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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Bill Daly, has warned that the long-established Moore's Law is in danger of joining phlogiston theory on the list of superseded laws, unless the CPU business embraces parallel processing on a much broader scale."
Dr. Daly believes the only way to continue to make great strides in computing performance is to ... offload some of the work onto GPU's that his company just happens to make? [Arte Johnson] Very interesting .
The industry has moved away from "more horsepower than you'll ever need!" to "uses less power than you can ever imagine!" Perpetuating Moore's Law isn't an industry requirement, it's a prediction by a guy who was in the chip industry.
So, a graphics card manufacturer says that graphics cards are the future? And this is news?
considering that Moore's Law was based on the observation that they were able to double the number of transistors about every 20 months, it would be inevitable that at some point they reach a limiting factor. The factor seems to be the process size, which is a physical barrier. As the process size continues to decrease, the physical size of atoms is a barrier that they can't get past.
Obviously "NVIDIA's Chief Scientist" is going to say something about the epochal importance of GPUs; but WTF?
Moore's law, depending on the exact formulation you go with, posits either that transistor density will double roughly every two years or that density at minimum cost/transistor increases at roughly that rate.
It is pretty much exclusively a prediction concerning IC fabrication(a business that NVIDIA isn't even in, TSMC handles all of their actual fabbing), without any reference to what those transistors are used for.
Now, it is true that, unless parallel processing can be made to work usefully on a general basis, Moore's law will stop implying more powerful chips, and just start implying cheaper ones(since, if the limits of effective parallel processing mean that you get basically no performance improvements going from X billion transistors to 2X billion transistors, Moore's law will continue; but instead of shipping faster chips each generation, vendors will just ship smaller, cheaper ones).
In the case of servers, of course, the amount of cleverness and fundamental CS development needed to make parallelism work is substantially lower, since, if you have an outfit with 10,000 apache instances, or 5,000 VMs or something, they will always be happy to have more cores per chip, since that means more apache instances for VMs per chip, which means fewer servers(or the same number of single/dual socket servers instead of much more expensive quad/octal socket servers) even if each instance/VM uses no parallelism at all, and just sits at one core = one instance.
It is also a modestly self-fulfilling prediction, as planners have had it in mind as they were setting targets and research investments.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Moore's Law isn't exactly "a law". It isn't like "the law of gravity" where it is a certain thing that can't be ignored*. It's more "Moore's Observation" or "Moore's General Suggestion" or "Moore's Prediction". Any of those are only fit for a finite time and are bound to end.
* Someone's bound to point out some weird branch of Physics that breaks whatever law I pick or says it is wrong, but hopefully gravity is quite safe!
Hence the need to embrace parallel processing. But the trend seems to be heading toward multiple low power RISC cores, not offloading processing to the video card.
yep, the "law" basically results in one of two things, more performance for the same price, or same performance for cheaper price.
thing is tho that all of IT is hitched on the higher margins the first option produces, and do not want to go the route of the second. The second however is what netbooks hinted at.
The IT industry is used to be boutique pricing, but is rapidly dropping towards commodity.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Wake me up when this NVIDIA's proposed solution doesn't double my electrical bill and set my computer on fire.
Nine processors can't render an image of a baby in one system clock tick, sonny.