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Intel Finds Moore's Law's Next Step At 10 Nanometers (ieee.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Sometime in 2017, Intel will ship the first processors built using the company's new, 10-nanometer chip-manufacturing technology. Intel says transistors produced in this way will be cheaper than those that came before, continuing the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law -- and contradicting widespread talk that transistor-production costs have already sunk as low as they will go.

In the coming years, Intel plans to make further improvements to the design of these transistors. And, for the first time, the company will optimize its manufacturing technology to accommodate other companies that wish to use Intel's facilities to produce chips based on ARM architecture, which is nearly ubiquitous in modern mobile processors.

182 comments

  1. monopoly by fabriciom · · Score: 1

    When will someone throw down and bring down or at least challenge intel's monopoly...

    1. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Intel doesn't have a monopoly, there is AMD. I would suggest buying all AMD chips to help support AMD's efforts.

    2. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They still have a monopoly, AMD, especially in the CPU Sector, is just for show and Ryzen might not change a lot of that.

      Giving AMD a lot more money and direct access to Intels Fabs as part of their agreement would have probably leveled that field.

    3. Re:monopoly by Stolpskott · · Score: 2

      Not sure would say Intel has a monopoly, but there is a huge capital cost involved in adopting each new generation of fabrication facilities, to the point where there are very few companies that can take a seat at that table - that is the reason why most chip design companies outsource their fabrication requirements to one of the companies with the desired/required technical facilities.

    4. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      NVidia wanted to but was prevented to do so by ridiculous copyright / patent laws that prevent companies to enter new markets.
      If you want to get rid of (near-)monopolies all you have to do is weaken patents. They do not help innovation and are mainly used to keep unwanted competition from entering into lucrative markets. Get rid of government issues monopolies (which is what patents essentially are, which also makes them at their core a communist concept and very much non-capitalist and against the free market) and you will greatly weaken all potential monopolies in the market.

    5. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They still have a monopoly, AMD, especially in the CPU Sector, is just for show

      I've been building my own computers for nearly 20 years, and I don't understand why anyone buys Intel over AMD.

      What's the point of paying double/triple the price? Better performance? OK, that's fine if you're building a supercomputer and money is no object. I do a lot of video and audio editing/production and my AMDs have handled everything I throw at them just fine. And the money I save pays for bigger hard drives or other components.

      Intel is for rich suckers.

    6. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, you work with integer math applications. Of course AMD will be sufficient for you. For floating point operations, Intel is king (for the last 6 years I compared chips for my company and Intel always came out cheaper by a factor of 2x price-performance; not on benchmarks but on actual simulation software).

    7. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      People don't realize this. Even without patents, no one else is close to 10 nm yet. How many years would it take AMD to match what Intel has today even if every patent and trade secret was free for use? I'm guessing over 5 years and several tens of billions of dollars. The truth is that this stuff is expensive to produce even if you have all the science and design done.

    8. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel motherboard/CPU prices seem to have a bit increased lately but otherwise Intel has often been cheaper than AMD depending on the situation. E.g. what they call the Pentium, in Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge / Haswell generations was a lot more powerful than similarly priced AMD CPUs. You also could and can put an i5 on a lowest end motherboard, low end PSU, stock cooler - do that with an eight core AMD FX, it'll cook the motherboard and make you deaf.

      In fact AMD might be getting the price/performance advantage back, but their best products are unreleased yet. Some that you can get right now are cheap and good, like A8 7600, but core-for-core slower than Sandy Bridge yet.

    9. Re:monopoly by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      Ryzen could be a winner. If it gets even close to intel's performance the value will be there.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    10. Re:monopoly by Mashiki · · Score: 1, Informative

      What's the difference between AMD and Intel? Intel believes that information should be patented and sold. AMD believes that it should be patented and used as a industry standard -- while giving that patented information away. Keep in mind that it was Intel who was also sued successfully multiple times by AMD for antitrust violations, price fixing, operating an illegal monopoly and fixing benchmarks(both simulated and real world). Pretty sure there's a few others I'm forgetting, just a FYI Intel has lost every case. Not just in the US but in the EU and JP courts as well.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    11. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sounds like you've demonstrated that there is actual competition, as you had to do a business case to determine which one to use for your application.

    12. Re:monopoly by Rockoon · · Score: 5, Informative

      People don't realize this. Even without patents, no one else is close to 10 nm yet.

      You mean besides the three companies that have already (Samsung) or will shortly (TSMC, Toshiba) beat Intel to 10nm?

      Intel fumbled the ball on this node. Their process advantage is gone, and combined with their vertical integration disadvantage, will see them fall farther and farther behind. Thats why they have recently done massive layoffs and are now blanketing press releases about a new "cloud strategy."

      Intel knows that they are now in a bad position. Their competitors also know it. Contrary to popular shalshdot belief, the list of Intels main competitors do not include AMD or even ARM. Intel is a fabrication company. Its main competitors are TSMC, Samsung, Toshiba, and Global Foundries, and there are dozens of smaller competitors, and all of them are now eating into Intel at all node sizes. Samsung arrived at 10nm mass production first, and TSMC is following closely behind.

      of course some anonymous coward will now say that Samsung isnt producing true 10nm ... not understanding that Intel invented lying about node size.. and hasnt even produced a true 22nm yet.

      Rate these things on transistor density and you will see that Intel is behind Samsung now, and will soon also be behind TSMC and Toshiba.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    13. Re: monopoly by hackwrench · · Score: 0

      Well, one way of looking at it is that he did a business use case to determine if there was competition and determined that AMD simply wasn't competitive.

    14. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How many years would it take AMD to match what Intel has today even if every patent and trade secret was free for use?

      We are never going to know. That's the point. Patents and trade secrets provide monopolies by definition. The opposite of this is competition. Intel may be able to compete effectively, and it may not. For now, it relies on monopoly.

    15. Re:monopoly by phantomfive · · Score: 0

      Contrary to popular shalshdot belief, the list of Intels main competitors do not include AMD or even ARM. Intel is a fabrication company. Its main competitors are TSMC, Samsung, Toshiba, and Global Foundries, and there are dozens of smaller competitors, and all of them are now eating into Intel at all node sizes. Samsung arrived at 10nm mass production first, and TSMC is following closely behind.

      Who is making x86 chips that can out-perform Intel's?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    16. Re:monopoly by unixisc · · Score: 1

      NVIDIA could have gotten around it by acquiring one of the Taiwanese companies (think it was Via) that had acquired Cyrix and Centaur, and then made 64-bit CPUs that were successors of theirs

    17. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Odd NCAR's WRF mesoscale weather forecast model performs much better with AMD processors than with Intel for the same clock speed. AMD runtimes are roughly 5 minutes shorter on an AMD for 300x300 km 2km resolution 6 hour forecast than on an intel

    18. Re:monopoly by Kaenneth · · Score: 2

      x86 is dying, and 2017 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, Netcraft confirms.

    19. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It appears that AMD is back on that path after having lost the lead when Intel debuted the Core-series.

    20. Re:monopoly by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Go Google AMD Zen aka Ryzen. Intel has a worthy competitor if true? It's not out yet but was demoed last week beating an Intel broadwell 8 core CPU :-)

      Also I am 40. In my 20s AMD made superior x86 chips over Intel! No you did not misread that? Google slashdot pentium IV vs AthlonXP from early last decade for a laugh? The pentium IV sucked! It was hot and single core and had inferior performance over the AthlonXP. AMD also invented 64 bit computing for x86. Intel wanted the horrible Itanic proprietary Mercedes to replace x86. Intel crippled the pentium IV making it just 32 bits and trolled the virtues of lWisc or whatever funny architecture it was for servers.

      Thanks AMD for saving x86 and bring us 64 bit computing to mere mortals outside of MDF rooms. Now go kick Intel's ass again?

      PS I still support Intel as my virtualization stuff is tuned for their chip. In 2 years that may change with KMS and Hyper-V supporting Ryzen if they hit it big

    21. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel could be right now manufacturing 10nm x64 processors, but they don't do it because they want to sell millions and millions of 14nm processors before to start selling 10nm processors. They do it because there is no competition in the x64 segment.

    22. Re:monopoly by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      x86 is dying, and 2017 will be the year of Linux on the desktop, Netcraft confirms.

      I appoint you king of 2017. Make it so.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    23. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would suspect it uses a lot of floating point and a good compiler/optimizer.
      Still great to hear AMD hardware holding a sliver of ground. "At work, still holding on to a nine year old AMD box just so I don't get stuck with intel".

    24. Re:monopoly by Solandri · · Score: 2, Informative

      The way Intel, Samsung, and TSMC measure transistor size isn't the same. Some of Intel's 22nm transistor structures were smaller than TSMC's 16nm. I do agree Intel's lead has shrunk, but just because one process is called 14nm and another 10nm doesn't really matter - transistor density and production yields are what are important.

    25. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "You mean besides the three companies that have already (Samsung) or will shortly (TSMC, Toshiba) beat Intel to 10nm?"

      Ironically it's Intel who've suffered due to marketing clouding actual technical achievements. The actual size of chip features has little to do with the headline nanometre number. It's just marketing and has been for a long time - 10nm in TSMC speak means "we have a few parts of the chip which have 10nm features" but the bulk of the chip will more closely resemble 14nm, 16nm and 20nm.

