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The Mile Markers of Moore's Law Are Meaningless
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."
And thirdly, More's law is more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Anyone who actually works in the semiconductor industry could've told you this. (Ever notice how the GHz stopped growing a while ago? The move to multi-core happened around the same time and even that's stopped growing.) Yes, it's still possible to shrink transistors further but the speed and power reduction gains are diminishing and the costs of further shrinking are moving from merely eye-popping to astronomical.
Intel can afford to stay ahead of everyone else a bit (this is one of the primary reasons AMD is having difficulty staying alive) because of the huge volume that they have but even they're having problems.
I don't know about that. It's been a damn useful prediction in that it gave a pretty ambitious roadmap for engineers to follow. They've been quite successful and meeting the challenge up until quite recently.
A wise proverb that is apropos: If you don't know where you're going, you'll never get there.
That way, you'd have the option of scrolling back to less dense chip designs.
Changing the names to make something sound better has been a strat for decades, if not longer.
So why is this a surprise that the semiconductors are using it now to sell stuff.
Be seeing you...
You've got it switched...
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
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.
It's one thousand (mille) paces of a Roman soldier, as modified through history. That seems to be as reasonable a basis for a unit of length as the meter, which is 1/10000000th the distance between the poles and the equator, as modified through history. Mileposts were markers placed by Roman roadbuilders as reference points.
Why do you ask - do you live in some backwards nation without a good educational system?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"...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."
Mac fans used to scream loudly about anything that made Macs look good...and still do. It's called tribalism and it isn't about being "right", it's about being on the winning team.
Apple only used an IBM "chip" once. It's clear you don't know that so it's no surprise you don't know how "rightly" Mac fans were about their screaming either. G5's were, in the balance, not faster than their Intel contemporaries. Better at some things and worse at others. One thing was clear with the G5 and it was that Apple was switching to Intel afterward.
If you asked any "Mac fan" back in the day you'd get explained to you just how superior every generation of PowerPC Mac was to any PC ever. It's surprising then, just how much better Macs got once they switched to a real processor. Macs today ARE PCs in every way yet those Mac fans still have that feeling of smug superiority. They are inherently right always, Steve told them so, they just aren't well informed.
The Romans were counting the right and left steps as one pace.
I don't know about that.
I do. Its been a fairly accurate prediction, yet a prediction none the less. The "law" part is just an anecdotal, off-the-cuff addendum. You want to support your theory that its in fact an actual law, here's room for your proof right here:
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
G3 and G4 were Macs using IBM designed (largely) processors. Motorola and IBM jointly produced Power PC chips that Apple used in the mid/late 90s (G3 and G4) but Motorola eventually dropped out and IBM wasn't interested in keeping up with Intel. For a few years, the Apple chips were better than the IBM chips (I didn't own an Apple computer at the time, so I was evaluating this as an engineer). By the time Intel had closed the gap Apple wisely went over to the Intel architecture.
hey thanks for the response
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.
Right, so did you just use Moore's Law or did you look at other factors as well?
What I mean by other factors:
> Trends of the capacity of other recent products? Did you look at teh speeds of CMOS processes from that company over the last 10 years and extrapolate?
> Did you talk to a sales rep or engineer or product development manager at the CMOS process company and **ASK THEM** how fast their upcomming models would be (approximately)
> Do literature review of what academic research groups and possible FOSS (idk if it applies for you) were doing in that CMOS wireless type transciever tech? My former university, Ball State University did research for WiMax coverage and speed for Cisco (before WiMax was ditched)...did you look at any of that to predict the CMOS process capability you needed?
I'm trying to be polite, but I call BS.
If you claim your company made that decision based **soley** on math from Moore's Law....well I have a hard time believe that claim's veracity. You are either fabricating or that company is not very wise. And if you company **did** use other factors, then that kind of invalidates your point and parenthetically supportsy my point...I won't deny that using it **might** have added value, but only IF you also did common practices like I mentioned above...
Seriously...did you use other factors besides Moore's Law?
Like asking the vendor? (or any of the others mentioned above)
Of course we used all kinds of inputs into our planning process. We would have been fools not to.
