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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
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.
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.
Battling for the title of who has the smallest one.