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Intel Seeking Moore's Law Original Publication
ackthpt writes "Gordon Moore's famous prediction, labeled Moore's Law, was originally published in the April 19, 1965 issued of Electronics. Sometime since, he lent out his copy and it has never been returned. Intel would like an original copy of the now defunct magazine and is offering $10,000 for a copy, presumably in good condition. The story is carried on Reuters, and if you happen to have a copy (of your own, not stolen from a museum or library) you may contact Intel via eBay's WantItNow."
Better get them a copy quickly - in a year and a half, the reward goes down to 5,000$, then 2,500$ another year and a half later....
Margaret Thatcher died the other day. It was a sad day, but I like to think that she's looking up at us right now."
That's the last time I use old science magazines to start a fire...
When you pry it from my cold dead hands.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Count me in, if you make it worth my while: Double the prize every 18 months.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Thanks to his evil brother's law (Murphy), everything that could go wrong has, and there are no copies left in existence...
...it's unfortunately become a driving marketing factor for the industry...
...people realize they don't really need more than a 1Ghz to surf the web, send pictures, and listen to music...
...Moore's Law was coming to an end based on simple technical limitations...
Huh? These three points don't mesh at all. A driving marketing factor -> people don't need that much power -> but it doesn't matter because it's coming to an end.
If you can't imagine the use for more processing power, then you're not very imaginative.
Processing power is a remarkable thing - you're talking about 1Ghz as being a pedestrian, adequate level of computing, yet you in a prior life (or rather prior year), back in 2001, were undoubtedly saying "Oh who'd need these crazy 1Ghz processors? A 300Mhz is all anyone would ever need...". Even the luddites somehow pull their requirements forward to be just behind the curve, and I've been hearing the same "who needs more than X" mantra quite seriously since the 386 days. Some people never learn from history though.
But the price just doubled.
of your own, not stolen from a museum or library
I believe the local vernacular is "shared."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
When ordinary memorabilia auctions (baseballs fetching more than $10k) at much more, $10k would be a pretty small sum to pay for this original copy.
If it's a unique copy, this could be worth much more. And the price will rise as the time progresses.
--
All your magazines are belong to us.
Repeat after me:
Moore's Law has nothing to do with clockspeed.
Maybe get that tatooed somewhere.
Is it safe to do business with Intel on Ebay ?
They've got a feedback score of 0. I'm not so sure I'd want to sell to them...
They might be marketing driven, but on the other hand the processing power nowadays really extends computers. Use hardware from '95 and you'll soon realize that you can't listen to mp3s in real time or that you can't encode some video within a week. I guess that we all agree that every modern computer mostly wastes its cycles, but sometimes it's rather handy to have that extra power at your fingertips.
If they need some stupid "law" to follow it's allright to me.
There is just one thing that bugs me since years: That every new gerneration of chips consumes more power in order to fulfill Moore's prophecy. But I guess we can only blame the consumers in this case.
I don't read replies by ACs.
My mom threw out my shoebox filled with old electrical engineering journals last year. And I'm positive I a had a mint-condition copy of the '65 Electronics.
I agree with you to a point, but in 2001, I was never saying 300mhz was all anyone would need. Applications like Office were still slow and memory-hungry. Booting up Windows was a minute-long affair.
That has changed. 512MB of RAM and 1Ghz are a very common baseline now. Office runs just fine on it. E-mail clients run just fine. Web browsing has never really been a system-hungry activity. Gamers are a special niche; most computer users have no need now for more than 512MB of RAM and 1Ghz.
Honestly, can you tell me what they'd need more for if all they're going to do is type documents, send pictures, and surf the web? A friend of mine is still running his 800mhz Powerbook at work with 128MB of RAM with no complaints.
Look at it this way. Cars used to be really slow, and you had to hand-crank them. They got faster and faster and more practical with each decade. Now you could build a car that could go 500mph, but nobody needs it except race car drivers. The only thing that's really changed with cars is more efficient fuel consumption and various niceties like stereo systems and computer navigation. And yet, I'm still getting along with my car made in 1993. Before that, a car made in 1984. A friend of mine still drives a 1960s pickup truck. He simply doesn't need more than that.
I think computers have hit that plateau. I also think that's part of the motivation behind rearchitecturing all of Windows Longhorn so that it's all "managed" and requires an extra layer and more hardware resources to run it all, and therefore a new computer purchase much to Intel's delight. In the Apple world, Mac users hang on to their machines longer because they're not living in a Moore's Law-inspired annual PC upgrade cycle that takes your money every year.
Just my $0.02.
Not too mention the trolling anonymous cowards!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Moore's Law has "nothing" to do with clockspeed?
Moore's law describes component integration on integrated circuits that are economical to manufacture. This results in, among other things, increased processor speed. Generally speaking, Moore's Law has been adopted as an observation on general computing power.
This is like the people who desperately argue that "hacker" originally meant something else, and that we should all use "cracker" instead. You and I know what we're all referring to, so the argument is just a nuisance.
From the auction description:
This auction is for a digital copy of the above magazine article, including the issue cover and credits page. This is a MINT CONDITION copy because it has been fully restored digitally and available in Adobe PDF format. All raster graphics have been restored and saved at 300 dpi for quality reproduction.
In other words, the person is selling a copyright violation. Methinks eBay would love to know about that.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
I wish people would stop calling Moore's Law a law. Laws don't have the word "about" in them ("transistor counts double about every 18 months"). It should be called "Moore's Observation" or "Moore's Conjecture."
In physics, do we say that force is about equal to mass times acceleration?
