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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
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".
...but the article doesn't point out that the law is based on silicon transistor based computing. Obviously, if we switch to other bases for computation, it probably wont apply. IE quantum or plasmonic (yes, I know the latter will probably be in silicon).
Before anyone says, well we've adjusted the length of time for doubling already, we'll do it again. For what its worth, its a bit silly saying X=2^Y/T is a law if you redefine T everytime it doesn't fit.
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
The amount of articles mentioning Moore's law will double each year.
Shouldn't it be Gordon's theorem is we are questioning it? People don't question the theory of relativity or the theory of evolution (ok- I meant educated people)- and we still refer to these as theories.
my blog
If not I herbey proclaim it Goat's Law.
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
I was looking for logic vs. cache break-down numbers for a while, obviously Intel is not keen on providing it on their own.
The way I see it, 24 MB = 1024*1024*8*24 * 6 transistors/SRAM cell = 1.2B transistors for cache, still leaving 500M for logic. Well, we can factor in address storage and cache access logic, but I'd still like to see some harder data than this.
Paul B.
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!
Uh, wouldnt that be two data points?
Intel's latest Itanium chip has 1.7 billion transistors!"
No wonder they call it the Itanic! Both were big and huge and failed miserably.
It's not a law, it's an observation. Did you know the term 'law' for a scientific theory was coined by Isaac Newton, who felt that his 'Laws of Motion' were so right and pervaded the universe so deeply that they had to be a law? He wanted to convey they had a deeper significance than a mere theory. In time of course, even these 'laws' came to be shown to be incomplete or only true for slow moving objects. Ever since, every theory both worthy and crackpot has been called a 'law'. It's about time we returned to the humbler 'theory', 'theorem' or 'observation'. In the case of Moore's 'Law', it's not even a very good theory, since it only describes a very general trend, it cannot predict with any accuracy exactly how fast/how many transistors or elements a chip will have at any time in the future.
By the way, if the Itanium has 1.7 billion transistors, (I'll take the poster's word for it) then one has to ask - are they all pulling their weight? It seems a hell of a lot for what it does. Surely one way to squeeze more out of Moore's Observation is to come up with more efficient architectures and use fewer devices, working more efficiently/smarter/harder. Just a thought.
Michale Moore has a law now? Great, and I haven't even seen his film Rescue 911 yet. Now I understand why Disney tried to crush him and his law-making ego.
It's buried right next to BSD, adjacent to the freshly dug grave for World of Warcraft.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
no, Murphys Law is eventually one day someone will make a cyborg police officer.
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.
Physicist, consultant, science communicator
Somewhere around there the number of transistors in a chip becomes equal to the number of atoms in the known universe.
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.
~c
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.
Failing to learn from history dooms you to repeat it.
I can just see Dr. Evil now...
"I demand the chip have...SIXTY TRANSISTORS!" (pinky lightly touches corner of mouth).
The guys at Intel start laughing hysterically...
"I've changed my mind...I demand the chip have...ONE POINT SEVEN BILLION TRANSISTORS!" (pinky lightly touches corner of mouth)
Intel guys gasp in shock...
Rather than calculating this forward in time, didn't someone trace this backwards in time, i.e. that you can see it halving every 18 months going back to the nineteenth century? I can't find a link on Google but I swear I saw it somewhere...
...the moment. It depends on your application of course. But for number crunching it's hard to beat the GPU on recent graphics cards. For non-graphics applications you can expect speedups from 5-15 times (not %) for things like linear algebra, option pricing and singnal processing. This has been increasing faster than Moore's Law and will likely increase faster. Code written for GPUs is inherently streaming code, and hence easily parallelisable, so many of the complex dependencies that make CPUs tricky to speed up go away. These are exciting times and a big shift in programming paradigm is taking place.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
Power to the Peaceful
Gates Law: MS Code bloat will double at the same interval as Moores law.
..but think it's bunk. There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that more-than-human AI is an inevitable consequence of continued development of computer hardware. The last 50 years of faster computers haven't helped much so far. Nor am I aware of some brilliant AI technique that will be made possible by much faster conventional computers. Technological progress generally happens in fits and starts, with radical jumps long periods of slow, gradual improvement in between. The chip industry is possibly an exception; but, frankly, I suspect if you could come up with a "utility gained" measure it would grow a lot more slowly than chip density.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
But that's not what Moore's Law says.
All it says is that the number of transistors you can fit in a fixed area doubles roughly every 18 months (or, expressed another way, the area of a transistor is halving every 18 months.)
Making transistors smaller does tend to mean you can run cirucits faster because you can switch state faster (which in turn, also reduces the dynamic component of your power consumption), but it's not just a simple linear relationship between size and speed.
garethw
From Popular Mechanics, march 1949:
"...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only 1 1/2 tons."
