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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
The amount of articles mentioning Moore's law will double each year.
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?
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.
It's buried right next to BSD, adjacent to the freshly dug grave for World of Warcraft.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Somewhere around there the number of transistors in a chip becomes equal to the number of atoms in the known universe.
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...
...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
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