It'd be funny to see if someone did post an auction for the magazine and AMD and Intel got in a bidding war. Possibly even funnier if IBM came along and took it right out from under both of them.
Has clockspeed doubled in the last 18 months? No, not even close.
Will it continue to ramp up as it has in the past. Probably not.
Has the number of transistors doubled every 18 months? Yes and it will continue to do so for awhile yet. Moore's Law is valid and will be valid even if there is no clockspeed increase, until we stop doubling transistor counts. You make the mistake in directly tying increases in performance to increase in clockspeed, which is a an oversimplification of what goes on in a cpu.
As to what the average person calls something I could care less, Moore's Law has always pertained to transistor counts.
Performance isn't tied down to clockspeed.
They're not the cutting edge. Hell, I'm not, but I see a need for speed because of: mp3's, video-on-demand, podcasting, voice-recognition, rippin' dvd's, capturing TV (myth, xptv, or whatever), centralized media and multiple remote players, kids doing homemade animation, gaming, backups, making backups of dvds so the 2-year-old doesn't destroy the original, advanced video processing, sound editing, home photography archives...
Nah, I don't need a gigabit net, firewire, raid or fast computers. This here 1-mhz Altair, wordstar, and 8" floppies will do me just fine. Together with a daisy-wheel, I can do all the writing I want. Really.
Still to come: videophones, real-time avatars, bespoke animation/video, more on-demand video/audio (including education and games), always-on videoconference ability, trivial offsite backups/redundancy, depth-of-field or other non-video data added to video feeds, any-to-any video feeds (think n-megapixel streaming cameraphone), realtime data analysis on problems that currently are out of reach, even broader upheavals between mainstream-media and blogs/indy musicians, etc.
Every time you give me more power, I'll find problems worth solving and places to use it. I used to slip a digit in some finite element work and take puzzles from 40-hrs of cpu time to unsolvable. Given a few more years, my old work will be running at 30 frames a second.
Right now, a pic of the Power5 chip is pinned to my wall: 8 cpu cores, 4 mmus, 144mb cache, one chip/die. Ads say this baby scales up to 16-ways for 128 cpus possible, at 2ghz. I say it's just a good start...
Some interesting facts I gleened from an article written by Tom R. Halfhill, an analyst for Microprocessor Report.
Fact #1: More's Law is not a scientific law, but and only an observation describing semiconductors pace of progress.
Fact #2: Intel cofounder Dr.Gordon E. Moore did not define Moore's law as it is understood today. He didn't even call it a "law" in the original article. Somebody else much later coined the now famous term.
Fact #3: Moore's law was never about processor clock frequency or other performance issues. Rather, it regards the economic manufacturing of component integration on integrated circuits.
Fact #4: Moore's law actually stated component integration doubles every 12 months - not 18 - and he actually ammended this prediction to 24 months. 18 months is a number seemingly drawn from a hat.
Fact #5: Moore's law is extremely inaccurate. Tom Halfhill estimates todays chips would have more than 27 trillion transistors, when in reality Intel's Prescott Pentium sports 169 million transistors.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Let's say that I did have a copy of this magazine. I would expect to be paid for it based on Moore's Law. Its only fitting. So with that in mind, let's see how much it woiuld be:
Magazine came out 40 years ago. Moore's Law says it doubles every 18 months. That's 26.6 doublings. Let's take 26 to make it easy. So thats 2^26 of the price.
I could not find what the cover price was but let's be fair and say $0.10 (10 cents). So thats 2^26 * 10 / 100 = $6,710,886.40. Thats a good deal more than the $10,000.00 they are offering.
I think its a rip-off.
BTW: here is a link to the original article in PDF format.
Bet this
nuf sed
This is in the disclaimers section
Intel employees & their families ineligible.
Why? Why won't they buy from Intel employees?
Or is that all Intel employees have to pledge their first borns & magazine collections when they join the company?
...my girlfriend wants me to throw out my old computer magazines. I got to show her this. :-)
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
1) subscribe to all magazines
2) Rent a warehouse to keep them
3) ???
4) Profit!!!!
There was a man by the name of Mike Myers(sp) in San Jose who worked out a deal with comic book companies to buy their surplus stock from warehouses, have them shipped to him via train, which he then in turn bagged, stuck a 99cent for 3 label on them, and sold them to discount chains such as Walmart. This upset collectors greatly as mint condition previously uncirculated issues of rare comics started to flood the market, all available to those willing to sort through the bargain bins. Eventually he started putting stickers on them denoting them as being surplus rather than collectible, but still maintained a store front which I presume contained some gems found by the employees as they were bagging 3 for 99cent comics. He was making enough money off the 3 for 99cent deal he wasn't worried anything rare or valueable.
Needless to say your business model is actually a somewhat valid one, but chances are there already is a warehouse filled with crap that you could buy cheaply if you are willing to take the time, or if you prefer sell at walmart for 99cents a bag.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
In the 1960s, most large computers were used on a timeshare basis. In many instances, if you wanted calculations done, you bought blocks of "computer time" by the minute. Thus, twice the computing power would = half the cost. Therefore something that cost $10000 one year should only cost $5000 the next year (when the computer was twice as fast), etc.
The funny thing is that I'd be midly angry if it were any other post you copied, but Singularity awareness must increase by any means...
Power to the Peaceful
Moore stated that computing power would double every 18 months... his estimations were a tad slow -- introducing the new P6!!! released just 5 months after the P5 and over twice as fast *at over 4 times the cost*
Buy it now at Dell.com!
Mens et Manus