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Intel made 3.7 GHz CPUs 20 years ago. Modern CPUs run at the same frequency. So was Moore's law dead 20 years ago? Clearly not. Right now Nvidia's focus is on
by gizmo 2y ago
Intel made 3.7 GHz CPUs 20 years ago. Modern CPUs run at the same frequency.
So was Moore's law dead 20 years ago? Clearly not.
Right now Nvidia's focus is on making bigger silicon with faster interconnects. But pretty soon that will stop working and then the focus will shift again. It's still early days for AI. People have only just started working on making dedicated AI chips. Presuming that performance per watt or per mm^2 of silicon cannot go up from here seems silly.
- Shorel 2y ago> So was Moore's law dead 20 years ago? Clearly not. Agree. It is only 'dead' because Moore's law is about the cost per transistor, and Nvidia wants to keep that price constant. Double the transistors? Double the price of the chips. That's Nvidia's wet dream. I hope this backfires on Nvidia and the standard Moore's law returns.
- gizmo 2y agoNo, Moore's law is the number of transistors on a chip doubling every 2 years. Quantity not cost.
- Shorel 2y agoWhat Moore said in the paper was about cost per transistor. It got misinterpreted during the 90s, that's all.
- rsfern 2y agoWhat is “standard Moore’s law”? People say that Moore’s law has been dead for 20 years because that’s when the industry hit the power wall and had to pivot from simply reducing transistor size to parallelism and these other engineering strategies for keeping the performance growth curve going. I don’t think that’s coming back without solving some really difficult materials and semiconductor physics problems
- Shorel 2y agoThe original article by Moore says: "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase." It is clearly about cost per transistor, it is/was correlated with performance, but it is not about performance. What Nvidia is doing is claiming that they will fight against lower costs per transistor with all their might, which means any efficiency improvement will translate into more profit for them, and never into lower prices for customers.
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- baal80spam 2y ago> I hope this backfires on Nvidia May I ask why? Why would you want a company to fail?
- formerly_proven 2y agoThere is huge gulf between "having 70%/55% gross/net margins" and "company fails".
- Shorel 2y agoReturning to lowering prices per transistor each generation is not failing.
- stabbles 2y ago> People have only just started working on making dedicated AI chips If you mean chips that do fast matrix-matrix multiplications, that definitely has a long history and was not "just started". If you mean calculations in low precision, that's also already a decade old if not more.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bhouston 2y ago> If you mean calculations in low precision, that's also already a decade old if not more. More like since the history of computing. 1990s era graphics cards made use of FP16 formats and before that people did fixed point math approximations because FP hardware was so slow.
- formerly_proven 2y agoMoore's law was never about clock frequency, but also with chip clock speed you simply run into propagation delay issues. The fastest ST-optimized CPUs are now at 6 GHz, so 166ps cycle time. A signal in a chip only travels 2-3cm in that time frame, and that's before it doing anything useful.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 2y agoA modern version would be the 4c/4t N250 @3.8GHz with a 6W TDP (~20W CPU/GPU load)