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Moore's Law Will Die Without GPUs

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the i've-heard-this-song-before dept.

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Bill Daly, has warned that the long-established Moore's Law is in danger of joining phlogiston theory on the list of superseded laws, unless the CPU business embraces parallel processing on a much broader scale."

5 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. An observation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:An observation by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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 TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. I am The Law by Mushdot · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Moores law will apply until it doesn't by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Nvidia says GPUs are the future? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.