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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."
>Wouldn't profit be it's own incentive?
Of course profit is it's own incentive; doesn't take a genius to realize that. What you miss in my question is this "law" based on the fact that instead of continually saturating the market with current product Moore seemed to set a goal for engineers to help that ol' profit incentive.
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
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
I agree,and I would actually give Moore's Law less credit than that. I would infer from your definition that, generally, a "law" is something fundamental and immutable that arises from the underlying nature of certain phenomena. Boyle's gas law is a good example: increase the temperature of a gas at constant pressure, and it expands. This is fundamental and can be explained as such.
Moore's "law" is just a relationship built from Intel's marketing engine and economics. Let's say I was rich and decided to start marketing cheap, low-defect silicon. Moore's "law" suddenly changes.
Basically, Moore's law could change at any time (and has) if Intel decides to accelerate their R&D facilities. Or if they decide to invest more in silicon fab facilities. Or if they decided to raise their prices, allowing them to get a lower yield of smaller-featured chips.
When you get right down to it, Moore's law only holds as long as Intel wants it too. Or, if they get more competition that forces them to accelerate their chip release schedule (like the last 5 years thanks to AMD).
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Moore's Observation?
Moore's Theorum?
Moore's Speculation? - this would have been good early on...
Moore's Principle?
Moore's Equation? - something for the big math fans to complain about...
Moore's Paradigm? - something for the cliche in all of us...
Moore's Model?
Moore's Formula?
I kind of like Moore's Determinant, but it's not very accurate.
But if we wander around changing things because we think they aren't right, that makes us revisionists. And revisionists are doomed to experience history for what they are sure is the first time.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Is to give you an excuse to avoid work. See http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912202 for a paper (in PDF) describing this
Yes, we should, and in fact, in reality if not in practice, we already have.
No scientist with half a head on his shoulders really thinks of laws as "laws" any more. They're observations of behaviour reduced to a mathmatical form for the purposes of understanding and prediction.
That is why it's Eintstein's *Theory* of Special Relativity, even though it is an even more accurate rendering of Newton's "Law." We gave up laws a century or so ago.
While at times language changes distressingly fast there are times when it seems impossible to change at all.
This is one of those times.
I'm afraid the resulting confussion, allowing President's to say dumb shit like "It's only a theory," may well never subside.
KFG
LOL! It was about 3am when I wrote that line, and I was completely fried and just wanted to be done with the article. You're right, though, that sentence (and some of the other parts of the intro) is completely overwritten... or something.
:0)
Oh well, at least the rest of the article (hopefully) doesn't appear to take itself quite as seriously as the intro
Jon
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
This is due to management overhead, ratio of parallelizable to non-parallelizable portions of the task, etc.
Very important stuff to consider when doing multi-threaded/process/tasking and clustered design and development.
No sig, sorry.
"The Hypothetical Moore Curve"
Is it testable?
Is his research repeatable?
What studies have been published to support the hypothesis?
What was tested, and how? What controls were used?
Moore was making an economic projection in order to formulate a business plan. He was not establishing a new field of theoretical physics.
If we had to, and if we could discount the variables of economic incentive and R&D time, we could try to directly approach the theoretical limitations. Maybe find something other than silicon and transistors that will work better than the semiconductors we use today. (We only have made incremental improvements on the same basic structures).
The true appeal of "Moore's Law" is that we have become accustomed to seeing doublings of power in our computing devices. So much so, that any consumer product that doesn't promise twice the speed/capacity of what came before it, won't be all that exciting to us.
There are plenty of industries where a fraction of a percent increase in production will make you a hero, even in electronics engineering.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Quite simply, companies expect Moore's law to remain true. Software companies plan product lines in anticipation of processor capability doubling every n years. Processors are going to get improve at this rate, therefore we know how quickly bus performance and peripheral performance need to improve.
Semiconductor manufacturers know this. They plan product lines in a Moore's-law-consistent manner (not necessarily explicity, but surely as a matter of economics). If they're a little behind the curve, more money gets put into keeping up with it... or somebody else steps up and keeps it true. If they're at or ahead, they hold the course.
If someone were to introduce a processor that was 10x the density/speed of current processors, don't you think more resources would then go into peripheral design/heat management/software development to utilize the improvments, rather than continuing to focus on improving the processor?
