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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Bill Daly, has warned that the long-established Moore's Law is in danger of joining phlogiston theory on the list of superseded laws, unless the CPU business embraces parallel processing on a much broader scale."
Moore's is not a law, but an observation!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Wake me up when this NVIDIA's proposed solution doesn't double my electrical bill and set my computer on fire.