I feel like you're doing a bit of "move the goal posts" here. First you very emphatically state that "[Moore's Law] is NOT and HAS NEVER BEEN fit to predict anything invovling money or resources"
I gave you a reply from experience that that is not true, and in fact companies do use (or at least used to) use Moore's Law in their planning process (where money and resources are involved).
Now you saying I'm claiming my company invested millions blindly because we had some faith in Moore's Law. Of course we didn't, and I don't think I implied that.
First off, looking at the speed improvements from the foundry over the last 10 years as evidence is pretty much the same thing as following Moore's Law.
Second, as I'm sure you know, sales reps will say "YES" to anything, so Moore's Law helps put things in context. If they are saying something way better than Moore's Law, you have to be skeptical.
Basically, I disagree that the fact that we used a variety of factors (like virtually any company will do for any decision) invalidates my point. You said that Moore's Law isn't fit for predicting things. I disagree.
If you would have said "Moore's Law isn't fit for making significant investments in the absence of other factors or critical thinking" then I would agree with you.
And yet the channel width is ~8 nm, which is ~64 atomic layers. How many times do you think they can cut that in half? And does it really matter when the source and drain contacts are 10x the size of the channel itself?
That's not hard to figure out - they lost to not only the colonies, but to the French. But I'm being facetious. They're "imperial units," not "English units." They're based on the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which postdates your claim that they deprecated such measures in colonial times. Britain didn't really embrace the SI system until the late 20th centuy.
(BTW, ITYM "England," not "English." HTH! HAND!)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
To my knowledge, the node's name was based on the DRAM half pitch. But yeah, it's not that any longer. And in defense of GlobalFoundries, finFET does literally add an extra dimension to the calculation of FET geometries.
The node names are indeed based on DRAM half pitch, but CPUs haven't been made with the same process as DRAM since pitch was measured microns (eg. 0.13u).
The reality is that marketing CDs, including 32 and 22nm are only achieved through multiple patterning, and that won't change unless the industry adopts EUV or moves to a maskless process, neither of which is an economical proposition, given that the current best lightsource for EUV is a Tin vapor excimer laser, with a less than 1% dose/total energy efficiency. Part of the problem is EUV zoneplate mirrors have poor reflectivity compared to mirrors used with ArF excimer lightsources, and part of the problem is the low efficiency of the Tin vapor lasers. My prediction is that Stanford's solidstate FEL will be commercialised and used in place of excimer lasers. I'd like to see maskless litho (using DMR or DLP scanning) become a commercial reality, it will really change the market, as single dies will be manufacturable for nearly equivalent cost to volume production, but I wouldn't count on that happening too soon.
-puddingpimp
If you've ever actually had to do precision pacing and measured it out, you'd know why a pace is 2 steps. It equalizes the difference between left and right. 1% accuracy in pace length over a moderately long distance (50-500 m) isn't unusual.
Most scientific laws are orders of magnitude more precise than Moore's "law", and are quite stable over time. Moore himself varied the period for doubling from 12 to 24 months over the course of just a few years. That's better than a meteorologist but not as good as an economist, and economic "laws" are mostly poor approximations even on good days.
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Battling for the title of who has the smallest one.
I got my first Mac just over a year ago. Because of comments like yours, I was expecting quality hardware.
It is the absolute worst computer I have ever owned. And all of my other computers were built from low-cost parts on the Internet. I've had the thousand-dollar monitor die twice (luckily under warranty) and now the video chip is flaking out whenever it displays videos. My other computers would develop issues over time, but I've never before had such serious problems in so short a time after purchase. I will never buy an Apple product again for its mythical "quality".
While I'm not a fan of Steve or Apple, Apple PCs are still superior PCs. It's just not in "geeky" stuff like processor speed or 3D performance which Apple has no control over, it's in some tangibles like quality and some other things that I personally don't give a shit about ("Design", "Form Factor").
Bull. Its noone elses problem that Mac fans insist on comparing $1200 Macs with $400 Dells. Compare a Mac with a laptop in the same price bracket, and you start to realize that there actually is competition out there. Check out the Samsung Ativ 9, or the last-year's Samsung Series 7s, or the Asus Zenbook prime.