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Understanding Moore's Law

Posted by timothy on from the in-the-name-of-the-law dept.

S. Blocher writes "Ars Technica has a great article up, 'Understanding Moore's Law', that I think most geeks should read. The misrepresentation of Moore's Law in the media has always been a real pet peeve of mine, and this article does a great job of looking at the flipside of the 'bigger and faster' thesis to show how the Law isn't really just about doubling computer power."

4 of 179 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Moore's ??? by Amazing+Quantum+Man · · Score: 4, Informative

    Fermat's Last Theorem is a theorem. It's been proved. Before Wiles' proof, it could have been called "Fermat's Last Conjecture". But it is now a theorem.

    --
    Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
  2. Re:This again? by Hannibal_Ars · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you're referring to that recent Red Herring article, my article was indeed "inspired" by it in the sense that I thought it was sensationlistic crap and I just couldn't take it anymore. For more info, see the news blurb that announces the article:

    http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1045747027.h tm l

    --
    Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
  3. Yield hasn't been the problem for a while by Animats · · Score: 4, Informative
    That article overemphasizes yield issues. Yield really hasn't been a limiting factor for a while. At one time, fabs were yield-limited. Today, one hears quiet boasting that some fab is producing most wafers with no flaws. Detailed yield information is very closely held in the industry, but it leaks out.

    This has been achieved by getting a more and more detailed understanding of the processes and eliminating the fundamental sources of the problems. The costs of doing this are immense, but it works. It's striking to look at micrographs of chips today - everything looks so good. No ragged edges anywhere. Think for a moment about what that means. In some of those pictures, you can see atoms, and they're in the right places. Atoms.

    It's not like the bad old days of the "purple plague", ceramics with traces of radioactive minerals, or the HP fab with the 4% yield.

  4. Re:Moore's ??? by forand · · Score: 5, Informative
    Newton's laws are simple, definitive, and we're unlike to find anything that contradicts them--relativity deals with the shape of space, not how objects react to motion, and quantum mechanics, as far as they effect "objects", are just another force.

    Classic Physics are undisputable--they can be observed by anyone with about thirty minutes of free time (or less). Relativity, on the other hand, has a rather smaller set of supporting data, and thus calling it a "law" isn't quite accurate just yet.
    I beg to differ with you: GENERAL Relativity deals with the curvature of spacetime, SPECIAL relativity is base on very few postulates the main of which is that the speed of light is constant in all frames. This has very real and observable consequences, like the fact that you cannot transmit information faster than the speed of light, this affects your everyday life.

    Classical Physics is undisputed within a certain range of energies/time difference, but you cannot explain light causing a measurable pressure with newtons laws nor can you explain doppler shifts exactly.