Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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