Slashdot Mirror
45 Years Later, Does Moore's Law Still Hold True?
Velcroman1 writes "Intel has packed just shy of a billion transistors into the 216 square millimeters of silicon that compose its latest chip, each one far, far thinner than a sliver of human hair. But this mind-blowing feat of engineering doesn't really surprise us, right? After all, that's just Moore's Law in action isn't it? In 1965, an article in "Electronics" magazine by Gordon Moore, the future founder of chip juggernaut Intel, predicted that computer processing power would double roughly every 18 months. Or maybe he said 12 months. Or was it 24 months? Actually, nowhere in the article did Moore actually spell out that famous declaration, nor does the word 'law' even appear in the article at all. Yet the idea has proved remarkably resilient over time, entering the zeitgeist and lodging like a stubborn computer virus you just can't eradicate. But does it hold true? Strangely, that seems to depend more than anything on whom you ask. 'Yes, it still matters, and yes we're still tracking it,' said Mark Bohr, Intel senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration. 'Semiconductor chips haven't actually tracked the progress predicted by Moore's law for many years,' said Tom Halfhill, the well respected chip analyst with industry bible the Microprocessor Report."
Number of components, not computing power, and the time-frame should be easy to figure out given the difference between 1965's number and the 65,000 predicted in 1975.
Put identity in the browser.
45 Years Later, Does Moore's Law Still Matter?
Seriously, hardware is always getting faster. Why do we need a law that states this? Which is a more likely scenario for Intel: "Ok, we need to make our chips faster because of some ancient arbitrary rule of thumb for hardware speed.", or "Ok, we need to make our chips faster because if we don't, AMD will overtake us and we'll lose money."?
Is there some corollary to Moore's law regarding the frequency at which articles will be written commemorating the age of Moore's law and asking if it is relevant?
Well, if it didn't, then would we still be talking about it, forty-five years later?
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
No, yes, no, no, no.
How often do you really max out your CPU cycles these days anyway?
Every-fuckin'-time Flash appears on a web page!
It's also been so frequently misused that Halfhill was forced to define Moron's Law, which states that "the number of ignorant references to Moore's Law doubles every 12 months."
There are only 13 posts so far, and yet /. is still on track to meet this law. Great job everyone.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Well the problem here is that the question "Does Moore's Law Hold True?" is not very precise. It's easy to show both that the law doesn't hold, and that it is being followed still today, depending on how tight your definitions are.
If you extrapolate from the date that Moore first made the prediction, using the transistor counts of the day and a particular scaling exponent ("doubling every two years"), then the extrapolated line, today, will not exactly match current transistor counts. So it fails.
But if you use the "Law" in its most general form, which is something like "computing power will increase exponentially with time" then yes, it's basically true. One of the problems with this, however, is that you can draw a straight-line, and get a power-law exponent, through a lot of datasets once plotted in a log-linear fashion. To know whether the data "really is" following a power law, you need to do some more careful statistics, and decide on what you think the error bars are. Again, with sufficiently large error bars, our computing power is certainly increasing exponentially. But, on the other hand, if you do a careful fit you'll find the scaling law is not constant: it actually changes in different time periods (corresponding to breakthroughs and corresponding maturation of technology, for instance). So claiming that the history of computing fits a single exponent is an approximation, at best.
So you really need to be clear what question you're asking. If the question is asking whether "Moore's Law" is really an incontrovertible law, then the answer is "no". If the question is whether it's been a pretty good predictor, then answer is "yes" (depending on what you mean by "pretty good" of course). If the question is "Does industry still use some kind of assumption of exponential scaling in their roadmapping?" the answer is "yes" (just go look at the roadmaps). If the question is "Can this exponential scaling continue forever?" then the answer is "no" (there are fundamental limits to computation). If the question is "When will the microelectronics industry stop being able to deliver new computers with exponentially more power?" then the answer is "I don't know."
How often do you really max out your CPU cycles these days anyway?
All the time. Why?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What the fthagn is this? A Fox News article on /.? And it's actually accurate, non-politicized reporting on a scientific matter?
