3 ms·

For decades I have heard that 11nm would be the end of Moore's law as we know it. This is proving to be true. CPUs have been frozen at 1 to 4GHz for nearly a de

For decades I have heard that 11nm would be the end of Moore's law as we know it. This is proving to be true. CPUs have been frozen at 1 to 4GHz for nearly a decade, with the latest advances going to power savings. Currently at 22nm, the next step is 14, and then 11. Perhaps they can eek out one more jump to 7nm or 5nm, but I expect that will barely be worth the effort and thus will drag out for at least decade itself. But Moore fans need not worry. There is a clear next step, and I am wondering why no one is talking about it: Optical Interconnects. Connecting chips and circuits within chips with optical channels should allow plenty of room for speeding up processors and reducing power requirements well into the mid-21st century.

dippyskoodlez 13y ago
Clock Speed is not relevant. In that "decade" our single thread performance has increased a fair amount, but we now have an additional 4-8 CPUs in the same amount of space. An Ivybridge will very handily beat a Northwood based system even in single threaded performance.
- autokad 13y ago
  Dont get me wrong, I love having all of my 12 cores, but I dont really count that as improved speed. More (no pun intended) importantly the rule was every 18 months if I'm not mistaken, not 10 years. Lets double it and add a little bit, 3 years ago you pretty much could have bought the same machine. in the last 3 years, processors have been about 3.4ghz, 3 years before that it was still around 3.1ish. I personally haven't noticed any improved performance on single threads. they pretty much do things at the same completion time. I have a 12 core 4.5 ghz machine (3.4 overclocked), and I ran a compute intensive process on a 2010 machine that was 8 cores 3.4ghz and they finished about 5 minutes later at about the exact same time. i'm not saying all things are equal and that things havent improved, just that i would have expected a lot more from something that was supposed to double (and get cheaper) every 18 months after 4 years

dippyskoodlez 13y ago

Clock Speed is not relevant. In that "decade" our single thread performance has increased a fair amount, but we now have an additional 4-8 CPUs in the same amount of space. An Ivybridge will very handily beat a Northwood based system even in single threaded performance.

autokad 13y ago
Dont get me wrong, I love having all of my 12 cores, but I dont really count that as improved speed. More (no pun intended) importantly the rule was every 18 months if I'm not mistaken, not 10 years. Lets double it and add a little bit, 3 years ago you pretty much could have bought the same machine. in the last 3 years, processors have been about 3.4ghz, 3 years before that it was still around 3.1ish. I personally haven't noticed any improved performance on single threads. they pretty much do things at the same completion time. I have a 12 core 4.5 ghz machine (3.4 overclocked), and I ran a compute intensive process on a 2010 machine that was 8 cores 3.4ghz and they finished about 5 minutes later at about the exact same time. i'm not saying all things are equal and that things havent improved, just that i would have expected a lot more from something that was supposed to double (and get cheaper) every 18 months after 4 years