Forty Years of Moore's Law

kjh1 writes "CNET is running a great article on how the past 40 years of integrated chip design and growth has followed [Gordon] Moore's law. The article also discusses how long Moore's law may remain pertinent, as well as new technologies like carbon nanotube transistors, silicon nanowire transistors, molecular crossbars, phase change materials and spintronics. My favorite data point has to be this: in 1965, chips contained about 60 distinct devices; Intel's latest Itanium chip has 1.7 billion transistors!"

Comments

Keeping Count

[ackthpt]

Intel's latest Itanium chip has 1.7 billion transistors!"

That's Montecito dual core Itanium, w/24MB of cache (only about 120 million transistors actually per CPU with the balance largely that motherlode of cache) and you could probably fry a steak on.

"We can keep Moore's Law alive just by stuffing the cache!"
"Brilliant!"
"Brilliant!"
Suddenly they were crushed by a giant can of Guinness containing not even an electronic sausage...

Re:Keeping Count

[timeOday]

But this misinterpretation is the only reason anybody cares about the "law" in the first place. There's no reason to care about increasing transistor counts unless there's a payoff.

The problem with bigger & bigger cache is that it has diminishing returns. This is why Intel's "Extreme" chips are a waste of money.

The inability to do anything useful with all those transistors is why we're seeing the advent of multi-core chips, which are neat but fail to preserve the conventional single-threaded programming model. This places the burden of creating explicit parallelism on the programmer, and leads to more complicated code, which means it costs more to write and also contains more bugs.

Don't hold your breath...

[gaber1187]

So many people really doubt Moore's law will die anytime soon. Just because intel isn't jumping MHz every year, doesn't mean its ending... There are so many things left to do to squeeze out more performance in the same area or smaller. You can go to 3D stacks of transistors, higher K oxide dielectric, the list goes on and on. I agree with the article that says that we could see it go into the 2020s... the main problem that will hinder moore's law will be the economics of investing in new fabs, and waning demand of chips, not research and technology limitations. I see more money being pumped into memory chips and special purpose ARM style chips with a focus on low power. Eventually, people will just say, "Moore's law just doesn't matter anymore, the market has changed".

Re:Do you have a source for the 120M transistors ?

[questionlp]

Keep in mind that the Montecito has 24MB of L3 cache, plus 2.5MB of L2 and 32K of L1 cache. You also need to include links between the two cores, the cores themselves, tags, bus interface and arbiter, plus redundant SRAM cells so that one or two defects doesn't render the die worthless.

I don't know how many additional SRAM cells Intel is planning in each of the cache levels, so the 1.2B transistors for cache can climb up to 1.4-1.6B.

Someone posted a number of 1.47B transistors for the L3 cache at Real World Tech. I'm not sure how credible or accurate that number is.

Another article on RWT shows approximate die floor plan and othat info at:
http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RW T100404214638&p=4

Re:When was the last time Moore's law was correct?

[fafalone]

Wow, how that display of ignorance got modded +5 Insightful on a site like Slashdot really makes you think.
First of all, Moore's Law implies that the number of transistors per integrated circuit will double every 18 months (which, is not really what he said, see Understanding Moore's Law).
Second of all, this has held true and is continuing to hold true.
Third of all, clock speed does not reflect transistor number or density, neither of which are the sole contributing factor to 'power' or 'performance'.


I don't know what's sadder; wondering if the parent was actually a joke, or wondering how it got +5 insightful. Damn.

Re:It definitely has less that 300 - 400 years.

[kesuki]

If the number started at 60 40 years means ~27 doubling of 60 so today's processores should have 8 billion tansistors 200 doublings of 8 billion is about 1.32*10^74 According to answers.com earth is composed of roughly 10^50 atoms and the Observable universe is estimated at 10^80 to 10^85 which is 335-356 years from now, not 300-400 Also, composing a transistor out of a single atom it pretty tough. plus you have to have gates etc. And if the whole observable universe is the processor, where is the rest of the system? ;) obviously you could make a system on a chip, but even then valuable atoms are being used and taking away from moore's law. plus the atoms of the device used to fabricate the observable universe into a giant processor... on the plus side, with that many transistors, you can probabbly encode the entire history of the universe into a mathmatically lossless codec that can achieve fit the entire sum of knowledge into a single byte of data. Some people believe this already happened, and the resulting processing caused the universe to collapse into a singularity and expolode into a new universe.