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Gordon Moore: Moore's Law is Dead
Golygydd Max writes "Moore's Law will not hold forever, claims Gordon Moore.
In a Techworld article, he points out the limitations of the law, in particular, the limitations as we approach the size of atoms.
He helpfully explains, however, that the law will hold for a few years yet." Still, sticking around for forty years is pretty impressive.
as an excuse for a lack of innovation?
"we have reached the limits so don't expect innovation!"
...and therein lies its true flaw. As the law stipulates doubling transistor counts, as soon as processors are primarily developed with non-transistor based technologies, be they optical or quantum derived, Moore's Law is essentially defunct.
Maybe not the computational power of a chip, but the computational power of the machine will continue to double. Intel and AMD will release 2,4,8,16 core chips that will double the computational power available in a single machine.
You cannot double any quantity of anything at a fixed interval, and expect to maintain that trend forever. Recall the story about some guy that was owed a favor by the king, who said "just give me one grain of wheat for the first square of a chess board, twice as much for the second, twice that for the third, and so forth" They thought he was selling himself short until they figured that the 64th square would require enough grain to bury the earth in something like 4ft of grain.. 65 would bury it in 8ft, etc.
Well, it's impressive for a "law" which is not in any fundamental sense a law, but a speculation about future progress.
Very few speculations hold for so long.
By the way, I assume your account name is pronounced "fish".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Does a law have to be based on "physical phenomenon". Moore's theories/laws/whatever governed innovation in the IT industry for well over 30 years. That ought to be good enough for anyone. There are obvious differences b/w the IT industry and natural sciences -- look at the rate in which IT has grown and evolved vs. that of traditional sciences. This is an interesting article though -- the inventor, scorning his own theory. I wonder what will come to replace it.
Moore's "Law" is a Marketing Axiom, not a law of nature or even a good approximation of technical development.
The chip makers have deliberately held their product releases to this rate so that they can continually improve and show growth for Wall Street.
It's a good strategy -- got people to upgrade more often for many years -- only now are they reaching the point where a cheapo home PC has enough horsies to do everything the typical clueless user might with to -- I'm still using 4-year old boxes and doing fine for most everything.
I wonder if Moore's law is a self-imposed limitation whereby people don't think outside of the box and therefore maintain a steady progress.
Then there is conspiracy theory view of it all: Intel and AMD are colluding to stay within the bounds of Moore's law to make sure all of us by new PC's that will be outdated in 6 months rather than put out 16GHz machines tomorrow.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
Perhaps Moore's law really is beginning to run up against its limits, as you will see if you read enough electronics magazines, but what I really don't "get" is this: The Intel processor can do amazing things, but look at the Motorola processors, like the G4s in those Macs... They're faster at floating point and at a variety of other uses. Their instruction set is quite different. There are many other significant differences between the Intel and Motorola processors. And as we know from software, the way an algorithm is made up, or the way it is implemented, can drastically affect the performance. I think processors follow quite the same rules. Maybe it's time, while we're running up against the limits of Moore's law, to examine what software needs to do nowadays, and then design a processor from the ground up that will fulfill each function in the most efficient way possible. And while we're at it, let's go back to the good ol' days of making the software efficient, too. You'd be amazed the kinds of ridiculous things todays' computers can do, but the software is just too darn inefficient.
Why is it that every post that says "i will probably get modded down" actually gets modded up?
(mod me down if you want)
Quantum computing is neat in theory, but has made not significant progress in the number of qbits manipulatable in years. Granted there are new ways to make qbits, but nothing can seem to get 7 to 10 to date. Hopefully there will be a breakthrough, but you can't just command one. There is no scaling technology for Quantum Computers yet.
I predict biological approaches will similarly run into intractably hard roadblocks on the way to usefulness, with the possible exception of practical biological to electronic interfaces to aid the disabled and in the more distant future meld with the machine so to speak.
All is not lost however, multicore is of course where the industry is going for now, but expect more specialization in silicon for well-defined tasks. Graphics processors will get more powerful as algorithms improve and are more efficiently implemented with the transistors available. Any application that becomes mainstream will get its own processing unit of some sort. Granted this make for less flexibility in expanding the capabilities of existing machines, but software has been getting a free ride off the speed scaling in chips for years. In the future the line between programming and chip designing will blur as the two must work in concert to achieve the desired performance in whatever domain is desired.
Imagine a compiler that doesn't just compile code but tapes out the coprocessor need to run it.
Letter To Iran
By the way, I assume your account name is pronounced "fish".
Ghoti probably assumed that, too. He's in good company: this mistake is usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, though he seems not to have been directly responsible.
The problem is that ``ghoti'' violates several rules of English orthography. The explanation for ghoti is: "gh" as in "cough", "o" as in "women", "ti" as in "nation". Unfortunately for the ``ghoti spells fish'' theory, gh==f works at the end of a word, but never[1] at the beginning, o==i is unique[1] to the spelling of women, and while ti==sh works near the end of a word, it is always[1] followed by ``on'', to make tion==shun.
English spelling isn't nearly the mess it's made out to be. It's complicated by the fact that there are two sets of rules (one for the words with Anglo-Saxon/Scadinavian roots, another for the words with Latin/romance roots), and by the fact that many words which we think of as English are actually foreign words which retain their foreign spellings[2]. Still, there are rules, and they _are_ generally followed. Yes, every rule has exceptions, but they are usually few in number, relative to the number of words which follow the rule. More importantly, the exceptions are usually common words, whose spelling you will memorize quite naturally, because you write them so often.
There is a book called The ABC's and All Their Tricks by M. Bishop which does a wonderful job of laying out and explaining the rules and exceptions of English spelling. You can read my brief review of it at my homeschooling books page.
[1] Exceptions to ``never'', ``unique'' and ``always'' are welcomed.
[2] Retaining the foreign spellings of the foreign words is a blasted nuisance, but it does seem a little more cosmopolitan and accommodating and tolerant than the German habit of changing the spelling to match their conventions (but I admire the ease of spelling German), or the French habit of coining neologisms to avoid loan-words.
See what I've been reading.
In The Emotional Machine Kurzweil showed Moore's law being more widely applicable than originally predicted. Historical analysis demonstrates its applicability to machine growth in general, even pre-transistor and pre-Moore's law. It's a function of an evolutionary process.
...and the earthy "schplop - schplap" sound was the sound of his joke tunneling right beneath your feet.
You are aware that Intel is currently paying serious money for a copy of the mag Moore made his prediction in (since they lost theirs)?
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Interestingly, I was just reading an article this morning in which Intel CEO Craig Barrett addresses this. He talks about developing tiny sensors for use in the medical industry and how that will cause a push for ever smaller chips. Quote:
Although manufacturers will have to develop new technologies to maintain the pace of development, Moore's Law won't die anytime soon. Intel has already produced prototype transistors based on the next five generations of manufacturing processes, which means that the chip industry can count on at least another decade of shrinking and adding transistors.
"That kind of guarantees you another five generations," [Barrett] said. "There is no fundamental limit there."
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
Moore's law has become a law of marketing rather than computer science, and as such it will never be broken, even if it means the definition of "transistor", "chip", "month" or even "double" has to be changed.