      What has been consistent is Intel's process maturity at a given node; their 14nm process is equivalent to TSMC's 10nm process, and their 10nm process will likely be equivalent to the next (half-)node pursued by TSMC, GF and Samsung (8nm?).

    26. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Also at some point you would think that minimum line widths of the circuit become less of a limiting factor than the minimum insulation distance between circuit lines.

    27. Re: monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I remember those day. It is funny to think that we are the old guys now talking about how things used to be back in our days.

    28. Re:monopoly by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This tends to follow typical trends of "industry leader" vs "also-ran". What would an industry leader have to gain by establishing well-defined standards? In contrast, standards are critical for the also-rans to compete.

      Don't think for a minute that AMD wouldn't do the same were they in Intel's shoes. They play nicer because they're the underdog right now.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    29. Re:monopoly by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      Designing a chip and fabbing them are two different things. You're combining something Intel has an advantage on with what is being discussed here, and claiming the outcome is the best. In reality the best outcome would be an Intel designed x86 chip fabbed in someone else's foundry. But for the sake of vertical integration we are now stuck with a sub par product given the current state of technology.

      But yay for your comment.

    30. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They've also been selling lower under performing processors. The fact that my 3.5GHZ quad core Xeon server from 2013 out performs the new "12 core Xeon" is quite the fucking joke.

    31. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ARM chip sales per year are an order of magnitude higher than x86. And that was 2 years ago.

      Or are you one of those pcmasterrace people who aren't aware anything else on earth exists?

    32. Re:monopoly by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Well, AMD has designed better x86 chips than Intel many times over the last two decades. I don't think they've ever been able to match Intel on process, though. If AMD can build their chips on someone else's foundry, then that's good.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    33. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      as soon as someone is willing to risk say, 5 billion dollars on a fab to go head to head with intel ?

    34. Re: monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      As others have pointed out this is simply not true. Intel's 14nm isn't tmsc 10nm. Intel invented the lying about feature size in first place to keep their stock price up.

    35. Re:monopoly by bongey · · Score: 1

      There are hints that Intel is actually seeing Ryzen as a threat and having to adjust. First they moved their investor meeting from Nov to Feb , then Intel just killed the KBL-H(mobile workstations) for the 2017 road map.Note wccftech screws up some the arch sizes but the headline is correct. http://wccftech.com/intel-kaby...

      Intel is not going to have the best q2-q4 in 2017, and maybe into 2018. Intel has nothing really new on the roadmap, just die shrinks.

    36. Re:monopoly by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      I can remember when TSMC was mostly known as an 8255 cloner.

    37. Re:monopoly by Dorianny · · Score: 1

      Intel's Itanium was a HPC (high performance computing) architecture meant to compete with IBM's Power and Sun's SPARC. Unfortunately delays and underperformance turned the product into a joke in the chip industry. There was never a road-map or intention to eventually bring it to the desktop as a i386 replacement. AMD saw an opportunity to score a marketing victory by extending i386 to 64bit before Intel did. The main benefit of 64bit is being able to address more memory then the 4GB 32bit registers are limited to. When the Opteron (first AMD64 processor) was released in 2003 the average amount of memory shipped with desktops was just 500Mb. Despite x86-64 underwhelming performance compared to HPC architectures, its cheap price and readily availability made it popular in the Enterprise market eventually killing Intel's own Itanium, all-but killing SPARC and relegating IBM's Power to a niche player

    38. Re:monopoly by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

      Intel's Itanium was a HPC (high performance computing) architecture meant to compete with IBM's Power and Sun's SPARC. Unfortunately delays and underperformance turned the product into a joke in the chip industry. There was never a road-map or intention to eventually bring it to the desktop as a i386 replacement. AMD saw an opportunity to score a marketing victory by extending i386 to 64bit before Intel did. The main benefit of 64bit is being able to address more memory then the 4GB 32bit registers are limited to. When the Opteron (first AMD64 processor) was released in 2003 the average amount of memory shipped with desktops was just 500Mb. Despite x86-64 underwhelming performance compared to HPC architectures, its cheap price and readily availability made it popular in the Enterprise market eventually killing Intel's own Itanium, all-but killing SPARC and relegating IBM's Power to a niche player

      Actually some Pentium's mysteriously had 64 bit support not too lang afterwards. Hmmm

      64 bits mean more registers and better performance with extra instructions like SQL databases. It is not just memory limitations as Intel did add PAE in the pentium IV chipset.

      The reason for this is simple. HP and Intel wanted ITanium to win at all costs and even crippled the superior Alpha chip and prematurely killed it. It would have been better but the idiots including Fiona have no concept of sunken costs. Shit the fans sounded like a jet engine taking off as Intel clocked the shit out of the Itaniums trying to outdo the 1999 Alpha haha.

      Intel had a roadmap and wanted to kill AMD to it's death as they didn't have a licensing agreement for the instructions. Intel had many seminars and by this time we all would be using Itaniums and using x86 only in emulation. Only Intel and HP did. IT was never high performance either. Gee moving the optimizations to software and crippling hardware lowered performance! WHo would have thought?!

    39. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel is getting its ASS handed to it in the mobile/iot/embedded world by ARM and ARM IP. That is why it is selling space to its competitors. (a) It needs money, (b) it wants to control their production.

      The only place intel is making money is the server chips. And once Cavium & nVidia eat Intel's heterogenous compute in that domain (it's Xeon Phi line), Intel is Fuuuuuuucked.

      I do not expect Intel to remain as big a company in 10 years. I think selling fab capacity is a move of desperation because intel literally has NOTHING else in its portfolio except predatory pricing and fab skills. Their architecture has been shit for quite some time, which is why there is zero penetration in the mobile world for intel.

    40. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OpenCL in the compute cloud is dominated by nVidia, as is distributed heterogeneous compute (ADAS).

      Mobile, IOT and embedded is dominated by ARM.

      Intel has a huge Xeon non-compute server (meaning non-XeonPhi) market, but Cavium is eating their lunch there w/ARM wins.

      Laptop is about the only other place Intel has left to call home, and Win10 laptops are struggling against Apple. Apple has been waffling between their own core and Intels x86. Intel kisses apple's ass and does special product spins for apple because Intel is so desperate.

      They will be relegated to Windows laptops and throughput servers, which is no small party, but just not as profitable as other segments.

      Selling fab capacity is like selling your children into slavery. Intel is fucked and they know it.

    41. Re:monopoly by Mashiki · · Score: 1

      Don't think for a minute that AMD wouldn't do the same were they in Intel's shoes. They play nicer because they're the underdog right now.

      Their past history seems to show that this is their corporate policy. If you're young, then you don't remember the AMD of the 80's and 90's when their CPU's were king and Intel was the one on the verge of bankruptcy.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    42. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Despite x86-64 underwhelming performance compared to HPC architectures

      Itanium was so bad that x86-64 had quite fine performance compared to it. Of course not if you compared an Itanium chip with 32 MB of cache with a Desktop AMD with 512 kB! But caches was almost the only thing (outside a few corner-cases compilers handled really well) Itanium had going for it.
      Kind of an attempt of proving that with (large) enough caches even the crappiest architectures can perform decently for HPC.

    43. Re: monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well, AMD still beats them out at other types of processing for price/performance, just not that one. So the monopoly is not absolute. Also, for people who just need a base end machine and excess power would be wasteful, go AMD. So Intel is more cost-effective for floating-point processing, but that also depends on how much load the machine is under. For anything less than 100% utilization, the theoretical extra power you're paying for will be wasted money.

    44. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Intel is cheaper after only a few years. Efficiency matters. And "handled" is a very subjective word. To me, AMD does not handle most loads I throw at it. Looking hopefully forward to Zen.

    45. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You mean besides the three companies that have already (Samsung) or will shortly (TSMC, Toshiba) beat Intel to 10nm?

      Not quite. Apples and Oranges here. Samsung's "10nm" is resulting in average transistor sizes almost identical to Intel's mature 14nm process. To top it off, is Samsung's version of finfet uses more fins than Intel's, because they need more contact surface to keep the transistors stable, which results in more leakage. Even at the same node size, Intel is effectively one process generation ahead.

    46. Re:monopoly by walshy007 · · Score: 1

      Surely (depending on your simulation software) cpu would be mostly irrelevant when it comes to strongly parallel floating point heavy math?

      Sure coding for OpenCL is certainly more restrictive in a lot of ways, but done properly where appropriate the performance gains can be immense (understatement).

    47. Re: monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Drivers. AMD/ATI drivers in open source world make my hair silver. For over a decade they refuse to write decent drivers with a flexible license. Intel apreciates me as a customer.

    48. Re: monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMD in 90s? Once i586s came out AMD was nowhere to be found.

    49. Re:monopoly by thunderclees · · Score: 1

      Just about every benchmark and benchmarking comparison site would disagree.

    50. Re: monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      UNESCO decided that 2017 is the year of AmigaOS. Linux year is scheduled to be in 2023, soon after Plan9.

    51. Re: monopoly by Mashiki · · Score: 1

      AMD in 90s? Once i586s came out AMD was nowhere to be found.

