Moore's Law Will Die Without GPUs

Stoobalou writes "Nvidia's chief scientist, Bill Daly, has warned that the long-established Moore's Law is in danger of joining phlogiston theory on the list of superseded laws, unless the CPU business embraces parallel processing on a much broader scale."

Comments

An observation

[Anonymous Coward]

Moore's is not a law, but an observation!

Re:An observation

[TheRaven64]

It's also not in any danger. The law states that the number of transistors on a chip that you can buy for a fixed investment doubles every 18 months. CPUs remaining the same speed but dropping in price would continue to match this prediction as would things like SoCs gaining more domain-specific offload hardware (e.g. crypto accelerators).

I am The Law

[Mushdot]

I didn't realise Moore's Law was purely the driving force behind CPU development and not just an observation on semiconductor development. Surely we just say Moore's Law held until a certain point, then someone else's Law takes over?

As for Phlogiston theory - it was just that, a theory which was debunked.

Moores law will apply until it doesn't

[91degrees]

But the only "law" is that the number of transistors doubles in a certain time (something of a self fulfilling prophesy these days since this is the yardstick the chip companies work to).

Once transistors get below a certain size, of course it will end. Parallel or serial doesn't change things. We either have more processors in the same space, more complex processors or simply smaller processors. There's no "saving" to be done.

Let's not play fast-and-loose with the word "law."

[dpbsmith]

I'm probably being overly pedantic about this, but of course the word "law" in "Moore's Law" is almost tongue-in-cheek. There's no comparison between a simple observation that some trend or another is exponential--most trends are over a limited period of time--and a physical "law." Moore is not the first person to plot an economic trend on semilog paper.

There isn't even any particular basis for calling Moore's Law anything more than an observation. New technologies will not automatically come into being in order to fulfill it. Perhaps you can call it an economic law--people will not bother to go through the disruption of buying a new computer unless it is 30% faster than the previous one, therefore successive product introductions will always be 30% faster, or something like that.

In contrast, something like "Conway's Law"--"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations"--may not be in the same category as Kepler's Laws, but it is more than an observation--it derives from an understanding of how people work in organizations.

Moore's Law is barely in the same category as Bode's Law, which says that "the radius of the orbit of planet #N is 0.4 + 0.3 * 2^(N-1) astronomical units, if you call the asteroid belt a planet, pretend that 2^-1 is 0, and, of course, forget Pluto, which we now do anyway."

Re:Nvidia says GPUs are the future?

[Anonymous Coward]

Marketing guy?

Before going to nvidia maybe two years ago, Bill Daly was a professor in (and the chairman of) the computer science department at Stanford. He's a fellow of the ACM, IEEE, an AAAS.

    http://cva.stanford.edu/billd_webpage_new.html

You might criticize this position, but don't dismiss him as a marketing hack. NVidia managed to poach him from Stanford to become their chief scientist because he believed in the future of GPUs as a parallel processing tool, not that he began drinking the kool-aid because he had no other options.