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Moore's law plateaued years ago. Sure they are adding more cores but thats because they have made no progress on the clock speed in nearly a decade. FPGA's are

Moore's law plateaued years ago. Sure they are adding more cores but thats because they have made no progress on the clock speed in nearly a decade. FPGA's are going to be the next go to for performance until cpu clock speeds improve

mikeash 11y ago
Moore's Law is about transistor count, not clock speed. They used to go together, now they don't, but Moore's Law is still doing OK. This is an indication that it may be coming to an end, finally.
- bargl 11y ago
  Richard from DotNetRocks does an Awesome show on this. https://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1130 https://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1130
singlow 11y ago
I thought Moore's law had more to do with density than clock speed. I thought that increased density helped to increase clock speed but that was not really Moore's Law. Recent increases in density have not helped clock speed as much due to other constraints on clock speed, but the density has still been increasing, hasn't it?
- astrodust 11y ago
  Smaller transistors can flip state more quickly with less energy, so usually a die-shrink allows higher frequencies. There's a limit to how much you can crank these things before power consumption becomes ridiculous and heat dissipation is impossible. You can make a 10GHz CPU if you're prepared to require a massive liquid helium cooling system and have a power consumption of 15KW.
JohnBooty 11y ago
Sure they are adding more cores but thats because they have made no progress on the clock speed in nearly a decade. Per-core IPC (instructions executed per clock cycle) have soared since then. That's why a modern 4-core Core i7 is roughly 20-30x faster than a "Netburst" Pentium 4 from 10 years ago. Looked at another way, each individual core of a modern i7 is about 5x-7x faster than those old Pentium 4 CPUs. http://ark.intel.com/products/27495/Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-supporting-HT-Technology-2_80-GHz-512K-Cache-800-MHz-FSB http://ark.intel.com/products/27495/Intel-Pentium-4-Processo... FPGA's are going to be the next go to for performance until cpu clock speeds improve Maybe. What would also be cool is decreasing the latency of main memory. That is the current single biggest bottleneck in processors today. A cache miss usually means that the CPU sits around doing nothing for hundreds of cycles while it's waiting for data to be fetched from main memory.

mikeash 11y ago

Moore's Law is about transistor count, not clock speed. They used to go together, now they don't, but Moore's Law is still doing OK. This is an indication that it may be coming to an end, finally.

bargl 11y ago
Richard from DotNetRocks does an Awesome show on this. https://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1130 https://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=1130

singlow 11y ago

I thought Moore's law had more to do with density than clock speed. I thought that increased density helped to increase clock speed but that was not really Moore's Law. Recent increases in density have not helped clock speed as much due to other constraints on clock speed, but the density has still been increasing, hasn't it?

astrodust 11y ago
Smaller transistors can flip state more quickly with less energy, so usually a die-shrink allows higher frequencies. There's a limit to how much you can crank these things before power consumption becomes ridiculous and heat dissipation is impossible. You can make a 10GHz CPU if you're prepared to require a massive liquid helium cooling system and have a power consumption of 15KW.

JohnBooty 11y ago

Sure they are adding more cores but thats because they have made no progress on the clock speed in nearly a decade. Per-core IPC (instructions executed per clock cycle) have soared since then. That's why a modern 4-core Core i7 is roughly 20-30x faster than a "Netburst" Pentium 4 from 10 years ago. Looked at another way, each individual core of a modern i7 is about 5x-7x faster than those old Pentium 4 CPUs. http://ark.intel.com/products/27495/Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-supporting-HT-Technology-2_80-GHz-512K-Cache-800-MHz-FSB http://ark.intel.com/products/27495/Intel-Pentium-4-Processo... FPGA's are going to be the next go to for performance until cpu clock speeds improve Maybe. What would also be cool is decreasing the latency of main memory. That is the current single biggest bottleneck in processors today. A cache miss usually means that the CPU sits around doing nothing for hundreds of cycles while it's waiting for data to be fetched from main memory.