      Thanks for showing you're very young, and have no idea of what you're talking about. AMD were the ones who created a compatible CPU at half the cost and worked on the same boards as intel...in the 90's. Then there was the Slot 1 and Slot A bit.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    52. Re:monopoly by syntotic · · Score: 1

      What for? Cheap and advanced and you are not doing the math for it. Lets wait for arduino style versions with increased power and yields.

    53. Re:monopoly by Agripa · · Score: 1

      I've been building my own computers for nearly 20 years, and I don't understand why anyone buys Intel over AMD.

      What's the point of paying double/triple the price? Better performance?

      Intel's compilers and libraries only take advantage of features found in Intel processors. AMD is great if you want your software to ignore the various instruction set extensions. So the extra cost for Intel CPUs is actually a licensing cost for their compilers and libraries to pay for Intel's programmers to go out of their way to cripple performance on AMD; that does not come cheap.

    54. Re:monopoly by Agripa · · Score: 1

      There was never a road-map or intention to eventually bring it to the desktop as a i386 replacement.

      That is not what Intel's actions and marketing indicated. They said Itanium would replace the last generation of x86 which was represented by the Pentium 4 and Itanium included hardware support for executing x86 code.

    55. Re: monopoly by syntotic · · Score: 1

      What about Atari? It was THE computer, ubiquitous when I was a boy. NOTHING else like it, either TV or small LED fixed-sprite games or even blinking LED American football and that was it. Consoles came later, I was already deep into Atari when you could find arcade consoled in The Beach, only.

    56. Re:monopoly by Agripa · · Score: 1

      The important criteria is the cost per transistor which must decrease to make the next fabrication node economical. This comes even at the cost of reduced performance.

      2016 Plenary Session 1 - Moore’s Law: A Path Forward

    57. Re:monopoly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've been building my own computers for nearly 20 years, and I don't understand why anyone buys Intel over AMD.

      What's the point of paying double/triple the price? Better performance? OK, that's fine if you're building a supercomputer and money is no object. I do a lot of video and audio editing/production and my AMDs have handled everything I throw at them just fine. And the money I save pays for bigger hard drives or other components.

      Intel is for rich suckers.

      Efficiency. Better performance per watt.

      Over time the extra cost of the electricity waste far exceeds the cost of the better performing chip.

    58. Re:monopoly by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Their architecture is a very highly scalable one - from 1 core to up to 72 cores. That's some definition of 'shit'. Recall that this architecture was designed by AMD: Intel was trying to go EPIC/VLIW w/ Itanium, but failed, since EPIC did not have the die size savings promised by the VLIW approach of tossing everything to the compiler. In fact, Itanium 3 is more of a RISC than a VLIW CPU, w/ RISC concepts like register renaming (which in VLIW is dealt by the compiler), and there had been better RISC CPUs before it, like SPARC, PA-RISC and Alpha. Anyway, Intel saw AMD starting to eat its lunch at around 2004, so went from the IA-64 to the Intel 64 architecture. The RISC over CISC advantages that used to exist are pretty much extinct now.

      Also, you forget that no company comes even close to Intel in terms of advanced fabs, and in some cases, like TSMC, need government subsidies to go the next step. Intel, by contrast, has meticulously dedicated all their extra cash in building and refining their processes, so that they can make whatever the industry throws at them. Selling capacity to other semiconductor houses, like Altera (before they bought it), has been brilliant, since other semiconductor companies can make use of the latest and greatest processes.

    59. Re:monopoly by armanox · · Score: 1

      I remember some of the hype about Itanium was the future - I even have textbooks here that mentions it ("The 80x86 Family: design, programming, and interfacing Third Edition" by John Uffenbeck (ISBN 0-13-025711-7) lists the P7 family being the Intel Itanium, compared to the P6 [Pentium Pro | Pentium II | Celeron A | Pentium III | Xeon], P5 [Pentium | Pentium MMX], P4 80486, etc; but no mention of the Intel Pentium IV in the book at all.). I've also seen the Itanium listed as the Intel 786 family (compared to the P2/P3 being the 686 and P1 being the 586). I think that clearly shows what Intel was thinking.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
    60. Re:monopoly by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      AMD was a second sourcer for most of the 1980s, and while they started to produce some decent stuff in the mid-nineties I'd hardly say they were King or Intel was on the verge of bankruptcy. Intel has always lead the market since the adoption of the 8088 by IBM.

      AMD has precisely one feather in its cap, which dates back to the early 2000s, not the 80s or 90s: the amd64 architecture. It was a sign of Intel's dominance that Intel tried to push a new 64 bit architecture unrelated to ix86, apparently believing it had the market power to do so.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    61. Re:monopoly by armanox · · Score: 1

      Hell, the Pentium III (Tualatin) beat the Pentium IV in performance. I had a Pentium III-S workstation (clocked at like 1.5GHz) with 2GB of RAM that my coworkers who were running Pentium IV and Pentium IV with Hyper Threading workstations were jealous of (which lasted until we rolled out Core 2 workstations, which I got one of the first) how well it performed. There again, I also upgraded the GPU where as they had the Intel i9xx GPUs, and I also added a SATA controller towards the end of its run that made a big difference as well.

      --
      I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
  2. No Moore's Law by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One cannot imagine how freaking tired I am of hearing about Moore's Law - there's no law, there's never been one. There was a mere observation that the number of transistors doubled every 18 months or so.

    Whoever decided to call this observation a law must forever be held up to shame. And the ones who keep repeating this nonsense.

  3. Re:No Moore's Law by guacamole · · Score: 0, Troll

    Dictionary nazi detected.

    Puhlease. Yes, we know that sometimes an observation or a hypothesis is called a "law". There are also theorems that should have been lemmas, and lemmas that should have been called theorems.

  4. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    One cannot imagine how freaking tired I am of hearing about the Theory of Gravity - there's no theory, there's never been one. There was a mere observation that the objects attract each other or so.

    Whoever decided to call this observation a theory must forever be held up to shame. And the ones who keep repeating this nonsense.

  5. Yeah right... by klingens · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Moore's Law isn't dead, that's why Intel already has the 3rd 14nm CPU family and is planning another one, Coffee Lake, in 14 nm before moving on to 10nm.
    Intel isn't making 4 different CPU families on 14nm cause the process works so well and is so cheap.

    First 14nm, Broadwell, was released 2014, released abysmally late and very underperforming, and the first 10nm is expected to be released 1h 2018. They may sample a few trial wafers in 2017, but there won't be a chip sold. 4 years is not what Moore's Law promised back then, and the Tick-Tock model is totally dead and buried as well.

    This IEEE Spectrum rag sounds worse like Popular Mechanic with that much paid cheerleading bullshit.

    1. Re:Yeah right... by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Informative

      Moore's law has been decelerating for a long time but is far from dead. What's really surprising is how far visible light lithography has been pushed, when everybody thought EUV would be needed long ago. Now, feature size is _way_ less than the wavelength, nice trick that. Even less than EUV wavelength. Probably, EUV will be used for 5nm nodes. Nanoimprint might take over when EUV reaches its limits. This is while staying with silicon. A 1 nm transistor (gate size) has already been demonstrated, and it won't stop there.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    2. Re:Yeah right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or it could be that Intel realizes that they're way ahead of anyone else in this business, and are just taking their time making boat load of money using existing methods (keeping something ready in case any competition tries to eat their lunch).

      It's all about profit, and delivering faster more efficient chips is just a coincidental result (when there's competition). When there's no competition, it's all just about volume production and profit.

    3. Re:Yeah right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Moore's law is a law in the same sense that Murphy's law is a law.

    4. Re:Yeah right... by slashrio · · Score: 1

      Only if and when "Moore's Law" fails will we know it wasn't a correct law.

      --
      "Trump!!", the new Godwin.
    5. Re:Yeah right... by klingens · · Score: 1

      No. Intel fabbing advantage has been shrinking lately. Back when Intel was doing 22nm, everyone else was still at 28/32nm for 2 years or so, if not longer due to skipping 22nm by others, before they caught up with Intel tech.

      Right now, Intel is at 14nm while the competitors (mainly smartphone CPUs) are too. AMD took ages to get away from 28nm, only doing it now with Ryzen due to their abysmal CPU design probably.
      So ~2012 Intel was way ahead. Nowadays the competitors took longer to get to 14/16nm than Intel, but they are still there at the same time as Intel. Intel of course touts "we have smaller gate lengths than the others!". It might even be true, but they still have lost advantage. Back then when they had the advantage, they didn't make 4 CPUs from the same process either: the did a brutal, fast tick-tock model shocking everyone. As the article itself touts: smaller structures still give you monetary advantage: you can produce more chips per same wafer. So the correct way to maximizse profits would still be to use the smaller process if you can. And Intel can't.

    6. Re:Yeah right... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Moore's Law isn't dead"

      Is has slowed down a lot though. CPU clock speeds used to double every 1 to two years (before y2000), but going from 2GHz to 4Ghz took about a decade.

  6. Size does not matter anymore. by pjv936 · · Score: 1

    It is speed that matters. In the old day when we make the transistors smaller they got faster. That hasn't happened in along while now.

