Understanding Moore's Law

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."

Comments

Moore's ???

[nanojath]

It seems like a good start would be to stop calling it a "law," a term that has some kind of meaning, in a scientific sense. Exactly where that line gets drawn may be a little fuzzy, but I think it's fairly obvious that Moore's observations don't make the grade.

Re:Moore's ???

[Dr.Enormous]

Nonsense. "Moore's Law", such as it is, tells us only what may be possible--if we take appropriate action. Newton's Law tells us what is true, and will continue to be true no matter what we do.

Re:Moore's ???

[kfg]

It isn't a speculation because it was based on observation, and the fact that the factor would change over time was included.

It isn't a theorem, again because it was based on observation. It isn't provable.

So either observation or theory would have been appropriate.

We like our little "Laws" though ( such as Murphy's), so, like it or not, law it is, and law it shall remain.

Law's are so comforting to the masses, don'cha know. They eliminate all the messy conditional shit real life is made up of.

KFG

Re:Moore's ???

[kfg]

You are incorrect. Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity is a fundamental "Law" of motion just as observable as Newton's, and in fact makes up a refinment of those "laws."

Newton's Law is nothing more than special case of Einstein's Theory.

You may assume anything you wish, but I was refering to Relativity, not Evolution.

The Theory of evolution should not be taught as a law for the same reason Relativity should not be taught as a law.

There are *no* laws. Only observation and theory.

KFG

It's not a law

[intermodal]

it is a theory, or a hypothesis, or an observation. A law in the scientific jargon must be something which is:

6 a : a statement of an order or relation of phenomena that so far as is known is invariable under the given conditions b : a general relation proved or assumed to hold between mathematical or logical expressions

Moore's Law only holds true to a point. There comes a time when only so much can be fit on that piece of silicon. The term conjecture might also be applicable.

On my tenth whip.

[blair1q]

Haven't we been beating this dead horse long enough?

Admonitions against misinterpreting Moore's law are about 3 minutes less old than Moore's law itself, and will probably be the part of Moore's law that outlives the law by 20 years.

Re:Just curious...

[Anonymous Coward]

moore's "law" became popularized in the 1980s as processing power began to grow on the desktop so it is the stuff of legend. unfortunately it is equally legendary in the number of times it has been warped to fit predictions.

All Moores law states is

[Rooked_One]

that every 7 months (or something like that) the number of transistors on a chip will double.

He didn't say just how long his "law" would last, however. He made the huge assumption that intel would keep on keepin on with their technology breakthroughs, and if they perfect that terahertz transistor technology, THEN Moore's law will stay in effect for a little longer

But, something that most people don't take into account (and moore probably didn't either) is the fact that we don't NEED faster computers. We want them. You don't need more than a P4 to do just about anything, but becuase of games that require horsepower, you are required to buy them. Of course theres the server side of things, which is a totally different ballgame. YES, they DO need faster computers as workloads get heavier.

Re:OT, But what the heck...

[Lazar Dobrescu]

Here is a more practical explanation for the less math/computer-wise.

Basically, Amdahl's law says that you can only optimize to a point before it becomes pointless. Also, it is often used to demonstrate that it is useless to optimize a single aspect of a system when the other aspects are still unoptimized.

For example, let's say you have a computer that executes something within 10 seconds. 5 of those seconds are spent reading from disk, 5 are spent doing calculations on the CPU.

Now if you upgrade the disk to a disk twice as good, you're gonna get an execution time of 7.5 seconds(5 for CPU, 2.5 for disk). So you gained 2.5 seconds.

Let's say you still think it's too slow, and upgrade the disk again to a disk twice as good. You're now getting an execution time of 6.25 seconds(5 for CPU, 1.25 for disk). You thus gained 1.25 seconds.

You should get the trend here, if you continue upgrading only the disk, it will come to a point where, even by increasing the speed of the disk tenfold, you will only gain small fractions of second on your execution time, and small fractions of second over more than 5 seconds is definitely not a good improvement.

The same reasonning can be applied(this is the original intent of Amdahl's law) to multi-processor machines. Assuming only 50% of a program is runnable in parrallel processing, it comes to a point where adding processors brings very little improvement, even were you to increase the number of processors tenfold. (The explanation for this is left as an exercise to the reader... Hint: it's the same explanation as the disk/cpu above.)

Moore's law - it doesn't actually exist!

[M0b1u5]

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/inde x.html This is much better article IMO. It doesn't say Moore's Law isn't a powerful force for technical and social engineering, or that it doesn't drive the PC and high-tech industry, but the simple truth is that Moore's Law doesn't exist as a law at all - and the only place it does exist is in the minds of journalists!