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Strained Silicon to Perpetuate Moore's Law
An anonymous reader noted a story floating around about a new technology known as strained silicon (or maybe 'Stained' since the article calls it both ;) which AMD & IBM figure will make CPUs 24% faster. A little bit on how it works as well, but not much substance.
24% does not perpetuate moores law.
This technique will allow transistors to react 24% faster. That doesn't neccesarily translate into faster cpus. For example, if this makes transistors run hotter, they will have to lower density. Furthermore, Intel already uses a version of this.
The time it takes for a signal to propagate down a wire is now much more important than it used to be.
A 24% increase in transistor speed is not going to instantly create a 24% faster processor.
Slow wires (relative to transistor speeds) will soon dominate.
There's nothing wrong with "Moore's Law".
As members of the science and engineering community, we understand that a Law is one of the highest designations we can give a phenomena. It implies that there exists consistent empirical evidence for the phenomena. Evolution and Relativity have far more evidence yet they are still theories.
What a load of utter rubbish. The reason some things are named 'laws' and some things are named 'theories' has absolutely nothing to do with the validity of them. Things were called 'laws' back in the 17th-19th century when a lot of people actually thought that they embodied some exact and final property of nature. None of them did.
The truth is, that most of the things called 'laws' are exactly like 'Moore's law': an ad-hoc mathematical description of an empirical observation.
Boyle's law, Hooke's law, Avogadro's law, Newton's law of gravity, Ohm's law, Arrhenius' law, and so on and so on. All of these laws were derived essentially the same way: By fitting a curve to experimental data.
Boyle and Avogadro didn't know what a gas was made up of. Arrhenius did not understand statistical thermodynamics, Newton did not understand gravity.
Now the theories you refer to, are something completely different in both rigor and how well the describe things. For instance the 'theory of relativity' is based on a set of basic postulates, from which the rest follows mathematically.
Einstein did not go out and measure the relationship of mass and speed and fit a curve to it. He made a few assumptions (some of which noone had dare make before) and worked out the physical consequences, arriving at something which just-so-happens to match reality far better than Newton's fitting-the-simplest-curve approach did.