    1. Re:Size does not matter anymore. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They didn't "get faster," they produced less heat and so were more tolerant of higher clock speeds.

      Moore's Law isn't about performance, it's about economy.

    2. Re:Size does not matter anymore. by Mashiki · · Score: 2

      That's because we're hitting multiple problems. We have heat, die size, and electrical limitations(bleed over in the substrates). It means in the end, that having multiple physical cores on one chip is the only direction that things will be going until those other problems can be solved. There's also the other issues with memory across the system bus being too slow and causing problems. HBM solves some of those issues, but it's still too cost prohibitive to use on CPU's at least right now. Where in the case of GPU's it's not.

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    3. Re: Size does not matter anymore. by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

      Nothing "goes faster". The distance that must be travelled decreases so that less time elapsed between the input being available and the result being available. Saying that hasn't happened in a long time is ridiculous. It happens each and every time and there is no way to avoid it in fact.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    4. Re:Size does not matter anymore. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      HBM is still too expensive for its benefits for most GPUs. It is only starting to get used for high end GPUs. It was rumored to be used for mid-line GPUs, but that got scrapped. HBM2 is supposed to be slightly cheaper and much faster, and HBM3 is supposed to be much cheaper and slightly faster. HBM2 may only briefly exist. Give it a generation or two.

    5. Re:Size does not matter anymore. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Part of "fast" is distance. It's difficult to synchronize transistors far away from each other without crazy deep pipelines, which makes everything else slow. Unless you think the P4 was a good idea. They were able to make higher frequency transistors but at what cost? Technically you are correct, shrinking transistors does little to make them technically faster, but it does make them faster in practice.

    6. Re:Size does not matter anymore. by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      Moore's Law isn't about performance, it's about economy.

      Actually, it is about density.

    7. Re:Size does not matter anymore. by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      That's because we're hitting multiple problems. We have heat, die size, and electrical limitations(bleed over in the substrates). It means in the end, that having multiple physical cores on one chip is the only direction that things will be going until those other problems can be solved. There's also the other issues with memory across the system bus being too slow and causing problems. HBM solves some of those issues, but it's still too cost prohibitive to use on CPU's at least right now. Where in the case of GPU's it's not.

      GPU ram is different than CPU ram for a good reason. THe data is fast but narrow. CPU needs wide loads and ram optimized for that. GDDR 5 is great for a few things fast where the GPU goes massive parallel. BUt it would cripple your i7 easily which needs more bandwidth and lower latency.

    8. Re:Size does not matter anymore. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's about feature density per unit cost, in Moore's original formulation. Hence, economy.

    9. Re:Size does not matter anymore. by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Yes, but since pure zone refined silicon wafers were stupidly expensive and still are not that cheap the density is almost directly proportional to cost.
      So the rule of thumb about increasing density was for the purpose of economy.

  7. Re: No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    'Dictionary Nazi'

    See? That's Godwin's law, even in you wouldn't classify it as a law

  8. Re:No Moore's Law by Opportunist · · Score: 1

    The problem with that analogy is that the definition of a scientific theory is just that.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  9. Exclusive rights have a purpose by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...all you have to do is weaken patents. They do not help innovation and are mainly used to keep unwanted competition from entering into lucrative markets.

    At least part of the problem is that the reason those markets are lucrative is because of patents.

    If I spend X billion dollars developing Y, I need to be able to (at least) make X billion dollars back.

    You, on the other hand, with Y in hand because of weak patents, and no need to have spent X billion dollars to get there, will be selling Y under the price that I can afford to, because you didn't spend X on developing it. So I go out of business. Which means next time you need methodologies, you won't be getting them from me. Because you killed me by entering the market without paying the same costs I did.

    These problems are very serious when you're talking about very expensive development and/or manufacturing. They affect drug companies, chip manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers, etc. Some types of development and/or manufacturing require big costs to bootstrap, and no, bottom line, it's not reasonable to allow the next-in-line operation to bypass those costs at the early entry entity's expense.

    Patents have a limited term, either 14 or 20 years, depending on the type; this sets fairly discrete bounds on what you can, and can't, do. Unlike copyrights, patent law hasn't (yet) fallen off the edge of the earth into the blatantly unreasonable.

    In the US, this all stems from article I, section 8, clause 8, of the constitution (emphasis mine):

    To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:Exclusive rights have a purpose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      In technology, 14-20 years is effectively 100 years. Technology is old news in 5 years and almost useless in 10 years. Since we're talking about CPU companies, let me know how competitive a 14 year old CPU is. Patents are great for innovative breakthroughs. They are bad for evolutionary next steps. Instead of making lots of quick steps and evolving technology quickly, create artificial gaps between each step and slow things down.

    2. Re:Exclusive rights have a purpose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Still shorter than copyrights

    3. Re:Exclusive rights have a purpose by unixisc · · Score: 2

      In technology, 14-20 years is effectively 100 years. Technology is old news in 5 years and almost useless in 10 years. Since we're talking about CPU companies, let me know how competitive a 14 year old CPU is. Patents are great for innovative breakthroughs. They are bad for evolutionary next steps. Instead of making lots of quick steps and evolving technology quickly, create artificial gaps between each step and slow things down.

      But that doesn't change the mechanism in finances, and the time it would require to recoup one's costs. The tech may be old, but if $X billion has been spent in trying to develop Y, it's not gonna be recouped in 5 years just b'cos Y is obsolete in 5 years. So they'd either have to hike prices of Y, which would then make it more difficult to sell, and longer to recoup $X B or they can charge the patent costs and split those costs upfront

    4. Re:Exclusive rights have a purpose by erapert · · Score: 1

      In technology, 14-20 years is effectively 100 years. Technology is old news in 5 years and almost useless in 10 years.

      That's only true for now because of how young the computing industry is. Once things have matured a bit and tech has gotten closer to the fundamental physical limits then you'll stop seeing such a break-neck pace of advancement.

    5. Re:Exclusive rights have a purpose by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

      Copyrights about entertainment can be longer than patents about technology, because it's just entertainment, and people can be repeatedly entertained with copyrighted information/recordings/writings, whereas technology often is obsolete and thus technically unfeasible in a much shorter time frame.

    6. Re:Exclusive rights have a purpose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So what? Why does some know nothing numb skull who didn't make anything new have any rights to ever use something they didn't invent?

      I find your whining baffling.

    7. Re:Exclusive rights have a purpose by Agripa · · Score: 1

      In technology, 14-20 years is effectively 100 years. Technology is old news in 5 years and almost useless in 10 years. Since we're talking about CPU companies, let me know how competitive a 14 year old CPU is. Patents are great for innovative breakthroughs. They are bad for evolutionary next steps. Instead of making lots of quick steps and evolving technology quickly, create artificial gaps between each step and slow things down.

      But that doesn't change the mechanism in finances, and the time it would require to recoup one's costs. The tech may be old, but if $X billion has been spent in trying to develop Y, it's not gonna be recouped in 5 years just b'cos Y is obsolete in 5 years. So they'd either have to hike prices of Y, which would then make it more difficult to sell, and longer to recoup $X B or they can charge the patent costs and split those costs upfront

      In the case of high performance logic semiconductors, achieving the same performance on a 10 year old process costs 3 times more than if you had developed a new process following Moore's Law so there is a great incentive to pay for research and development; if you stop, then you will not be competitive and this will remain true as long as the cost per transistor continues to decrease.

    8. Re:Exclusive rights have a purpose by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      At least part of the problem is that the reason those markets are lucrative is because of patents...These problems are very serious when you're talking about very expensive development and/or manufacturing. They affect drug companies, chip manufacturers, vehicle manufacturers, etc. Some types of development and/or manufacturing require big costs to bootstrap, and no, bottom line, it's not reasonable to allow the next-in-line operation to bypass those costs at the early entry entity's expense.

      That's the claim that's routinely made by those who profit from the patent system - and thus are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to the status quo in patent law - but actual evidence supporting that claim is weak at best.

      Certainly patents don't help individual innovators much on average. It's a lot like the music business: a few people do very well, but the majority get screwed. According to economists, the average return on innovation in the USA, over the lifetime of a product, to the individuals actually doing the innovation, is around 2% - which is actually less than the average musician makes. In other words, the efficiency of the patent system is at best 2% - comparable to the earliest and most primitive steam engines - which is pretty horrible and means society pays a very high costs for the supposed "benefits" of patents. Worse, that's not much different from the return to inventors during the early industrial revolution when there were very few patents, which could be taken to indicate that the efficiency of the patent system is even lower than 2%!

      For many businesses - such as chip producers - the startup costs are what make the markets lucrative. At a billion dollars, it's not cheap to build a chip fab - nor is it cheap to operate one. There's a LOT of knowledge that's needed to do these things, and that means hiring and retaining good people - that that's expensive. Equipment is expensive as well, as are licenses. Startup costs, and ongoing costs, not patents, keep competitors out.

      Another big problem is simply the high cost of litigation. It's highly unlikely that the return on the litigation will compensate for the cost. It's not an accident that most patent litigation involves patent trolls that are professional lawyers - because litigation is a poor business decision in most cases for anybody else.

      One big problem is the difficulty of proving that a patent is both a) legitimate (most aren't) and b) being violated.

