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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!"
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...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
W T100404214638&p=4
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=R