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Feature In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.
In it, he noted [PDF] that in three years, the optimal cost per component on a chip had dropped by a factor of 10, while the optimal number had increased by the same factor, from 10 to 100. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development – he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley – he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year. By 1975, as far as he would look, up to 65,000 components such as transistors could fit on a single chip costing no more than the 100-component chips at the time of publishing.
He was right. Furthermore, as transistors shrank they used less power and worked faster, leading to stupendous sustained cost/performance improvements. In 1975, eight years after leaving Fairchild to co-found Intel, Moore revised his "law", actually just an observation, to a doubling every two years. But the other predictions in his original paper of revolutions in computing, communication and general electronics had taken hold. The chip industry had the perfect metric to aim for a rolling, virtuous milestone like no other.
Since then, according to Professor Erica Fuchs of Carnegie Mellon University, "half of economic growth in the US and worldwide has also been attributed to this trend and the innovations it enabled throughout the economy." Virtually all of industry, science, medicine, and every aspect of daily life now depends on computers that are ever faster, cheaper, and more widely spread.
Professor Fuchs has an additional point to make: Moore's Law is dead.
Many disagree, especially chip makers. But even if it's not dead, Moore's Law looks unwell, with Intel taking five years, rather than two, to make its latest process node transition. And Moore's Law looks to be on increasingly expensive life support. A 2018 study from researchers at MIT and Stanford concluded that the research and development spent on keeping the rate of semiconductor growth up increased some 18 times since the early 1970s, with ever-decreasing effectiveness. Yet with Intel publishing a new roadmap going into 2025 and promising three new iterations of chip technology, and TSMC and Samsung also promising quick-fire movement into the 1nm range and beyond, what's actually happening?
(Score: -1, Spam) by acid andy on Thursday August 05 2021, @09:26PM (15 children)
Roll Up! Roll Up! Roll Up! Roll Up!
Click
HERE [soylentnews.org]
if you love Trump!
First Post! First Post! First Post! First Post!
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Tork on Thursday August 05 2021, @09:32PM (13 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday August 05 2021, @09:38PM (4 children)
Fair cop, I guess.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:00PM (3 children)
Tork is being harsh there. Spam mods are surely not to stop regulars goofing around from time to time. We'll let a Shirley reverse it.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:04PM
I'm not too fussed. Needed to burn off the excess karma. Thanks though.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Tork on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:19PM (1 child)
I hear you and agree, would undo if I could. My reasoning was I thought it was a malicious link (or we're opening the door to tricking ppl with mal-links...), but I think I jumped the gun.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:49PM
Appears to be a consensus so it's done.
(Score: 3, Informative) by cmdrklarg on Thursday August 05 2021, @09:47PM (7 children)
It got a smile out of me. I'd be curious to see how many times it got clicked.
Answer now is don't give in; aim for a new tomorrow.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Tork on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:00PM (6 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:02PM
The trauma is real! The "good old days" when Moores Law was in full effect and the "me too" movement consisted of comments from AOL accounts.
(Score: 3, Touché) by acid andy on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:07PM (4 children)
I'm following a great Slashdolt tradition. I remember CmdrTaco burning off his karma with offtopic trolling occasionally back in the day. Monkey see, monkey do.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Tork on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:13PM (3 children)
This was way back when search engines were really just a table of contents for porn.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:30PM (2 children)
That's what Reddit is for in 2021
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Tork on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:52PM (1 child)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06 2021, @12:33AM
You mock, but the guys on Reddit predicted SoylentNews would miss their second quarter by $0.44 and they were exactly right. Fancy Wall Street analysts got nothing on these guys...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:22PM
Wrong URL its actually https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by istartedi on Thursday August 05 2021, @09:34PM (11 children)
It keeps getting negated by The opposite effect [wikipedia.org], which goes under various names. Obviously if you maintain the same algorithm and implementation things are getting faster, but for a lot of end-user applications that isn't happening. Instead we're getting 500k of JavaScript that displays one line of text and other travesties.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:14PM (1 child)
That's a good point and one of the reasons I like running older software on new hardware. Obviously if it's connected to the internet you need the OS and anything that goes online to have the latest security patches but it's always nice firing up an old game on new hardware and maxing out all the graphical settings. It's also a reason sites like this are great of course. Older games are usually a lot cheaper too.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06 2021, @02:03PM
I tried running Warcraft (the first one) on modern HW about a decade ago (maybe it was just the demo?).
It was unplayable.
