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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.
"The present paper argues that Moore's Law has not been a driver in the development of microelectronics or information technology. "
A better title might have been: "Moore's Law - Not All It's Cracked Up To Be"
It will stop, right? I mean, if the marathon record gets 10 minutes shorter every few years, for example, that doesn't necessarily mean that 100 years from now we'll be running a 20 minute marathon.
Aren't there limits to materials and stuff like that, or do we come up with Infinite Probability Drives, Dimensional Transfunctioners, Flux Capacitors, Heisenberg Compensators, Ludicrous Speeds....
Uhh, it's not a logarithmic function, it's an exponential function. Exponential functions have no asymptote. Think about what you're saying exactly. Why should the number of transistors ever level off if the function specifies that it DOUBLE every year.
I'm not saying moore's law will last forever, but that's because of the physical limitations, not because the actual function hits an asymptote.
I thought the General version of Moore's Law was "The speed of a computer will double every 18 months or so".
Fine, originally it was "transistors" but I thought that if dual CPUs became a defacto standard in 12 months that would count towards Moore's Law instead of being illegal since the transistors aren't all on the same die.
It just sounds like nit-picking bullshit. I've always thought of Moore's Law as "the IT industry will find a way of doubling computing power every 18 months" not some stupid unit of measure.
Shit, if superior engineering can double computation with the same number of transistors (via better design) shouldn't that count? It just sounds like someone getting into a huff about it and having too much time on their hands to fiddle with Excel.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Another factor is the great disparity between actual processing power (often measured in FLOPS etc) and the number of transistors on a chip. For a while, transistors numbers were doubling every 12 months, but computing power was only doubling every 24 months. Why? The need for pipelining and data management meant more and more of the chip had to be dedicated to pre- and post-processing of the actual calculation, along with intelligent caching and the related works of predictive streams.
An alternative approach has been to build specialized hardware to put all those transistors to use, at the expense of turning your general purpose computer into a very special purpose machine. This has been used, sometimes to great effect, in for example N-body calculations (GRAPE 1-6), yielding 50 or more TFlops of performance for the general computer cost of a 500 GFlop machine. It provides yet another example of the misappropriation of Moore's law.
I think while we may be starting to reach the point that the laws of physics may limit how much faster a CPU can go, don't forget that other parts of the computer are getting major speed boosts, too.
First, there is the connection between chipsets on the motherboard. AMD's Hypertransport and others could make big differences on overall motherboard speed.
Second, system memory speeds are getting quite a bit faster, too. Developments in DDR-SDRAM technology could eventually result in throughput 2-3 times what we have now with DDR333 technology.
Third, expansion slots are getting faster, too. There are now standards upcoming for both PCI and AGP that will substantially increase data throughput on expansion slots.
Fourth, mass storage devices are getting faster, too. IDE hard drives have now reached ATA-133 speed, and future IDE hard drives using the new Serial ATA connection will eventually reach the equivalent of ATA-600 speed! SCSI interface hard drives are benefiting from Ultra 160 and Ultra 320 speeds, too. Even optical recorders are getting faster, too; we've reach 48X speeds for CD-R writers, and DVD recorders will go past 12X speeds some time in 2004.
Fifth, hot-docked external connections are getting faster, too. USB 2.0 support 480 megabits/second connections, and the next-generation of IEEE-1394 connectors will support 800 megabits/second connections.
Finally, graphics cards have seen VERY dramatic performance increases for 3-D graphics. Today's ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and the upcoming nVidia GeForce FX chipset graphics can achieve 3-D rendering that no one could have dreamed of even five years ago.
In short, CPU's will probably reach their limits before 2010 but overall system speed will still increase dramatically thanks to other system components speeding up.
However, many users still want functionality in Linux that closely resemble what you get in Windows XP. Unfortunately that will result in system bloat because of all the multimedia programs, web browsers, etc. you have to include.
The idea of the paper is to show that Moore's law can't be used to predict trends in economics.
So
a) "Moore's law" shows us the effect of demand vs. supply
b) It does not mean that the demand (or demanded quantity) would increase infinitely
c) You can not call it a law because the variations have been too big (first it was one year, then two, now 18 months) and as the formula is that of exponential growth, those variations mean huge differences at the number of transistors over a period of, say, five years.
