Does Moore's Law Help or Hinder the PC Industry?

An anonymous reader writes to mention two analysts recently examined Moore's Law and its effect on the computer industry. "One of the things both men did agree on was that Moore's Law is, and has been, an undeniable driving force in the computer industry for close to four decades now. They also agreed that it is plagued by misunderstanding. 'Moore's Law is frequently misquoted, and frequently misrepresented,' noted Gammage. While most people believe it means that you double the speed and the power of processors every 18 to 24 months, that notion is in fact wrong, Gammage said. 'Moore's Law is all about the density...the density of those transistors, and not what we choose to do with it.'"

Comments

Both

[DaAdder]

I suppose it does both.

The drum beat of progress pushes development to it's limits, but at the same time hinders some forms of research or real world tests of computation theory, for all save the few chip makers dominating the market currently.

I'm gonna vote for hurts - big time

[$RANDOMLUSER]

If only because it keeps us tied to the x86 instruction set. If we didn't have the luxury of increasing the transistor count by an order of magnitude every few years, we'd have to rely on better processor design.

Moore's Observation

[Edward Ka-Spel]

It's not a law, it's an observation.

Re:Moore's Observation

[jhfry]

If you think that Intel or AMD double the number of transistors in an effort to keep up with Moore's law than you know nothing about business.

No one does anything in an effort to prove Moore correct... they do it for their own benefit. Intel does it to stay ahead of their competition and continue to keep selling more processors. If they chose to stop adding transistors they could pretty much count on losing the race to AMD, and likely becoming obsolete in a very short time.

I agree that more transistors != better... however it is indeed the easiest way, and least complex, to increase performance. Changing the architecture of the chip, negotiating with software developers to support it, etc, is far more complex than adding more transistors.

Re:Moore's Observation

[TheRaven64]

It takes roughly 3-5 years to design a modern CPU. At the start of the process, you need to know how many transistors you will have to play with. If you guess to few, you can do some tricks like adding more cache, but you are likely to have a slower chip than you wanted. If you guessed too many, you end up with a more expensive chip[1]. Moore's 'law' is a pretty good first-approximation guess of how many you will have at the end of the design process. A company that can't make this prediction accurately is not going to remain competitive for long.

[1] There is no real upper bound on the number of transistors you can fit on a chip, just the number you can for a given investment.

No significances.

[Frosty Piss]

"Moore's Law" is not a real law. In reality, it is not relevant at all. It's kind of a cute thing to mention, but when it gets down to the real world engineering, it has no significances.

Re:No significances.

[truthsearch]

While you are correct, it has value as being accurate foresight. So the question is, was it just an observation or did it become a self-fulfilling prophecy? If it was a self-fulfilling prophecy then what other judgements can we make now that may drive technology in the future?

In My Opinion, It Isn't a Law

[eldavojohn]

I always viewed this as an observation or rule of thumb, not a law.

Moore (or Mead for that matter) didn't get up one day and declare that the amount of transistors on a square centimeter of space will double every 18 to 24 months. Nor did he prove in anyway that it has always been this way and will always be this way.

He made observations and these observations happen to have held true for a relatively long time in the world of computers. Does that make them a law? Definitely not! At some point, the duality that small particles suffer will either stop us dead in our tracks or (in the case of quantum computers) propel us forward much faster than ever thought.

Why debate if a well made observation hurts or hinders the industry when it's the industry doing it to itself?!

Better Summary

[Palmyst]

The core of their argument is that instead of actually delivering same performance at lower prices, Moore's law delivers more performance at same prices. i.e. you can buy Cray-1 level performance for $50, but you can't buy Apple I level performance for $0.001. The second level of their argument is that this march of performance forces users to keep spending money to upgrade to the latest hardware, just to keep up with the software.

The Real Story

[tomkost]

The real story is that Moore's law describes the basic goal of the semiconductor industry. Perhaps there are better goals, but they tend to get swallowed up in the quest for smaller transistors. The other real story is Gate's law: I will use up those extra transistors faster than you can create them. My hardware OEMs need a bloated OS that will drive new HW replacement cycles. I also seem to remember Moore's law was often quoted as a doubling every year, now I see some saying 18-24 months, so I think in fact the rule is slowing down. We are pushing into the area where it takes a lot of effort and innovation to get a small increase in density. Even still, Moore's law has always been a favorite of mine! Tom

Simple answers from an old Guru

[Applekid]

What we do with the transistors? Run software of course. Enter Wirth's Law:

"Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating."