Moore's Law

I thought Moore's Law was that CPU speed should double every two years.

 

I picked this up from a google hit of the Portland Business Journal:

Years ago, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore put the computer industry's quantum evolution into comparative terms when he declared: "If the automobile industry had advanced as rapidly as the semiconductor industry, a Rolls Royce would get 500,000 miles to the gallon and would be cheaper to throw away than to park."

/Jim

 

Actually, it would get much better mileage. He forgot about the reduction in size. The problem is that the Rolls would fit in your pocket and the question would be miles per shoe! :lol:

 

when considering scale, its obvious that automobiles could never progress at the same rate as computers. and what is to say that they have not??

do you really think that computers would have been as fast and as popular if someone died every time they crashed??

cars have progressed EONS...its just that their progress is measured in so many different and MUCH MORE valuable ways. processors are only measured by speed and nothing else. just because they are 1000 times faster, does that mean they are 1000 times more efficient?? we all know the answer to that one.

besides Moore's law stated that the number of transistors will double every 18-24 months while the cost of its production would be halved.

 

Moore's law has slowed down quite a lot (50% according to some). IC design and fabrication is hitting a wall. 65nm (transistor gate size, 'nm'= 1e-9 meter) is a challenge. No one know what problems lie ahead at 45nm. 45nm may be the end of Moore's law w/o major breakthru. Your newest Pantium was fabricated with 90nm. 65nm is used in most advanced DRAM today. The next Intel CPU will be fab-ed in 65nm. This year (2006), some advanced DRAM will use 45nm.

 

:lol: you're hilarious, Jim. As far as the American auto industry goes, I think that the law they should be applying it to is the second law of thermodynamics.

 

RIP, Gordon Moore.

Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder who coined chip rule, dies at 94

 

Another obituary:

Gordon E. Moore, Intel founder and creator of Moore's Law, dies at 94 - Los Angeles Times

 

Moore was one of the giants whose 'Fairchildren' quite literally put the silicon in Silicon Valley.
Intel Processors specifically and silicon in general are still a 'thing' today.

By all accounts (except perhaps Shockley's ) he was a decent chap who married up, lived a long and productive life, and tried to leave the world a little better than he found it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_and_Betty_Moore_Foundation

 

i wonder if post #8 still holds true 17 years later

 

This study seems to end data in 2015. IBM announced 2 nanometer (transistor scale) chip in 2022. It could have 10 ^ 11 transistors per mm^2, which is off the chart. That is also less than 100 atoms across, and there must be a bottom. At a scale when quantum tunneling of electrons through atoms becomes more than an infinitely small probability, semiconductors no longer work like their bigger versions.



But before getting to Iron Man's and Ant Man's area of expertise. Cost of technically achieving those feature sizes (and unit failure rates) will stop the march. So practical ICs will stop 'Moore ing' if they have not already.

Quantum computing is a whole 'nother thing. Perhaps ChatGPT can explain that.

 

Strictly speaking....
No.
Most CPUs now use a 5nm manufacturing process, IIRC (not my AOE.)
As mentioned above 2nm is now possible but perhaps not yet economical.
Moore's law was always presumed by everyone, including Gordo himself to have a sunset date in the mid 2020's, and it is also a near certainty that innovation will continue beyond our abilities to shrink physical components.

As it is, the Apples claim to have 15 billion transistors in their last-year's A15 Bionic system on a chip, while their current phone (a 14 at the time of this writing) uses a 4nm processor with a billion more.
Their M1s are even more staggering with the super-duper-whamalama-ding dong chip (M1 Ultra) posting claims of well over 100 billion transistors....and the M2 is in serial production!
.