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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 formul

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.

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.