Apparently, I have entered the Bizarro World. Or perhaps the Mirror Universe. I can't be dreaming, because I'm not surrounded by hot women in tiny outfits, but something is most definitely WRONG here, and I aim to find out what.
At best it is a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the 'law' is now used as a standard for judging the industry, which strives to keep up with the predictions.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
I feel like I've been reading this article every six months for the last ten years.
Even if you had an arbitrarily powerful CPU, you'd still have to load in everything from memory, hard disk, or network sources (i.e. all very slow)
Considering that light only travels 30 cm per nanosecond in a vacuum, the maximum practical clock speed depends on how far your memory is. At a 3 GHz clock rate, a request for data from a chip that's just 5 cm away on the circuit board will have a latency longer than the clock period.
The only solution to this problem is increasing the on-chip cache. But that will depend on having software that manages the cache well, i.e. more complex algorithms. In that case, since you have to optimize the software anyhow, why not go to a parallel architecture?
I bet that in the future we will see chips with simpler (read RISC) architectures with more on-chip memory and special compilers designed to optimize tasks to minimize random memory access.
the future founder of chip juggernaut Intel, predicted that computer processing power would double roughly every 18 months. Or maybe he said 12 months
What Gordon Moore actually said was that complexity would double every year. Moore was also relating cost at that time, but cost doesn't actually scale well, so most people don't include cost in modern interpretations of Moore's Law.
For circuit complexity, Moore's Law (with the 18 month amendment) seems to still hold true. However, we are fast approaching some physical limits that may cause the doubling period to increase.
Performance is commonly associated with Moore's Law (as you mention), However, performance is a function of clock speed, architecture, algorithm, and a host of other parameters and certainly does not follow Moore's Law... It never really has, even though people still like to think it does... or should...
CharlieMopps's Law(TM): The quantity of articles posted to Slashdot that mention Moore's Law will approximately double every time Intel or AMD come out with a new processor.
"Moore ... predicted that computer processing power would double roughly every 18 months. Or maybe he said 12 months. Or was it 24 months? Actually, nowhere in the article did Moore actually spell out that famous declaration, nor does the word "law" even appear in the article at all."
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase."
Moore's law is about minimum cost per unit. In traditional manufacturing, this is volume. In the IC world, component volume is simply chip density, but unit volume is affected adversely by chip density (complexity up, yields down). Thus, there is a balancing act. Moore's law is about the minimum, the optimal point on the curve from a manufacturer's standpoint.
This minimum has traditionally directly correlated with performance. Why? Because we tend to add components that end up doing work.
No, Moore didn't call it a law. It was an observation, and a prediction. As it proved to hold true over the next several decades, people referred to it as a law.
And it continues to hold true.
So please shut the fuck and stop asking about it every 6 months. Moore's law isn't about to be broken. Tablets aren't replacing desktop PCs any time soon. The cloud isn't changing the face of computing as we know it. This isn't the year of the Linux desktop. That breakthrough in solar panel efficiency will never materialize. Batteries still suck ass and there are no signs of any significant improvement on the horizon.
If you've got no news to report, just throw up "Not much news today. People are still talking about those new Intel CPUs, though.".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Unfortunately its the aggregate of a pile of small independent undemanding tasks that drags modern PCs to a crawl. And these aren't even bottlenecking the CPU itself... to be honest I don't know what the bottleneck is right now in some items... I'll open up the task manager... cpu utilization will be comfortably low on all cores, hard drive lights are idle so it shouldn't be waiting on IO... and the progress bar is just sitting there... literally 20-30 seconds later things start happening again... WHAT THE HELL? What are the possible bottlenecks that cause this?
Might be thrashing or a task scheduler issue. Try a different OS on that machine to see if the performance changes, or try a similar machine configured with more memory.
But it might also be the Von Neumann Bottleneck. If your working set - either data or instructions - is bigger than the on-chip caches, you get constant cache misses. It's like thrashing but between cache and memory rather than between memory and the swap partition.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way