The reason the law has held so long and seems to be so consistent is that it sets everyone's expectations, and people plan towards those expectations. Not less, not more.
You've all been Jedi mind tricked.
That is why it's Eintstein's *Theory* of Special Relativity, even though it is an even more accurate rendering of Newton's "Law." We gave up laws a century or so ago.
I beg to disagree.
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.
While at times language changes distressingly fast there are times when it seems impossible to change at all.
Most scientific laws are hundreds of years old--they've withstood the test of time. Relativity and other modern theories haven't withstood the test of time yet, but in a few centuries we'll be talking about "Einstein's Laws."
I'm afraid the resulting confussion, allowing President's to say dumb shit like "It's only a theory,"
You mean evolution, I assume.
The principle that living creatures evolve is observable, uncontestable, and hundreds of years old. High School students can test it with rabbits. Current evolution should be taught as and called "The Law of Evolution."
Now, when biologists start speculating about the fossil record, species relations, and where life came from, they're on territory that they can never prove to have a definite answer, and thus they should either use the same terminology that historians, not labcoat scientists use, or they should stick with "theory."
There comes a time when only so much can be fit on that piece of silicon.
e lemen t/C
.525 the size of a Si atom.b /elemen t/C
Couldn't resist replying since i'm on your foes list for god knows what.
Moores law doesn't just apply to silicone, it applies to integrated circuit design in general. If moores law was based purely on the manufacturing techniques at the time, of course it wouldn't hold true in 20 to 30 years.
What we've seen though is a change in manufacturing processes, and with the research going on in quantum computing, light computing, and biological computing, I would speculate that we will see "moores trend" (calling it that because it's not really a law) will continue on course as these advancements are made.
Take for example our use of Si (silicon) for every IC designed today. We use it because of it's strength, and low electrical conductivity. It's a rather large atom though, and we will run out of space eventually using it.
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/nph-pertab/tab/
But wait! Right above Si on the periodic table of elements is C (carbon) which is roughly
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/nph-pertab/ta
Now why don't we use carbon based IC's? Well for one thing, carbon does not play well with itself unless you use a lot of heat and pressure (Carbon melting point is 3727c vs Si's 1410c). Secondly we haven't really mass produce the carbon buckyballs/nanotube enough where we could actually use them in place of Si.
Now where was I going with this... Oh yeah..
Basically Moores law will continue to hold true as long as material manufacting keeps up. Silicon has nada to do with it.
"The misrepresentation of Moore's Law in the media has always been a real pet peeve..."
./ articles have mentioned the increasing specialization of society as a source of many problems and changes. Is the inability of the media to accurately report on subjects yet another product of this specialization? Both the reduced ability of the reporter to understand technical information and the reduced ability of Americans to spot (and hold media responsible for) incorrect/bad/misleading reporting have, perhaps, allowed the problem to bloom enormously.
Is it possible that Americans have come to mistrust the media, because the media reporters no longer understand 99% of the subjects on which they report?
Earlier
Perhaps Moore's Law is inversely applicable to media reliability. Every two years the reliability and accuracy of the media is halved. Every two years the ability of the average American to spot the innacuracies is reduced by half.
There were a link on pages linked off of that story. Found it at http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm and also links to History of the Microprocessor.
These show the history, compare die sizes, etc. and add some context to this article. Had to dig a bit, but I love this kinda stuff. Bet Im not the only one.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Mean that buying any PC immediately causes Best Buy to sell it for $100 less than you paid.
The first computer I owned was a Compaq Portable (about as portable as a 20" color TV with a handle on it). I paid $3,000 for it - with a 10mb hard drive and a 1200bps Hayes modem.
Today, that same $3,000 - not even adjusting for inflation, and buying only retail equipment, would get me a 2.5+ghz machine with a 20" LCD flat panel. And if I noodge the sales droid enough, toss in a disposable HP printer (as if they make another kind...)
The only concern I have about personal computers these days is... how the heck do I keep track of the exploding volume of information on them?
How do I keep 2,500 family pictures? And find the one of a friend's birthday party?
How do I organize 10 years of letters and emails? And not lose track of the ones from my dad?