5 ms·

> Moore's Law is dead. What makes you say that? Intel would certainly disagree...

by p1esk 13y ago

DougMerritt 13y ago
The particular form of Moore's Law that used to give regular doublings of clock speed is the one that has been dead for years. Although not the original formulation (which was number of transistors), the clock speed one is very significant because it means that sequential computations are no longer getting faster exponentially. The forms of Moore's Law that remain are still being used advantageously by Intel, e.g. for more cores amongst lots of other things, but it's not helping as much, since not all computations can be parallelized.
- p1esk 13y ago
  There's only one formulation of Moore's Law - the one from 1965 paper. Clock speed has nothing to do with it. Clock speed is generally not a good indicator of a processor performance. I'm guessing a single 2GHz Haswell core is faster than 4GHz P4, due to a number of significant architectural improvements, which were made possible by the larger number of transistors available. Keep in mind that processor performance per watt continues to improve significantly every two years, with no sign of slowing down in the nearest future.
  - DougMerritt 13y ago
    > There's only one formulation of Moore's Law You can't dictate that to the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Other_formulations_and_similar_laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Other_formulations_... > Clock speed is generally not a good indicator of a processor performance. I didn't say it was. But if all else is equal, the exact same architecture running at a doubled clock frequency will run exactly twice as fast as the original. You are arguing that not all else is usually equal, and although true, it's a different topic. The point is that the "free" doubling of speed that we used to get stopped some years back. Computation per watt is another important subject -- but it is s a different topic (and for that matter, is yet another formulation of Moore's Law). There are a thousand issues that are important to varying degrees when discussing architecture and performance, but there is no point acting like we don't know what people mean when they say "Moore's Law has failed". What they mean is quite clear.
    - p1esk 13y ago
      I actually looked at the section of the Wikipedia article you linked to. It lists about a dozen of rules or laws similar to Moore's Law. In every case, it's made clear the rule is not Moore's Law. In fact, most of those rules have their own distinct names (Dennard's scaling, Butter's Law, Wirth's Law, etc). Read it carefully and you will see that throughout the article, it's maintained that Moore's Law has exactly one, well defined meaning. > there is no point acting like we don't know what people mean when they say "Moore's Law has failed". What they mean is quite clear. When I read "Moore's Law is dead", I thought the OP meant we can't shrink transistors any more. You can probably agree it is not the same as saying "clock speeds are not improving anymore". If someone says "Moore's Law" I will assume they mean "number of transistors on a chip doubles every 2 years or so". If they mean something else, such as "clock speed doubles every 2 years", then they use the term incorrectly. Moore's Law is alive and well, and if you talk to people who actually work on extending it, you should use the correct terminology.
- marcosdumay 13y ago
  I was talking about the original form, as created by Moore. The number of transistors on the cheapest chip size doubling every X months (with X=18 as recently stated, it was smaller once). It's dead. If you go back one and half cycle, you'll see that it does not add to a doubling for any big manufacturer. But what's most troubling is that the rate of increase is going down. Yep, that happened in the past, and manufacturers recovered (altough not for so long). But this time it's different. We are very near the limits of MOSFET created on silicon by lithography, and we are so invested on this technology that I doubt we'll be able to transition quickly into anything else.
ssdfsdf 13y ago
It is definitely on it's way out. We are having more and more trouble scaling to volume production for each production node. 14nm is behind schedule. 9nm is going to be harder and no one is really sure how to get down to 5nm. Beyond 5nm parts of the transistor will need to be smaller than an atom. We are hitting a wall, predictions are that by 2020 the cost of developing new manufacturing techniques will not justify the return. A fundamentally new substrate or perhaps paradigm will be required to push us forward. This will need to be revolutionary not evolutionary in nature. This is not guaranteed to be forthcoming in time to continue Moore's law.
- p1esk 13y ago
  > It is definitely on it's way out. People have been saying that for decades. Experts claimed it would be impossible to shrink transistors below 1 micron. When that was done, other experts claimed it's impossible to shrink below 100nm. Yes, Intel does not know how to build 5nm transistors, which are 3 process generations away from the current state of the art (14nm - 10nm - 7nm - 5nm). It's always been like that - for example, when Intel released 90nm technology, they didn't know how to do 22nm. Yes, a new paradigm or substrate might be required to get there, so what? There's no shortage of new ideas, or new materials. Graphene is looking pretty good. Can't shrink it below atomic dimensions? Put another layer on top! The only thing that can kill Moore's Law is lack of demand. But as long as people want faster, more efficient computers, they will be getting faster and more efficient. And I don't see the demand decreasing any time soon.

