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Moore's Law Disputed
Kumiorava writes "Transistors can be packed to same chip two times more in every 18 months. This Moore's law has been repeated already over 30 years. Computers become faster, IT economy grows, but Moore's law doesn't apply. That has been proven by researcher Ilkka Tuomi. You can read the research from First Monday article The Lives and Death of Moore's Law." 'tho, to be fair, it seems to me that Moore's Law has lasted a lot longer then the throng of people who keep predicting its death.
It was never a law (as in operating principle of existence). It was merely a trend in manufacturing. Keen observers could probably make note of similar trends in other industries. I.e. gas mileage of cars, etc.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
The guy isn't a person saying that Moore's law is doomed, he clearly points out that it doesn't exist in the first place. The claims of transistor counts doubling every 18 month, and processing power doubling 18 month, and the like are all historical inaccuracies, that Moore himself didn't claim. He also uses numbers to show that Moore's law has in fact NOT been valid.
It is also shown that Moore's law is often used as an reason by people who don't know better, and those who don't bother to verify their facts. The main point of the article though is that any Moore's law is not the driving force in the IT industry. It all comes to supply and demand. Unlike slashdotters, who seem to like pulling figures out of their ass, this guy actually has real and valid numbers which prove his point.
Before you make rediculous comments, please, RTFA.
"The present paper argues that Moore's Law has not been a driver in the development of microelectronics or information technology. "
I guess that depends on what you mean by driver. In the hardware world, engineers and managers - especially at Intel - are acutely aware of the impact Moore's Law. It has become the primary driver for the rapid advancement of processor speed. The paper basically says this same thing.
Whether Moore's Law has accurately described the rate at which processors have advanced is insanely trivial to study: did the number double in x amount of time? To say that Moore's Law is wrong misses the point that it was an estimate that has been adopted by the industry, the press, and the public to express expectations of processor advancement and a simple measure to view that advancement. It isn't a law like gravity, nor is it a law like the speed limit: it is a driver in the development of microprocessor technology, though.
ah corretion if it has a physical limitation it has asymptote...think about what you are saying ..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Every six month's some pundit will predict that reached have reached the end of Moore's Law
I know, you're being funny, but I think the difference this time around is that we're in the land of Monster Heat Sinks, Active Cooling, and 70W CPUs. Chip designers *know* how to make things go faster, at the expense of more transistors, but it's the power consumption and heat dissipation problems that are stopping them.
Actually Martyn is right. The actual evolution of microchip technology might (and probably will) eventually reach a physical limitation, which could be described as an asymptote.
Moore's Law, on the other hand, is merely a mathematical function, made to predict the evolution of microchip technology, and being an exponential one, it, per definition, does not have an asymptote.
You're falsely assuming that Moore's Law is an absolute reflection of the actual evolution of mcrochips, when it is in fact just a predition (although so far a pretty good one IMHO).
Since it's a rule of thumb and not a law, why should we care if it's *about* to be broken? Let me know when you have 6 months or maybe 2 years of data showing that the cycle is lengthening or shortening. And since we know that progress will eventually double capabilities, isn't the length of the cycle the only thing that can change?
Right, it was silly to call it a law. It's not a law, it was Intel's marketing plan - i.e. "We plan to double chip density every 18 months". By stating it the way he did instead, the Intel CEO provided a goal for the troops, and a very quotable phrase for the pundits. Possibly the most successful memitic infection ever.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
No. Wrong. Sorry, try reading the *whole* article again. The BIG major point of the article, which he point out at the very beginning, by the way, is just this:
Moore's Law has never really existed in any form that is consistent or interesting to us.
It isn't "just" that the doubling times was fudged (although when you're talking about a presumably exponential process a little fudge goes a *long* way). The above bold point really breaks up into three major claims:
Seriously, it *is* a really big deal when an idea as big and as potentially important as Moore's Law turns out to have little or no substance. It is always a rude awakening when you find out that a growth process that appears to be exponential has hit some limit. It may be worse in some ways to find out that not only were you not looking at some coherent or unitary process, but that none of the obvious possibilities really ever seemed to show an exponential growth curve for more than 5 years or so.