      It's worth noting Stigler's Law of Eponymy (no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer) tends to apply to patents as well: even if the patent was a novel and not obvious idea (the latter is rarely true) the person getting the patent isn't likely to be the first to come up with it. The amount of published material is simply enormous - and given the ambiguity of natural language (a problem familiar to most experienced software engineers) it can take decades to discover that somebody else already came up with an idea.

      In practice, the lawyers pretend the patent is legitimate (by ignoring the "not obvious" part, or by playing games with words), and it simply costs too much to fight them, which creates the illusion that the system is actually working the way it's supposed to.

      With something like a chip, it can be really hard to know whether somebody might be violating a patent. You would either have to steal their HDL (generally illegal) and figure out what they're doing, or you would have to reverse engineer the chip (possibly illegal), or you would have to hire one of their people (possibly illegal). Further, maintaining patents on an international basis is quite expensive, so if it's hard to prove infringement the patent is basically useless.

      In many cases, the technology companies are in a position of mutually assured destruction with respect to patents: they routinely do things that violate each others patents because no party can start a dispute without destroying

  10. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Would you be OK with Moore's rule of thumb?

  11. Re:No Moore's Law by radarskiy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's what a scientific law is: a relation between measured observations. It can be purely empirical.

    There's a law for centrifugal force, and it isn't even a real force!

  12. Re:No Moore's Law by willworkforbeer · · Score: 5, Funny

    It should be more clearly stated, Like Cole's Law.

    Cole's Law: When making cole slaw for a large group, there will be 50% left over even when you account for Cole's Law.

    --
    Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
  13. But by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Thanks to "trusted computing" and all the other innovation and backdoors they've brought to chips, I don't want a new intel processor anymore.

    1. Re:But by slashrio · · Score: 1

      This. Someone mod this up please.

      --
      "Trump!!", the new Godwin.
  14. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    PUHLEASE stop with the "PUHLEASE" shit. Ge a fucking dictionary. You cunt.

  15. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It's more of a guideline, really.

  16. User experience still sucks by mi · · Score: 2, Informative

    the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law

    According to this law, our computers are 1024 times more powerful today, than they were 15 years ago. And they are.

    But the user-experience still sucks. Web-browsers are still bloated and slow — and need an occasional restart. You still can't talk to computers reliablyAlexa is considered the best, yet it is pathetic. Being able to reliably show something to a computer will take another 15 years, if not more.

    Spammers may be able to generate spam faster, but reliably detecting and blocking their crap — without occasionally blocking real e-mails — remains elusive.

    The fanciest UIs — be they by open source or commercial projects — would just stupidly hang or otherwise behave erratically every once in a while.

    Hardware-makers may be doing their jobs, but the software-engineers aren't doing theirs... Not well enough, anyway.

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:User experience still sucks by djinn6 · · Score: 0

      The fanciest UIs — be they by open source or commercial projects — would just stupidly hang or otherwise behave erratically every once in a while.

      Hardware-makers may be doing their jobs, but the software-engineers aren't doing theirs... Not well enough, anyway.

      You can't prove that those issues aren't because the processor decided 1 + 1 = 3 for one particular instruction.

    2. Re:User experience still sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can't prove your a dipshit either.

    3. Re:User experience still sucks by erapert · · Score: 0

      But I can prove that you're a dipshit.

    4. Re:User experience still sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Excellent!
      The web pages of today are atrocious with a collage of images moving stuff and those 1990s stupid slideshow scripts.
      Now with mobile in the mix the pages have gotten worse.
      True also, software development lost it craft to Agile and Scrum which focus on getting code done and not spending the time to craft a clean UI.

    5. Re:User experience still sucks by Raenex · · Score: 1

      According to this law, our computers are 1024 times more powerful today, than they were 15 years ago. And they are.

      Bullshit. I lived through the exponential increases before the 2002 wall, and it was glorious. If that had continued, it would make today's computers look like ancient relics.

      Sure, today we have more cores, obscene amounts of ram, and you can fit a decent computer in a mobile phone, but when it comes to general purpose computing the exponential increases in performance died a long time ago. There are young adults alive today that will never have experienced what it was like.

    6. Re:User experience still sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Touchy

    7. Re:User experience still sucks by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Touchy

      That's spelled touché.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    8. Re:User experience still sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      False, it is indeed because software has not scaled to keep up with hardware capability. In fact, it never has.

      Think about it. You can run virtual machines on a modern desktop so that you've got a whole cluster of 2002 era desktops at your fingertips.

      Just because you perceive a lack of progress in a certain area doesn't mean it is not possible, or even that someone somewhere has not made that progress behind closed doors.

    9. Re:User experience still sucks by Raenex · · Score: 1

      You can run virtual machines on a modern desktop so that you've got a whole cluster of 2002 era desktops at your fingertips.

      As I said, we have more cores and obscene amounts of ram. That's good for parallel computing and doing stuff like running a bunch of VMs (talk about software bloat). It's not the same as the exponential general purpose sequential computing we had experienced up till then.

    10. Re:User experience still sucks by mi · · Score: 1

      It's not the same as the exponential general purpose sequential computing we had experienced up till then.

      Few tasks require serial performance — most desktop stuff is, in fact, parallelizable. It just is not done — not done right anyway.

      Consider Firefox for just one example — it has gone from event-driven (Netscape) to multi-threaded and now to multi-process. Because loading and rendering even one page offers ample opportunities for parallelizing — you can load multiple elements of the page (images, styles, JS) in parallel. Just not very well.

      And, after it runs for a while, its memory usage becomes so high, you have to restart the process — because even with the shiny new malloc there remain problems...

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    11. Re:User experience still sucks by Raenex · · Score: 1

      Few tasks require serial performance â" most desktop stuff is, in fact, parallelizable.

      It's much harder to write concurrent code, and there's also Amdahl's law. It really would be amazing if trends had kept up and my computer ran 1,000 times faster for the general purpose serial case. Sadly, it did not.

    12. Re:User experience still sucks by mi · · Score: 1

      It's much harder to write concurrent code

      Of course! And that's my point — software engineers aren't keeping up with the hardware advances.

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    13. Re:User experience still sucks by Raenex · · Score: 1

      And my point is that the hardware advances didn't keep up the way they used to. It really isn't a difficult or controversial point.

    14. Re:User experience still sucks by mi · · Score: 1

      And my point is that the hardware advances didn't keep up the way they used to.

      And your point is wrong. Moore's Law never promised serial speed-ups. It promised greater number of elements (transistors) on the same-size chip — and that keeps working, according to TFA. We just don't feel it like we used to.

      Where the increase could be translated into serial speed-ups, no effort is required from software folks — the same program would run faster automatically. But when the advances provide for larger caches, RAM, new processor-instructions, more and wider IO-pipes, and multiple threads of execution, a rewrite may be necessary. Other things being equal, Firefox should be able to render the same page about twice faster on a quad-core machine than it does on a dual-core one. It does not...

      And that's, where the the software engineers are coming short — despite having these wonderful tools like IDEs and smarter compilers to do their jobs.

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    15. Re:User experience still sucks by ausekilis · · Score: 1

      Moore's law was never about processing power, just transistor size. It ignores all other things that make a computer "powerful", such as clock speed, IOPS, FLOPS, multiprocessors/concurrency, bandwidth, on-chip cache size, etc...

    16. Re:User experience still sucks by Raenex · · Score: 1

      And your point is wrong. Moore's Law never promised serial speed-ups. It promised greater number of elements (transistors) on the same-size chip â" and that keeps working, according to TFA. We just don't feel it like we used to.

      No, my point is perfectly on target. You are the one who brought in performance. While Moore's law is technically about transistor density, it so happens for a very long time, many other things went along for the ride, resulting in exponential serial performance that lasted for decades.

      But when the advances provide for larger caches, RAM, new processor-instructions, more and wider IO-pipes, and multiple threads of execution, a rewrite may be necessary.

      Bits and pieces have been made faster or grown in size. Your general claim that "computers are 1024 times more powerful today, than they were 15 years ago" is bullshit. Not that we have 1000 core desktops anyways, but even if you did, you ignore the theoretical limits placed by Amdahl's law.

      Today's computers are a pale joke if you compare them to how they used to improve. And unlike you, I'm not blaming anybody. It was a good ride while it lasted.

    17. Re:User experience still sucks by mi · · Score: 1

      You are the one who brought in performance

      Performance is not just serial speed. And what I "brought in" is user experience anyway.

      Your general claim that "computers are 1024 times more powerful today, than they were 15 years ago" is bullshit

      That depends on how one defines "powerful", does not it? I didn't say serially faster, I deliberately said more powerful — because power is about more than serial speed.

      it so happens for a very long time, many other things went along for the ride, resulting in exponential serial performance that lasted for decades

      That's true. But the improvements, which we continue to get, can still be put to a good use improving usage. That they aren't, is, to no small extent, the fault of the programmers.

      Today's computers are a pale joke if you compare them to how they used to improve.

      No, they aren't. There is well-written code out there, which actually takes full advantage of the new hardware. For one example, try make -jN — Unix kernel and make really scales with the number of CPUs. A build will finish about N times faster — provided, you have N CPUs.

