps. It quickly becomes meaningless since it's not the percentages that matter, it is the actual number of transistors. But it is the percentage that matters? If I have 10B transistors and I add 1B to it, the speedup I can expect is 10%. If I have 1B transistors and add 1B to it, the speedup I can expect is 100%. Tremendous difference. Why would I ever care about the absolute number of transistors added?
_0ffh 2y ago
> This enormous acceleration of progress is increasingly unnoticed due to even faster increases in software bloat Can't resist to throw in this quote (from one of Wirth's students I think): "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."

brookst 2y ago

The spirit of Moore’s law is alive and well. It’s just that it doesn’t cover the whole story; it ignores efficiency, because that wasn’t a huge concern back then. Sure, it’s not literally true of literal transistor density, but it feels arrogant to invent new names for the overall phenomenon that Moore observed. Like the way we still talk about Newton’s laws despite very valid “actually technically” incompleteness.