> Moore's Law is dead. What makes you say that? Intel would certainly disagree...

by p1esk 13y ago

> Moore's Law is dead. What makes you say that? Intel would certainly disagree...

The particular form of Moore's Law that used to give regular doublings of clock speed is the one that has been dead for years. Although not the original formulation (which was number of transistors), the clock speed one is very significant because it means that sequential computations are no longer getting faster exponentially. The forms of Moore's Law that remain are still being used advantageously by Intel, e.g. for more cores amongst lots of other things, but it's not helping as much, since not all computations can be parallelized.

p1esk 13y ago
There's only one formulation of Moore's Law - the one from 1965 paper. Clock speed has nothing to do with it. Clock speed is generally not a good indicator of a processor performance. I'm guessing a single 2GHz Haswell core is faster than 4GHz P4, due to a number of significant architectural improvements, which were made possible by the larger number of transistors available. Keep in mind that processor performance per watt continues to improve significantly every two years, with no sign of slowing down in the nearest future.
- DougMerritt 13y ago
  > There's only one formulation of Moore's Law You can't dictate that to the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Other_formulations_and_similar_laws http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Other_formulations_... > Clock speed is generally not a good indicator of a processor performance. I didn't say it was. But if all else is equal, the exact same architecture running at a doubled clock frequency will run exactly twice as fast as the original. You are arguing that not all else is usually equal, and although true, it's a different topic. The point is that the "free" doubling of speed that we used to get stopped some years back. Computation per watt is another important subject -- but it is s a different topic (and for that matter, is yet another formulation of Moore's Law). There are a thousand issues that are important to varying degrees when discussing architecture and performance, but there is no point acting like we don't know what people mean when they say "Moore's Law has failed". What they mean is quite clear.
  - p1esk 13y ago
    I actually looked at the section of the Wikipedia article you linked to. It lists about a dozen of rules or laws similar to Moore's Law. In every case, it's made clear the rule is not Moore's Law. In fact, most of those rules have their own distinct names (Dennard's scaling, Butter's Law, Wirth's Law, etc). Read it carefully and you will see that throughout the article, it's maintained that Moore's Law has exactly one, well defined meaning. > there is no point acting like we don't know what people mean when they say "Moore's Law has failed". What they mean is quite clear. When I read "Moore's Law is dead", I thought the OP meant we can't shrink transistors any more. You can probably agree it is not the same as saying "clock speeds are not improving anymore". If someone says "Moore's Law" I will assume they mean "number of transistors on a chip doubles every 2 years or so". If they mean something else, such as "clock speed doubles every 2 years", then they use the term incorrectly. Moore's Law is alive and well, and if you talk to people who actually work on extending it, you should use the correct terminology.
marcosdumay 13y ago
I was talking about the original form, as created by Moore. The number of transistors on the cheapest chip size doubling every X months (with X=18 as recently stated, it was smaller once). It's dead. If you go back one and half cycle, you'll see that it does not add to a doubling for any big manufacturer. But what's most troubling is that the rate of increase is going down. Yep, that happened in the past, and manufacturers recovered (altough not for so long). But this time it's different. We are very near the limits of MOSFET created on silicon by lithography, and we are so invested on this technology that I doubt we'll be able to transition quickly into anything else.

ssdfsdf 13y ago

It is definitely on it's way out. We are having more and more trouble scaling to volume production for each production node. 14nm is behind schedule. 9nm is going to be harder and no one is really sure how to get down to 5nm. Beyond 5nm parts of the transistor will need to be smaller than an atom. We are hitting a wall, predictions are that by 2020 the cost of developing new manufacturing techniques will not justify the return. A fundamentally new substrate or perhaps paradigm will be required to push us forward. This will need to be revolutionary not evolutionary in nature. This is not guaranteed to be forthcoming in time to continue Moore's law.

p1esk 13y ago
> It is definitely on it's way out. People have been saying that for decades. Experts claimed it would be impossible to shrink transistors below 1 micron. When that was done, other experts claimed it's impossible to shrink below 100nm. Yes, Intel does not know how to build 5nm transistors, which are 3 process generations away from the current state of the art (14nm - 10nm - 7nm - 5nm). It's always been like that - for example, when Intel released 90nm technology, they didn't know how to do 22nm. Yes, a new paradigm or substrate might be required to get there, so what? There's no shortage of new ideas, or new materials. Graphene is looking pretty good. Can't shrink it below atomic dimensions? Put another layer on top! The only thing that can kill Moore's Law is lack of demand. But as long as people want faster, more efficient computers, they will be getting faster and more efficient. And I don't see the demand decreasing any time soon.