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

Re:Kinda obvious....

[fm6]

Strictly speaking, you're right. But Moore's law, despite the name, isn't a law of nature. It's an observation about the progress of the chip industry. And that progress is motivated by a simple feedback loop: other industries put ICs into their products, which motivates the IC industry to retool to make better, cheaper ICs, which motivates other industries to put ICs into their products...

Moore's original observation, that transistor density doubles every 18 months, will obviously cease to apply once it becomes impossible to make transistors. But as long as that feedback loop continues to churn, it continues to make sense to talk about Moore's law.

Self fulfilling

[Bifurcati]

One can't help but wonder whether there's a self fulfilling element to these sort of prophecies - do computer manafacturers feel pressure to adhere to Moore's law? Is it a challenge to keep up? Or is it really just chance?

Also, for the record as a physicist, quantum computers won't remove the need for conventional computers in most areas - a big thing is (as I understand it) that they're not programmable, and have to be built to a certain specification. Therefore, classical computers will always have their use.

It definitely has less that 300 - 400 years.

[highfreq2]

Somewhere around there the number of transistors in a chip becomes equal to the number of atoms in the known universe.

Graphs????

[King-Raz]

Has anyone got any pretty graphs of the performance of particular CPUs against time? It would be cool to have some sort of visual representation of the validity of Moore's law.

Bugs

[sicking]

What amazes me the most is the amount of bugs a device with 1.7 billion transistors has compared to the number of bugs in, say, Windows XP, GIMP or Firefox.

And don't give me any crap about that software is somehow inherently harder to keep bugfree. I develop both and there really is little difference when it comes to complexity.

Sure, software performs more complex tasks, but when you add 'parallel-ness' of hardware, as well as timing issues, temperature and manufacturing issues, clock distribution, leakage and crosstalk, hardware defenetly is a pretty good match.

The simple truth is that there is simply vastly more testing that goes into hardware then most software (software in mars rovers and lunar landers would be an exception). And I bet that there are better design methods and safty guards too.

Law of Accelerating Returns

[Saeger]

Few people realize that Moore's Law is just one component of an even greater overall exponential trend which has been called The Law of Accelerating Returns (by Ray Kurzweil).

Basically, it has been observed that any evolutionary process (including technology) will progress exponentially as it builds on past progress, with barely perceptable slow-down/speed-up "S-curves" as paradigm shifts occur.

Moore's Law is certainly an important component of this trend, as it relates to computing power and eventual AI/IA accelerating to Singularity in ~25 years, but there are many others in parallel: storage space, networking bandwidth, # of internet nodes, transportation speed, etc.

One thing that certainly ISN'T keeping pace with our technology is our old evolutionary psychology; hopefully we can fix some of the more disgusting aspects of human nature before it's too late.

Re:Don't hold your breath...

[Doppler00]

This is a good point. I have money saved up just waiting to buy the latest greatest thing... yet it's not here? My 3.0GHz P4 I bought in Jan 2004 is within %20 of the speed of any of Intel's offerings now (within the same class: desktop/consumer). And even when the dual core devices are released, I'm not confident that they will provide a doubling of performance.

And what about Nvidia? They're last product jump from 5900 to the 6800 was absolutely amazing. A very clear %100 increase in performance. I'd be very surprised to see Nvidia be able to match that leap sooner than 4Q 2006.

Another Good Quotable

[Jhyrryl]

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!"

From Popular Mechanics, march 1949:

"...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1 1/2 tons."