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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.
My guess is that the reports of the death of Moore's Law will turn out to be greatly exaggerated.
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First the 2nd law of thermodynamics fails, then Moore's Law... When will things start fulling upward?
"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"
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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....
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.
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Let me introduce the Slashdot law. This law is inversely proportional to the decline of Moore's law.
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Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
Sorry, couldnt help myself
The level of Vodka in your blood doubles every 18 months
The oft quoted 'Moore's Law' as some have said before, is not in fact a law at all, but instead a theory proposed by Moore based on the economic and technological trends of his time. He by no means meant to imply that this measurement be used as a benchmark of the technology industry. The fact that is is not only known, but hotly debated in the industry shows not the accuracy of the 'law', but instead the success of the marketing campaigns based off that quote. To be quite realistic, some manufacturers have pushed out technology that has not been completely tested in order to compete in the marketing game of Moore's Law, and thus we have cheap, unreliable PC's. (Don't get me wrong, this is only one of many reasons for this effect!)
</RANT>
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
Moore's Law has never really been a hard and fast law. It's more of a rule of thumb... I've read a few books that mention it, and some of them even disagree on the time period in which the double takes place. Some say a year, while some say 18 months. I've also seen articles which claim as a part of "Moore's Law" that the prices also cut in half.
Defying Moore's Law isn't like defying gravity. We know that at some point, miniturization will no longer be possible. It's hard to double the number of transistors in one space when they're on the atomic level. Do you think we could do that in 18 months?
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.
The number of people incorrectly predicting its demise will double every 18 months.
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?
Every 18 months, computer software will be made to take twice the processing power for the same task.
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.
However big, fast and/or powerful your computer is Adobe Photoshop will always take an age to start up.
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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.
'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.
I just saw a throng pass away last week!
That doesn't sound so bad.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
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.
For a second I thought that the headline read "Murphy's Law Disputed". I was going to argue it bitterly.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
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).
Murphy's Law, now that's a law.
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Goddamn cut and paste from the spell checker--mod the above post down. Anyone else been having problems with ctrl-c, ctrl-p, and Phoenix?
Godwin's law fails!
USENET authorities are disturbed by the failure of a law that some thought to be a lynchpin of internet discussion: Godwin's Law. Simply stated, "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Beginning last week observers began to notice something was wrong. Says one 'lurker', "I came across this thread on abortion, you see. I started reading--and that's when I noticed something strange. Every post in the thread simply got better and better as each participant read the other's arguments and replied calmly. It was then when it hit me--no Nazi references anywhere. I went back to read it again, and I was sure--Godwin's Law has been broken."
The violation of Godwin's law is hailed by some as a doomsday scenario for USENET. "These threads will just keep going and going forever! There is nothing to stop them. Eventually it'll all just reach critical mass and collapse in on itself," says a popular USENET troll. Others don't see it as cataclysmic, put painful all the same. "World War II is a large part of the world's history--I don't want to see that forgotten," reads one post to alt.military.history.
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
If Moore's Law does official die, will there be sightings of it afterwards like that of Elvis?
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, Moore's Law, Moore's Law...Christmas!
What "Law"? How about "Postulate", or "Theorem"...no, not theorem...how about "conjecture"? How about "cockamamie bullshit"? You could probably make a similar "law" that describes the performance of light bulb technology over the last 100 years..."well, lightbulbs become (sort-of) 5% less expensive to make and 5% brighter every decade! Whoopee!!!"
Everybody's seen the graph. It's not linear. It's not exponential...it's just up. Hit or miss. No "law" involved here at all.
The whole idea that Moore's Law is a Law is stupid from the get-go. Damnit, I wish I could remember the name of the...oh yeah, the IgNobel. They should give the IgNobel to the cat who disproved Moore's Law. I mean, come on people, duh!
This is almost as stupid as those clone-aid wackos...
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.
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>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.
"It's not that transistors use less material, but that the atoms themselves in the material shrink!" declares Special Agent Fox Mulder, expert in conspiracy theories.
"For eons we've wondered how come Dinosaurs were so much larger than modern mammals, but it's because the closer you get to the Big Bang, the largers those atoms were. I have something in my pocket that will astonish you..."
Agent Mulder removes from his pocket an atom the size of a tennis ball. "This is an atom from the Dawn of Time itself. The Al Queda has been trying to get there hands on this puppy, because you can split it with a butter knife."
(Portions of this post were lifted from a bit of Fan Video called "The Fed-EX Files" produced by a film crew in Montreal, Canada.)
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.
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.