In short, this article looks at the economics (as in macroeconomics) side of Moore's law. It doesn't claim that you couldn't pack more transistors or whatever on a microchip.
You could also claim that Moore's law might actually hinder economic development as Intel wants to obey the law. What results is that we are actually saying that "wow, Intel is keeping up with the R&D forecasts stated in their company strategy". Yipee.
Okay, a shitty explanation but please read the paper and look at the idea behind it before saying it's total bullshit.
The 2nd law is usually presented as a statement about multiplicity. You'd expect it to be violated over small systems for short time periods. That's the whole point about statistical laws--they're valid over long time periods where there are lots of events.
Sorry--I just had to be contrarian about a new "discovery" in physics for a bit.
Then again I thought that the Micheal Vick was full of it when he predicted that he was going into Lambeau Field in January and beat the Packers.
Now I still do not think that we are going to see the end to Moore's Law in the near future. But as I have stated, I have been wrong before.
Did anyone actually read the damn article?
It's about how the entire concept of Moore's Law is vague and has been applied to all sorts of other things exhibiting exponential growth, even though Moore was not referring to them. And specifically Moore never gave the time frame of "18 months." He said "1 year" one time, then later said "2 years." And if you look at the data, the transistor count of chips doubles roughly every 26 months, not 18. The point of the article is that Moore's Law is more of a hazy myth than anything else.
Murphy's Law, now that's a law.
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It looks like about 3 people so far, but some read it more carefully than others. Please everybody who is reading this: read this article article because it is very important. Again, though, even people who have read the article (or skimmed it) appear not to have gotten the full message. So Junks Jerzey writes:
It's much worse than that, actually. When he really pulls the gloves off and looks at the hard data over the entire 43-year history of the industry, he finds *no* simple doubling time for almost any measure of interest that has been claimed to be Moore's Law or any folk version of it. Even for transistor counts. What you can sometimes sort of show is iffy exponential fits to the data for 5-10 year periods. Strikingly, though, the doubling rates for several of the measures the author investigates have *slowed*. Improvements do keep on happening, but the pace of the improvement is not as consistent or rapid as you might have expected.
Now the big deal about this is simple. Anybody who tries to project that our problems will be solved when X doubles in Y months is really walking on thin ice. It is also important because chip technology has often been held up as some special and amazing business whose success should be inspirational to us all, since it improves so fast. Clearly, improvements in raw components have been rapid (although not as rapid as you might expect), but the Big Changes caused by technology are rarely tightly coupled to the speed of improvement in underlying technology. Hey, the *big* change of the last decade is that your grandma now probably has email. I'm not sure it makes sense to calculate how many transistors that took.
Babar
It's really just "Moores Semi-Accurate Observation That We Can Use To Help Figure Out How Fast Things Are Changing".
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.
Is this a joke? Moore's law isn't E or the speed of sound: It's a general hypothesis about the rate of technological progress. No one expects there to be an absolute correlation, and really any correlation that there has been has largely been perceived as humorous in the context of the "law" (it isn't a "law", of course, but is rather an "observation").
Should we go back and re-engineer all of the processors because of this amazing new research into Moore's Law?
The author of the article seems to misunderstand completely the intent of Moore's law. The article notes a few things:
...Moore's law was always intended as a rough rule of thumb that applies relatively well over a long period of time. If anything, the article buttresses Moore's law. The article notes that the original micoprocessor in 1975 had 2,500 transistors, and that the P4 has ~40 million. If we assume a doubling time of 2 years, then Moore's law was substantially correct, within a 10% margin of error. This was far more accurate than I was expecting, and far more accurate than Moore was expecting.
1. Increases in transistor count do not precisely follow an exact, continuous, exponential mathematical function. Some years it grows faster, others slower, etc. WELL FUCKING DUH. The article seriously thinks this is original and insightful, but actually it was known to everyone. OBVIOUSLY, Intel releases new processor architectures on some years but not others, therefore the increase in transistor count will be faster on those years and slower on others.
2. A few journalists have misrepresented Moore's law, by publishing versions that were not identical with what Moore actually said. AMAZING. A journalist misquotes, or misunderstands a technical issue? Who would have thought it possible? I'm glad we have this article to expose such shocking truths.