I don't think you read this very carefully. I don't think the author cares at all about fundamental phenomena, just whether there is any testable content to various formulations of Moore's Law, and if there is something you can test, do the empirical data fit the law. Very, very embarassingly, (in my opinion) nobody much bothered to do this before, and the actual data lend very little support to any statement more concrete than "technology has improved significantly and rapidly since the invention of the IC".
Babar
Moore's Law has never really existed in any form that is consistent or interesting to us.
Right...but since nothing else was ever claimed for Moore's law by anyone with intelligence, I hardly see the point. Yes, I read the article. Yes, what you say is right. Moore's law has never been strictly correct. I'm kind of surprised you thought otherwise.
Hell, it's never been a law, in that there is no fundamental, scientific *reason* for there to be *any* link between the number of transistors on a chip, processing power, or whatever, and time. Intel *could* have ratcheted up the doubling times if they wanted, say in response to competition. Like what's happened in the last ~4 years thanks to AMD. That alone should have made it obvious that Moore's law is bunk.
Very, very embarassingly, (in my opinion) nobody much bothered to do this before, and the actual data lend very little support to any statement more concrete than "technology has improved significantly and rapidly since the invention of the IC".
To me, that's like saying it's embarassing that no one has ever done a test to prove that concrete is harder than styrofoam. No one bothered because it's so trivially obvious. The only people who considered Moore's law to be anything but a marketing construct over the last 30+ years are journalists, most of whom have no tech training.
It is always a rude awakening when you find out that a growth process that appears to be exponential has hit some limit.
Now, *that* wasn't in the article. He just proved that Moore's law never really had a point. He gives *no* technical reason why whatever validity it has now will cease to be. Nothing regarding power consumption/loss, tunnelling across junctions, etc. In fact, I saw nothing technical in the "article" whatever. Partially, that's fitting, since Moore's "law" isn't technical. But for the claim it has some technical, fundamental limit, such proof is needed.
So I'll stay with my original point - this article used 10 pages to prove the mundane. Also,what most people will assume the article proved wasn't in the article at all.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
This question has been puzzling me for awhile... because, unlike other 'laws' that have fallen into disfavor, we never even expected Moore's "law" to ring true for even a relatively short duration. That we would call this set of observations a law in the first place strikes me as odd, considering that it's expression is dependent on so many other socio-economic factors.
>Why should the number of transistors ever level off if the function specifies that it DOUBLE every year.
The function doesn't take real world problems into account.
Eventually the size of transistors will reach a near molecular level and be too expensive or impossible to make any smaller. (we are no where near this point yet)
OR
Eventually the transistors will be small enough for an arc to bridge them, even at low voltages. Then it goes from being a transistor to being bridged. This isn't good for logic circuits: )
These are two good reasons why the number of transistors you can squeeze into a given area of real estate is finite.
Of course, you can simply make the die bigger and lower the voltage if necessary. Even this has practical limitations.
Problem:
heat becomes an issue and the wires need to get bigger as the current rises (due to lower voltage and the higher current that results).
While the size of the die is not limited, eventually to keep up with moores law, the chip would get too big to be practical once the transistor minimum size limit is reached, and a couple of generations of the device had passed.
Don't take my word for it, I am not an EE or computer scientist. I am simply a professional programmer/hobbyist (with an electronics background) who likes to read a lot.
While we may not run into these issues in the next ten years, or even in your lifetime, it is a mathematical certainty that we will eventually get there. This is the fundamental problem with moores law: transistors can only get so small.
Of course by the time we reach this point, we will have found a better control device than the transistor, and a better logic device than computers and chips as we know them today.