      And unlike you, I'm not blaming anybody.

      This may mean, you are a nicer person than my nasty self. But that does not mean, there is no one to blame...

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    18. Re:User experience still sucks by Raenex · · Score: 1

      That depends on how one defines "powerful", does not it?

      You didn't define it in any way. You referenced Moore's law, but that only talks about transistor density and not "power". Lacking any specifics at all, it's only fair to compare it with traditional improvements in "power" that everybody recognized as going along with Moore's law -- those that occurred for decades before the 2002 wall.

      But the improvements, which we continue to get, can still be put to a good use improving usage.

      You made the hefty claim that computers today are 1,024 times more powerful than 15 years ago, and placed blame on software for not following along. That's bullshit.

      For one example, try make -jN â" Unix kernel and make really scales with the number of CPUs. A build will finish about N times faster â" provided, you have N CPUs.

      So where is your desktop with 1,024 cores? Oh that's right, you have nothing close to that. And even if you did, you'd be severely limited by Amdahl's law, which you should spend some time to figure out the significance of it. Unless your task is embarrassingly parallel, even a small amount of required serialization will catch up with you sooner rather than later.

      But that does not mean, there is no one to blame...

      It's not about being nice. It's about recognizing the reality of the situation instead of just saying that somebody else should make everything work like I want it to.

  17. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    smallest feature size

    blah blah

    http://www.dictionary.com/browse/law?s=t

    15 a. a statement of a relation or sequence of phenomena invariable under the same conditions.

  18. Fast Tech by fyngyrz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Technology is old news in 5 years and almost useless in 10 years.

    Let's assert this is uniformly true.

    So let's say we reduce the patent term to 2.5 years so it's not old news. After 2.5 years, you can do whatever you like with any invention.

    This, in turn, means that the time the creator has to recoup their inventing costs is 2.5 years; no longer. Because after that, a competitor will enter the market having spent nothing to get where the creator spent all that money.

    This will considerably reduce the amount that can be spent on new inventions without losing one's shirt; and that, in turn, will severely retard the advance of the very technologies you are so eager to get for free.

    But there's more, and if anything, it's worse. Here 'tis: While no consumer is very likely to wait 20 years to get their hands on something, two to three years? That's not unthinkable at all. I kept my last phone five years. I've kept my computer eight years. So what happens here is that the market for the initial product, at the higher price that has to pay for the development costs, over the shorter period of time, will shrink, because the consumers will be thinking "if I just wait a couple years, this will be much less expensive." And not because initial high prices have defrayed the development costs; no, this is because for the me-too manufacturers, there are no development costs. So what you end up with is even less recovery of development costs.

    While I'm with you in that development is hard, and in tech, it's fast, the problem is it is expensive, and if you want the money spent to do the development in a capitalist economy, then something like the patent system has to be in place.

    If you think we can somehow transition the US from capitalism to... something that sees that all development efforts are fully funded and everyone gets to benefit... well, let's just say I don't see it anywhere on the horizon and leave it at that.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:Fast Tech by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The economics you describe are only true if the inventing company stops inventing. They will always have a lead because they understand how it works. Copying development is never the same as creating it. So for capitalists, who are simply trying to buy one-off ideas and profit from them, then what you say is true. For the rest of humanity, everyon benefits far greater from the knowledge being free from the begining, including the one spending the development costs. They get market edge as being the developer when they ARE the developer, home field advantage is no joke for small businesses. It's only when do-nothing capitalists try to buy a monopoly and then do nothing with it except extract profit.

    2. Re:Fast Tech by fyngyrz · · Score: 1

      The economics you describe are only true if the inventing company stops inventing.

        Which they will do as soon as you take their development treasure and run away with it.

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    3. Re:Fast Tech by BlueCoder · · Score: 1

      The whole patent thing is for disclosing the tech. At 5 years and the speed of the court system I doubt companies would bother with patents but companies will still do R&D and simply keep their cards to themselves.

      The system needs to change. All the IP laws need their own court system and their needs to be body of (not sure what you would call them) that actually know and review technology and instead of statically rewarding they should be dynamically reward inventors. Rewards should be merit based. With the highest rewards going to problems that needs solutions. If it's actively reviewed I don't have a problem with patents exceeding 20 years. Further it should be up to this new body of people to decide how the reward is monetized. Who can use the IP and when as well as how much they have to pay. All based on merit. The people on this board will be scrutinized such that each and every one them are actually basing their decisions on merit vs politics or private interests.

    4. Re:Fast Tech by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      again, only true for one-off capitalists. Actual inventors can give two shits less about "treasure"

    5. Re:Fast Tech by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This, in turn, means that the time the creator has to recoup their inventing costs is 2.5 years; no longer. Because after that, a competitor will enter the market having spent nothing to get where the creator spent all that money.

      That is a simplistic view. The company that spend the R&D will still have a near monopoly on all of the talent and skill for said technology. Short of poaching, there is little another company could do to quickly close the gap even giving the information from the patent. A patent is not a blueprint, it is a very high level description of an implementation.

    6. Re:Fast Tech by cwsumner · · Score: 1

      again, only true for one-off capitalists. Actual inventors can give two shits less about "treasure"

      Engineers may sometimes work mostly for appreciation, but keep in mind that Money is the sincerest form of appreciation! ;-)

    7. Re:Fast Tech by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

      The modern engineer prefers an appreciative smile over a tawdry handout. :-)

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
    8. Re:Fast Tech by cwsumner · · Score: 1

      The modern engineer prefers an appreciative smile over a tawdry handout. :-)

      Usually, yes. But the modern "pointy-haired manager" practices simulating "appreciative smiles", in front of a mirror...
      Money is more real! 8-)

  19. Atom scales by unixisc · · Score: 2

    What is the diameter of a silicon atom in nm? Anybody know?

    1. Re:Atom scales by TomGreenhaw · · Score: 1

      first page in a google search says "The atoms used in silicon chip fabrication are around 0.2nm"

      --
      Greed is the root of all evil.
    2. Re:Atom scales by wikdwarlock · · Score: 1

      Google says ~0.11 to 0.15 nm, depending on if you use atomic radius or covalent radius. That's 1.1 to 1.5 Angstroms.

      --

      "I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer." -Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
    3. Re:Atom scales by dbIII · · Score: 1

      That's not going to be the number because each junction is more than a single atom.
      Around 1998 a guy in a university lab I worked at made a diode out of a single atomic layer of gallium arsenide on a silicon substrate, and he was nowhere near the first, but making a lot of junctions in the right places is a hell of a lot harder than putting a very thin coating on something.

  20. Research is expensive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Why bother innovating when consumers will gladly buy up the latest respin of your dated architecture with a minimal bump in performance for a given price? Few organizations have the deep pockets to fund such endeavors without incurring the wrath of greedy shareholders. If you want to know what the future will look like then you might do well to look to those who will fund it.

  21. Being the best by unixisc · · Score: 1

    When will someone throw down and bring down or at least challenge intel's monopoly...

    Being several generations of process nodes ahead of one's competitors, like TSMC or GSMC or other fabs, is not a monopoly. Intel has consistently had a policy of investing their money in state of the art fabs everywhere they have it, and they happen to have a big volume driver w/o becoming commodity, like memory. This is what the old US businesses used to do - invest cash into enhancing their company value

    If you are talking about the x86/x64 ISA and related patents that allow a company to make x86 CPUs, it's a duopoly, and AMD holds the cards on the x64. Only problem - AMD has gone fabless, and despite that, I have yet to see any good CPUs from them, since no fab comes even close to Intel's

    I used to be anti Intel and pro RISC. But there is no doubt that Intel has easily been the most innovative tech company in the US, if not the world. They took their stab at going away from x86 THREE times, but failed: finally, went the AMD route on this one. In fact, given that all other fabs that manufacture in volume are located outside the US - mainly Taiwan, Japan and China, Intel ought to be the model of what a US tech company should be like

  22. Re:No Moore's Law by garyoa1 · · Score: 1

    Murphy will eventually supersede Moore.
    Just sayin...

    --
    Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
  23. Re:No Moore's Law by enriquevagu · · Score: 1

    I attended a course by Yale Patt from U. Austin, who is one of the "popes" of Computer Architecture research (see this ranking, for example), where he discussed Moore's Law.

    He argued how Moore's Law was not a physical law, nor a technological or market-driven law. But it was a real law and had a very large impact.

    Instead, he argued very accurately that Moore's Law was actually a psychological Law: given that it provided the baseline for the expected performance (or transistor count) increase, every company would struggle to get to that point, knowing that otherwise the others would get it and make a much better product. Therefore, Moore's Law became somehow a self-fulfilled prophecy. Note how the ITRS still provides yearly predictions for the (still exponential, in some cases) improvements in semiconductor technology fabrication.

    So definitely you are right in that it was a mere observation -- but this observation drove the evolution of electronics for more than 50 years (enough to be labelled as "Law", isn't it?)

  24. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
  25. Re:No Moore's Law by Lost+Race · · Score: 1

    Moore's Law is as much fiat as observation. "Transistor density of integrated circuits shall double every 18 months. Make it so!"

