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Bill Daly, has warned that the long-established Moore's Law is in danger of joining phlogiston theory on the list of superseded laws, unless the CPU business embraces parallel processing on a much broader scale."

9 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 binarylarry · · Score: 5, Funny

      Guy who sells GPUs says if people don't start to buy more GPUs, computers are DOOMED.

      I don't know about you, but I'm sold.

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    2. 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. Nvidia says GPUs are the future? by iYk6 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, a graphics card manufacturer says that graphics cards are the future? And this is news?

    1. Re:Nvidia says GPUs are the future? by Rogerborg · · Score: 5, Funny

      So, a graphics card manufacturer says that graphics cards are the future? And this is news?

      THIS! IS! SLASHDOT!

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      If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
    2. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Umm? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.