Biocomputing comes to mind(no pun intended).
l8,
AC
Intel itself has already said that Moore's law is over, explained in slashdot here. Of course, other people are always predicting the end of it as well. Then again, some people think it will continue.
I really wish people would get over Moore's prediction and talk about relevant stuff. There is no way to predict how long unknown scientific breakthroughs will allow Moore's Prediction to remain true. There is one absolute though, the end will come some day, you can only store so many atoms in a certain amount of space according to the rules of quantum physics - that is the absolute barrier.
Until it is actually abandoned I could do without hearing more of Moore's law.
How can one deal with this computers on a regular and continuing basis and still come out with a jack ass statement like:
Moore's Law has never really existed in any form that is consistent or interesting to us.
Pardon me? When new procesors are announced do they have performance increases that are proportional to their existing speed or are they some lesser quantity. For example when 300 MHz processors were current the next interesting products were hundreds of MHz faster. When processors were 1 MHz (the original 6502 in the Apple II) the improvements were 2 and 4 MHz. Now with GHz processors we look at new generations measured in multiples of existing speeds, not a few MHz or even hundreds of MHz faster.
A similar story is true of memory density. The original Mac had 64K of RAM. Each generation wasn't just larger, it went up by an order of magnitude. Now we can easily afford and use a gigabyte of memory.
Hard drives started around 5 to 10 megabytes. The build up to current 100's of gigabytes of storage (all at static price levels) was obviously exponential.
Just how dim do you have to be to miss the fact that fixed price improvements come as multiples of existing levels which is what defines exponential growth which is the actual content of Moore's Law?
Did I read the article carefully? No, because I quickly reached the conclusion that the author was a moron with the ignorance that is only obtained via studying for an advanced degree in one of the less rigorous academic fields. If you are looking for insight read some of the observations of Carver Mead who obtained the fundamental insight back in the 60's and helped to create the phenomenon that has transformed the world (as dimensions get smaller almost every performance aspect improves so we are on a roller coaster until we butt up against fundamental limitations which themselves seem to recede as ever more human ingenuity is applied to every detail).
When I was an undergrad I worked for a physics professor whose research included experimental measurements that pertained to general relativity. He showed me the archives of the kooks that are invariably drawn to the challenge of refuting general relatiivity. He was always getting these silly things in the mail and few of the authors had any sort of understanding of physics at any level. The same seems to be true of Moore's Law today. But in this case you can't have a requirement that a disputant at least have some knowledge of differential geometry. You just have to be able to spell the names.
Within a decade, that technology hits a wall - atoms and electrons are too big. That's the ultimate limit for photolithography on flat silicon. We may hit a fab limit, a device physics limit, or a power disspipation limit before that. Right now, power looks like the limiting factor. We're headed for hundreds of amps at fractions of a volt going into physically small ICs. Heat dissipation per unit area is approaching levels normally associated with cooking equipment. But somebody may find a way to get power dissipation down; it's been done before.
Even after the size limit is reached, it may be possible to push on cost. IC cost per unit area has increased over time as fabs became more expensive. New fab technologies, or improvements to existing ones, might improve the situation. It's of course possible to build physically bigger parts, as well. (Wafer-scale integration turned out to be a dead end. You can make a RAM chip several inches across, and it's been done. But the chip, plus its massive stiffener, is bigger, more expensive, and harder to cool than the current packaging systems.)
Alternative IC technologies are possible, but none of them seem to provide a lower cost per gate. Gallium is too rare. 3D layering doesn't bring cost down and makes cooling harder. Quantum computing is a long way from the desktop. Nanotechnology is still vaporware. Some of these technologies may eventually work, but to keep digital logic on the Moore's Law curve, they'd have to be further along than they are now.
It's much like aircraft, circa 1970. Aviation people were talking about bigger supersonic transports, hypersonic transports, suborbital ballistic transports, and large VTOL craft as near-term possibilities. None of them were feasible. 30 years later, aircraft are about like they were in 1970.
We're going to see a slowdown in IC progress within a decade.