  26. Re: Samsung to challenge by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1

    Samsung which has a stake in global foundaries will break Intel's monopoly over expensive chip fabrication. In fact AMDs new Ryzen x86 chip is built by them and so are their .14 NM GPUs and even Nvidia's. Cell phones beat Intel as a result :-)

    So monopoly ride is soon over. ARM is new king nowdays anyway

  27. Not news, but ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is prophecy - a prediction of the future.
    News is a report of something that has already happened.
    Prophecy presented as news os just as bad as fake news.

  28. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Someone coined is as a phrase which humanity with it's infinite brains clung to and now it sticks like a song in our heads.
    I don't even expect the term to drop when we switch to quantum circuits because I am sure people will be counting the number of Q-Bits they can squeeze onto a substrate or n-space container. AC

  29. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    'Ge'
    noun
    1.
    a family of South American Indian languages spoken in southern and eastern Brazil and northern Paraguay.
    2.
    a member of any of several Ge-speaking peoples.

    That's not even a verb.

  30. "Transistor costs" by Shane_Optima · · Score: 1

    Intel says transistors produced in this way will be cheaper than those that came before, continuing the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law -- and contradicting widespread talk that transistor-production costs have already sunk as low as they will go.

    Err, what now? I thought smaller transistors were desirable for performance reasons. Has the marginal per-transistor cost been what's holding us back all these years?

    I was under the impression that the costs for microprocessor fabrication had to do with their design and then building the foundry. The per-unit cost (and thus per-transistor cost) is utterly negligible, right?

    This is a salient point because it implies that in decades to come we're eventually going to see a steep drop-off in prices for not just CPUs, but also RAM and flash memory once enough patents expire and enough high-output fabs come online, which promises to be a utterly world changing solution-in-search-of-a-problem. (Specifically, I predict this will be the point at which AI really takes off.)

    1. Re:"Transistor costs" by currently_awake · · Score: 1

      Moors law is about cost. Chip cost is based on area, so making stuff smaller reduces the cost per transistor. The dropoff in cost has already happened, that's why you can get a phone that has more power than the entire USA 30 years ago, for a days wages.

    2. Re:"Transistor costs" by Shane_Optima · · Score: 1

      Moors law is about cost

      No it isn't. It's about transistor count.

      Chip cost is based on area, so making stuff smaller reduces the cost per transistor.

      ... explain that, if you would. Chip cost is not driven by the cost of raw materials, yes?

      Point #1: Calculators can be bought at dollar stores and have been sold in dollar stores for at least a decade, if not two. (Pocket calculators used to cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.) Correct me if I'm wrong, I do not think that these calculators are using the latest sub-90nm technology. I suspect they're using very old fab technology.

      Point #2: I don't have a link handy, but there's a chip that recently came into the public domain (in terms of patents) that was in the Sega Genesis or Sega Saturn or something, as well as some other embedded devices. The factory is now providing the chips at something like $0.12 apiece or some other stupid low price, when decades ago they were presumably a significant portion of the cost of the video game console (I apologize for lacking the Google-fu to find the relevant articles right now.) The price has fallen dramatically, but the fab technique is presumably the same.

    3. Re:"Transistor costs" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      First, define "raw materials". Sand is cheap, but producing pure silicon from it is not (and that's one of the things you just buy at a foundry), so there is a significant material cost.
      But mostly the cost is time (though of course also recouping your investment). Operating a manufacturing plant has a huge component of "operating it 1 hour costs this much, no matter what technology you produce".
      As a basic limit, wafers can move only so fast. If you had a maximum speed of "10 seconds per wafer", then getting twice as many transistors on that wafer halves the cost of the transistor.
      Old plants will have lower operating and especially capital costs, so that does its part to reduce the cost. The process is very mature, that also does its part via very high yields (very few of the chips produced are defective).

      > I do not think that these calculators are using the latest sub-90nm technology. I suspect they're using very old fab technology

      You are very likely wrong. No, they are not using the latest technology, both because it would cost money to constantly update the design and because the latest would be expensive. But if they are cheap, they most likely will use a generic chip, not a custom one. And that one will most like use something around 30nm, because that is cheapest (which does NOT meant that 90nm didn't become cheaper as well).
      Anything around 90nm is usually only used for special things:
      - crypto chips (easier to make robust against side-channel attacks)
      - one-off-designs (masks are much cheaper to produce, thus reducing one-time costs even though per-chip costs increase)
      - designs with analog components (as they are hard to do at smaller scales)
      - radiation hardened designs (naturally more robust to radiation)

      About your point #2: I wouldn't expect them to produce the chip at the same technology, why would they? If only patents expired, they can't use the original design, since that one comes under copyright, too. So it's likely actually a re-design of that original chip, and there is absolutely no reason to produce it in an obsolete process, both because it is more expensive AND because you can't easily scale up production by asking e.g. TSMC to do a large run for you (there isn't that much capacity at larger node sizes in general).

    4. Re:"Transistor costs" by Agripa · · Score: 1

      Intel says transistors produced in this way will be cheaper than those that came before, continuing the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore's Law -- and contradicting widespread talk that transistor-production costs have already sunk as low as they will go.

      Err, what now? I thought smaller transistors were desirable for performance reasons. Has the marginal per-transistor cost been what's holding us back all these years?

      I was under the impression that the costs for microprocessor fabrication had to do with their design and then building the foundry. The per-unit cost (and thus per-transistor cost) is utterly negligible, right?

      This is a salient point because it implies that in decades to come we're eventually going to see a steep drop-off in prices for not just CPUs, but also RAM and flash memory once enough patents expire and enough high-output fabs come online, which promises to be a utterly world changing solution-in-search-of-a-problem. (Specifically, I predict this will be the point at which AI really takes off.)

      Moore's law has *always* been primarily of economic importance. Decreasing the cost per transistor is what makes later fabrication node economically feasible.

    5. Re:"Transistor costs" by Shane_Optima · · Score: 1

      Again, I'm talking about marginal costs here. "Decreasing the cost per transistor" is a fairly strange way of putting it at best. The raw materials needed to create the transistors haven't been significant for a long time now. The point is how many transistors you can make with a given die as well as the properties of those transistors.

    6. Re:"Transistor costs" by Shane_Optima · · Score: 1

      First, define "raw materials". Sand is cheap, but producing pure silicon from it is not (and that's one of the things you just buy at a foundry), so there is a significant material cost.

      Definite significant. More than, say, 5% of the cost of the retail price (CPUs, GPUs, memory) or more than 20% the cost of the wholesale price?

      . The process is very mature, that also does its part via very high yields (very few of the chips produced are defective).

      What does that have to do with Moore's law and the shrinking of transistors? If smaller scale plants happen to have better yields as a side effect of being newer, I don't see how that's relevant. I don't think you meant to imply that smaller transistors are inherently more durable?

      because it is more expensive

      Well I'm definitely up against the limits of my knowledge here, but I would assume that creating the die or proof or whatever the hell it's called would be a significant cost. Regardless, this is fairly tangential.

      Operating a manufacturing plant has a huge component of "operating it 1 hour costs this much, no matter what technology you produce".

      My point entirely. If the machines are by their nature limited to a certain physical chip size but not a specific scale, then yes you could misleadingly say this is all about reducing the costs of transistors, but in that case I think it would be more useful to say it's making it easier/cheaper to crank them out faster (as a side effect of making them smaller.)

    7. Re:"Transistor costs" by Agripa · · Score: 1

      Costs are roughly proportional to area but if more transistors can be placed into the same area, then the cost per transistor is less and that is what primarily drives investment into new process generations even at the expense of performance.

      Intel's William Holt gave a recent lecture on the subject - Moore’s Law: A Path Forward.

    8. Re:"Transistor costs" by Shane_Optima · · Score: 1

      Costs are roughly proportional to area

      That's what I assumed. "Cost per transistor" is technically accurate, but the primary factors in cost are in the design of the chip, the creation of the die, the cost of the foundry and the time it takes 'em to create the chip (which is a function of die size, sure. Among other things.) As I've speculated elsewhere, if a government were to drop hundreds of billions of dollars on large, high-output fabs (while either not caring about patents or buying out the patent holders or waiting until they expire or whatever) and leave them cranking out chips at full speed, the costs per chip would surely be ridiculously low. The price isn't being driven by transistors costing too damn much to make. It's being driven by the limited quantity of machinery (and die space) and also the actions of the suppliers themselves, who are paying attention to the estimated supply/demand curves so they can avoid overproducing. (I'm talking about the chips in mid to high end electronics, by the way, not the $1 calculator.)

      As far as the wafers go, I'm seeing stuff like $1-$3 per square inch. There's no way Intel is going through the effort of their "tick" phase just to save thirty cents of silicon for their $100+ processor. And I suspect the production of high purity wafers is something that probably also would scale up decently if there were motivation to do so.

      So sure, you're decreasing the per-transistor silicon costs with a die shrink, but the main bottlenecks are obviously in the static machinery costs (which you say are tied to die size, which certainly makes sense to me) in addition to the IP laws allowing manufacturers to carefully control the price and also prevent too many fabs from being built (...by competitors.) There are other reasons to want to shrink things, of course.

