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The Mile Markers of Moore's Law Are Meaningless

Posted by timothy on from the we-call-this-one-petite dept.

szotz writes "Keeping up the pace of Moore's Law is hard, but you wouldn't know it from the way chipmakers name their technology. The semiconductor industry's names for chip generations (Intel's 22nm, TSMC's 28nm, etc) have very little to do with actual physical sizes, says IEEE Spectrum. And the disconnect is only getting bigger. For the first time, the "pay us to make your chip" foundries are offering a new process (with a smaller-sounding name) that will produce chips that are no denser than their forbears. The move is not a popular one."

3 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Moore's Law = Statistical Novelty by globaljustin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You've got it switched...

    If TSMC isn't keeping up with Moore's Law, that's not a problem with Moore's Law. It's a problem with TSMC.

    see, when the data does not support the hypothesis, you **change the hypothesis** not how you interpret the data

    Moore's Law has never been a 'law'...it was a cool statistical novelty that seemed to predict processor advancements...it is NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN fit to predict anything invovling money or resources...it's 'for fun'

    I've seen Singularity/Kurzweil types in TED talks show some dumb graph of 'Moore's Law' and show how, according to the law, humans will have the processor speed to do XYZ by 2050....it's all bunk...

    Using Moore's Law to make important decisions is about like using a Slashdot Poll to do the same...I don't trust people professionally who take a concept like Moore's Law and build their understanding of an industry around it. It's a common mistake of perception.

    Maybe there is some sort of pattern to processor speed, but it's not helping us understand anything to be so reductive and irresponsible with how we use scientific concepts.

    --
    Thank you Dave Raggett
    1. Re:Moore's Law = Statistical Novelty by crgrace · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Moore's Law has never been a 'law'...it was a cool statistical novelty that seemed to predict processor advancements...it is NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN fit to predict anything invovling money or resources...it's 'for fun'

      I disagree with you a bit here. Moore's Law is an observation, sure, but to engineers that understand the assumptions that go into Moore's Law it has been extremely useful for making predictions involving money and resources.

      At my last job I worked in an advanced development/product group working on CMOS wireless transceivers for basestations and handsets. We used Moore's Law explicitly in our planning. The IC business is brutal and you have very little room to miss your market windows. With multi-year development cycles this is tough. Therefore, like a duck hunter, you have to shoot where the technology is going to be, not where it is.

      Basically, we started the design using a CMOS process that wasn't on the market yet. We were confident that it *would be* by the time we were ready to go to market. We were confident because the availability of that process was predicted by Moore's Law and any number of foundries were spending billions to make it happen.

      If we hadn't used Moore's Law in our planning, we would have come out with products using two-year old technology, and our competition would have eaten our lunch.

  2. Re:bad example by crgrace · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The problem with the transitions to finFETs is now we have an apples-to-oranges comparison between finFET (or 3D gate or whatever you want to call it) processes and surface FET processes. GlobalFoundries feels they need to stretch the truth to get the point across that the process really is better objectively, even if the minimum feature size hasn't shrunk.

    It reminds me of 10 years ago when the microprocessor companies finally stopped the GHz war. For several years, clock speed was a poor proxy for microprocessor performance, and Mac fans used to scream loudly (and rightly) how the IBM chips beat Intel on real-world benchmarks while Intel touted their higher speed.

    Hopefully, this "node as minimum gate width" will go away and we'll move to more meaningful process figures-of-merit such as power density, power-delay product, gm/I, transit frequency, Ioff and the like.