Jhyrryl
The paper he wrote for Electronics Magazine is here.
SYSOP ('sih-sop) n.: the guy laughing at your typing.
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.
Peak Oil folks take one valid idea (oil is finite, and running out will be painful), but then devolve into irrational fear-mongering about it. If thermal depolymerization can net the US four billion barrels of oil from agricultural waste we currently throw away, running out of ground oil ain't going to be causing a new Stone Age.
That it's mostly useless in real-world terms anyway.
Sure, taking Moore's law literally, computers are 1 million times faster than 30 years ago. Arguably that should translate into _more_ than 1 million times more work per second, because compilers have evolved too, and expensive optimization techniques have become more affordable. (A compiler optimization technique that would have taken a week on a 70's mainframe, now takes seconds.) We also have better tools.
But are we doing 1 million times more with them? Nope.
Every time we get better tools, the accounting dept just get the idea "w00t! Now we can _really_ hire untrained monkeys to use them." In fact, the better tools and computers you get, the worse code you get.
It's not just code _performance_ that went south, any clue about security or good design went south too. Actually analyzing what could go wrong got at some point replaced by magic talismans like "we use Java so we can't possibly have a security problem" or "we use HTTPS, so our site is by definition secure." Too bad that one only has to edit an URL to bypass all those magic talismans.
And then there's the BDA (Buzzword Driven Architecture) effect.
The whole computer industry is one big scam where marketting is in control, and the biggest outright liar and con wins the contract. So every single dud or unfinished (or outright _stupid_) idea is marketted as _the_ second coming of christ, cure for all enterprise problem, cure for cancer, etc. And there's one born every minute who actually believes that drivel... yet again.
So programs are written with the sole purpose of having as many buzzwords in them as possible. Everything _must_ involve a SOAP call, to an EJB, which uses XSLT instead of just processing the damn data, etc.
True story: I've actually benchmarked one such crap buzzword-driven framework we were forced to use here. It took 1.1 seconds for a call to an empty method, on a 2.26 GHz P4 computer. No, not milliseconds. 1.1 _seconds_. A cool 2.5 billion CPU cycles just for a function call to an empty function.
We've actually exceeded Moore's law. A computer in '70 may have been 1 million times slower, but we're taking a _billion_ times more computer cycles to do the same. Yep, the modern version actually runs _slower_.
Being an ex-assembly programmer, that realization hurt. I'm talking physical pain.
So to end this long rant, IMHO I'm not sure that Moore's law will become that irrelevant any time soon. You could increase the CPU speed another 100 times, and someone will just find the monkeys to write 1000 times slower code for it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Somehow, sometime, Moores law will fail.
Then you will have Lazenby's, Connery's, Dalton's, then (perhaps) Brosnan's law fail as well. Some laws can be.....broken, and twisted, and....um suckey. That last illiterative is mine....all mine, Mr. Bond.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
...in 1956, when they managed to fit one component on to a device.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
40th anniversary? That's weird, I swear just about a year and a half ago it was the 20th anniversary.
Sorry for the unwarranted conclusion, but the second part of my claim may still be valid. That you have worked in a particular field (AI) doesn't automatically make you qualified to make claims about developments in this field more than a decade in the future.
Going back to your original post, the evidence that faster hardware means human and then more than human AI is as strong as it can be at this stage. We haven't found anything odd in the human brain that can't be simulated (and already simulated some parts). We found that individual neurons works in a rather simple way. We found that the brain is not a mysterious everything-connected-to-everything device, but a modular, rather crude and tolerant device. We also made significant process in brain scanning. All this leads to a conclusion that in a relatively near future (2-3 decades) it will be possible to simulate the human brain in silicon. Add a few more years and we might even simulate a brain that works.
This alone leads to more-than human AI as "an inevitable consequence of continued development of computer hardware". Your comment about "past 50 years" is rather idiotic, because 1) computers basically started 50 years ago and 2) we know for certain that today's computers are very slow compared with a human brain. As for the brilliant techniques, Moravec comments on that. There are, indeed, many techniques that are impractical below a certain speed (as a matter of fact, most of techniques are that way).
It appears to me that you simply have a negative outlook towards technology (not 100% negative, mind you), and so you attempt to fit reality into your narrow beliefs (see your last sentence about "utility gained"). For some irrational reason you don't want progress to work. Well, this is clearly a problem, but one we can't do anything about right now. May be your brain is low on dopamine or something.
In any case, there is basically nothing useful that simple negativism such as expressed by yourself can bring to the discussion. "This won't work" is simply useless, especially when others have reasons to believe that it will. I can't tell you to read up, because you claim you already read enough (didn't do you much good though), but may be you can try improving your outlook on life. Ask your doctor for some anti-depressants. I've also read today that Semen can act as one. Then you might be able to consider our future prospects without your preconceived pessimism.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.