      "Chips are cheap" is the thesis I'm trying to support here. The static costs are huge, but the per-unit costs are minimal. Phrases like 'driving down the cost of making transistors' thus sit wrong with me, even though they're accurate. It's an incomplete picture that's being painted.

    9. Re:"Transistor costs" by Agripa · · Score: 1

      Watch that video again. At the end, Holt shows the cost of *not* investing in the next node with the intention of lowering the cost per transistor. It amounts to spending 3 times as much money in production 10 years later just to keep even with competitors that *did* invest spending a fraction of that amount.

      At some point when the investment is a lot greater, it will not pay but he gives the numbers showing just how much money that would be and it is a lot.

    10. Re:"Transistor costs" by Shane_Optima · · Score: 1

      It amounts to spending 3 times as much money in production

      "Spending money on production" is not the same thing as "spending money on silicon wafers". If the machine time is limited[1] and/or expensive and the die size is held constant, then obviously shrinking your transistors lets you do more with the same amount of machine time. Summarizing that gain as "we made the transistors cheaper!" misses the point in my view. The focus should be on the cost, output, speed, efficiency, availability (if third party) and IP status of the fab machinery. Shrinking the transistors is one way to make the machinery more efficient and thus cheaper to use for the same output, but there are others.

      it amounts to spending 3 times as much money in production 10 years later

      I'm not sure that means much given the mid to high end chips I explicitly mentioned that I was referring to in my last post. Depends on what they're lumping into "production costs" though. And it also obviously depends on their gross profit margin (minus all design and initial setup costs), which I'm assuming is fairly fat. I grant you that it might be more important for generic unpatented chips than I originally imagined.

      But despite those reservations, I still don't necessarily dispute the conclusion. I dispute the phrasing. If it's true that Intel can save a significant chunk of money for their CPUs by making their machines more efficient, then that's surely because their machines cost a lot of money to build and run per unit of output. The costs and output bottlenecks involved here are complex... "transistors are expensive to make, so making them smaller saves money!" doesn't sound like a useful summary of the situation. I could probably form a more detailed argument here were I more familiar with the exact processes and expenses involved, particularly as they relate to die size.


      1. And once again, it's worth noting these limits aren't necessarily permanent or natural ones. It probably greatly depends on IP law, static investment costs for the machinery and technicians in an uncertain market, and various other barriers to entry that may suddenly give way. The expense isn't based on a hard scarcity (like gold), nor is it based on insurmountable issues of size and complexities (like cars.) If things change and a few high output fabs come online and we're dealing with a chip in the public domain... wouldn't you expect the price to plummet dramatically, even if the transistor size were held constant? Note that I'm not saying that's what Intel should do.

  31. Re:Intel needs to do CET security vs. speed imo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Wow, APK, you're still alive? Haven't seen you post in a while. Thought you had died of AIDS or something. Keep up the good fight, buddy.

  32. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ok fair enough...

    Moore's conclusion then. ;-)

  33. Intel needs to do CET security vs. speed imo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See subject: CPU side for security vs. speed. By itself it can invalidate & neutralize an entire class of malware avenues of intrusion (buffer overflows etc.) via its 'shadow/mirror stack' read-only hardware side...

    * Look it up here, it's necessary + needed https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/11/11/malware-detecting-cpus/

    APK

    P.S.=> I'm sure most of you agree & that speed has hit a bit of a 'peak' (for now @ least as far as BIG boosts of it via Mhz->Ghz & multi-core which software cannot always take advantage of ala my OWN work even (can to some extent but linear blocking nature of ops prevent it further for gains https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10053471&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=53577421/ as a concrete verifiable + undeniable 'example thereof' fact))

    Yes - SECURITY CPU SIDE is the "next big boost" & yes, it's ENTIRELY doable per CET... apk

  34. Re:Intel needs to do CET security vs. speed imo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    He's still here raymorris despite your attempts at discrediting apk now and in your gossip shown here https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9880997&cid=53312265/ behind apk's back which you waste time on chattering on slashdot 50 posts a day instead of doing what apk does building decent tools slashdotters use and like with even malwarebytes people hosting and recommending his work.

  35. Re:No Moore's Law by Rising+Ape · · Score: 1

    You could say the same about Ohm's law - it was just the empirical observation that current through something was directly proportional to the voltage across it. And that's not always true, but it's true widely enough for it to be a useful law.

  36. Re:No Moore's Law by radarskiy · · Score: 1

    When it costs 10^7 USD to put up just one factory, you're going to heavily incentivize the equipment supplier who is a 1 month outlier on the schedule.

  37. Re: No Moore's Law by Cmdln+Daco · · Score: 1

    This isn't a month-long Usenet thread, which is what Godwin's Law applies to.

    Slashdot discussions automatically extinguish in about three days so Godwin's Law really can't ever apply to them.

  38. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    By that logic, neither is gravity. It's the result of spacetime curving out from under you.

  39. Re:Intel needs to do CET security vs. speed imo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Alexander if you're going to reply as "somebody else", then you may as well capitalize APK like the rest of us do...

  40. Re:No Moore's Law by dbIII · · Score: 1

    No you can't. One is physics and the other was a guy called Moore setting a long term goal.

  41. Intel does not have a monopoly as per law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They got to where they are through being smarter and creating things and keeping up with new research. By definition they are therefore not s monopoly.

    They could have 100% of the market but so long as they adhere to the laws about such things they are not a monopoly.

    Hint: Intel is not a monopoly. By law.

    Now then, in your dorm room conversations you can make up anything you want but out here in the real world... Intel is not a monopoly.

    So says the law.

    1. Re:Intel does not have a monopoly as per law by unixisc · · Score: 1

      It's not just the law. It's reality as well. The law says that you can't resort to unfair means to eliminate your competition. But it says nothing about making superior products and making your competition unattractive that way.

  42. Re:monopoly What! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    IBM last year made a POWER11 prototype using 7nm. INTEL has allways been 10 years behind IBM. yet since INTEL now owns altera its stock maybe worth buying; In the past 30y years i would never recommend buying their stock, yet with altera its a whole new beast.

  43. Re:No Moore's Law by slashrio · · Score: 1

    Well, how about Newton's law?
    That also stems from observation of a common exclusion-less repeatedly occurring phenomenon.

    --
    "Trump!!", the new Godwin.
  44. Re:No Moore's Law by slashrio · · Score: 1

    I think it's cockney ;)
    Ge' a fu'ing dictio'ary

    --
    "Trump!!", the new Godwin.
  45. Re: centrifugal force is no real force by slashrio · · Score: 1

    Then why am I able to measure it? :)
    Experimental set-up: Tie a stone (tightly) to a rope, hold one end of a (coiled) spring in your hand, the other end holds the rope.
    Swing it around and see the spring expand in length ==>> force!
    They dubbed this the centrifugal force, although a better name would have been 'centrifugal reaction force'.

    --
    "Trump!!", the new Godwin.
  46. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hey, you found the joke.

  47. Re:No Moore's Law by terjeber · · Score: 1

    So I am sure you are tired of hearing about Newton's laws too then.

  48. Re:No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I don't think it was transistor density either. It was just the number of transistors on a chip. Meaning that larger dies or even having multiple dies in a chip still counts towards more's law.

    However you could, if you wish, also just talk about computing power, which seems to have doubled every 18 months since the invention of the abacus.

  49. Re: No Moore's Law by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From Wikipedia:

    Godwin's law (or Godwin's rule of Hitler analogies)[1][2] is an Internet adage which asserts that that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1"[2][3]â"ââthat is, if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler.

    Promulgated by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990,[2] Godwin's law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions.[4] It is now applied to any threaded online discussion, such as Internet forums, chat rooms, and comment threads, as well as to speeches, articles, and other rhetoric[5][6] where reductio ad Hitlerum occurs.

  50. Re:No Moore's Law by Rising+Ape · · Score: 1

    The original post was "there's no law, there's never been one. There was a mere observation".

    Ohm's law was also a mere observation at the time it was made. There was no theoretical understanding behind it. That didn't stop it being called a "law".

  51. Re:No Moore's Law by cwsumner · · Score: 1

    Moore's "law" is a trend, not a law or theory. Trends change... ;-)

  52. process shrinks at this stage by unixisc · · Score: 1

    This used to be the case when the industry was going from 1 micron to the sub micron scales - 0.65, 0.5,0.35. After it got to the 0.18, that has been less true, as fabs have migrated from 200mm to 300mm wafers, and the proposition has grown a lot more expensive for migrating from 300mm to 450mm wafers. Just going from 200 to 300, factories had to be re-tooled, and the changes are even more disruptive while going from 300mm to 450mm. So the add-ons you are estimating in staying w/ an old process is overtaken by the add-on costs of retooling for a 450mm process. Also, while you do get more die/wafer on the 450mm, the processing time is longer, thereby reducing the throughput of the processes.

    The only advantage of going to shrinks at this point are reductions in power consumption, and/or increases in performance. But the market will still expect price reductions, even if these newer processes invoke cost increases

    1. Re:process shrinks at this stage by Agripa · · Score: 1

      Intel's William Holt gave a recent lecture on the subject - Moore’s Law: A Path Forward.

    2. Re:process shrinks at this stage by unixisc · · Score: 1

      This is very enlightening. Thanks