All movement was instant, and the AI would destroy you in about 30s.
I had a chuckle about the dangers of using the PC clock as your limiter for speed.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:29PM (5 children)
Been messing around with flutter which is a halfway decent cross platform app framework. Anyway:
https://flutter.dev/docs/perf/app-size [flutter.dev]
Yeah that be 40 megabyte app size for literally a "press here to increment the displayed counter by one" demo.
10 x = 1
20 print "The counter value is currently"
30 print x
40 input wtf
50 let x = x + 1
60 goto 20
70 end
Yeah you can make it look nicer in nicer BASICs but this is generally what the flutter demo app does. In a mere 40 megs.
Still, its easier than doing cross platform native on android and IOS and fuck null pointers on android anyway (sry about language, but come on, gimmie a break, fuck null pointers)
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Tork on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:59PM (4 children)
Yeah this is the aspect I always wonder about. I script in Python quite a bit and while the code needed to execute is absolutely massive compared to what I did on my commodore 64 the fact is I can whip up an app complete with UI super quick. I created a tool once where md5 hashes were important and that involved me just importing a module that already came with the installation package. Can I write code that uses a teeny-tiny fraction of the resources? Yeah... but how long would it take? What benefit would I get? That's a serious question btw, I'm not a software developer, just someone who occasionally automated stuff at work.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday August 05 2021, @11:21PM (3 children)
I think the point is something like granddad did stuff in kilobytes that takes the grandkids tens of megabytes today, but with the end of Moore's law and the end of doubling every two years and all that nonsense, its quite possible that in a couple decades grandpa's phone had 20 TB and his grandson's phone also had 20 TB despite being half a century apart, so that'll have interesting effects on "just make everything larger and more complex" as a software development strategy.
Also I'd like to point out WRT security surface, my home computer with 8K of executable basic had a lot smaller security footprint to keep secure than a 40 meg app on a multi-gig phone. Do we have the technology to make a secure 20 TB phone, or does having 20 TB of executable binaries doom us to eternal insecurity? I'm just saying, nobody ever remotely rooted my TRS-80 model 3 but its a serious concern for my phone and I don't think we can make a 20 TB phone that is secure.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by istartedi on Friday August 06 2021, @01:26AM (2 children)
This thread is a nice example of the tension between what I have come to think of as "developer efficiency" vs. "software efficiency". Perhaps the DE camp's most famous advocate is Jeff Atwood who may have coined Hardware is Cheap, Developers are Expensive [codinghorror.com] as a mantra. In his defense, he qualified his position as ALMOST always. I'm not sure if the other side has a famous advocate, but I was following some game devs for a while. Having gotten my start with the C-64, I empathized up to a point. Their push-back on the idea that a simple terminal rendering task was PhD worthy, struck a chord; but then they were tweeting back and forth about optimizing terminal programs and I got sick of it. I'm sure *somebody* has been hamstrung because they couldn't quickly scroll through a gigabyte of text; but I haven't so I don't care, and I quit following it last week.
It's not like either side is right or wrong. "My time is more important than CPU cycles" until "Customers say this thing is too damned slow".
I think some of this depends on your targets too. I think the Atwood mentality is coming from things that run distributed across servers where adding more hardware really can make sense, whereas the game developers have to work within the confines of one machine and are always pushing the limit of what the graphics can do. "Throw more hardware at it" is not even an option when you have to code for a phone or a console.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06 2021, @01:55AM
> I'm not sure if the other side has a famous advocate,...
I've posted this before, Bill Gosper & friends might be a good candidate?
HAKMEM at: https://w3.pppl.gov/~hammett/work/2009/AIM-239-ocr.pdf [pppl.gov] or https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6086 [mit.edu]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06 2021, @10:33AM
Actually the problem is rather frequent, as too many things slow to a [near-]standstill when presented with mere few tens of megabytes of some log (or CSV table, or something). While it's unlikely their bottleneck is the rendering as such, the proper place for them is in the trash regardless.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:46PM (2 children)
Can the web bloat keep up with the pace of hardware improvements? 6 cores is becoming the new minimum, soon to be 8 cores. 15-20% generational single-threaded performance boosts are expected for the next few AMD and Intel microarchitectures. Intel will launch "24-core" (8 big, 16 small) CPUs within the next 2 years. The amount of cores will simply exceed the amount of highly active scripts that are running.
Of course, an adblocker and a script blocker (manager) will improve the web experience.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday August 05 2021, @11:30PM (1 child)
Don't forget the OS using 21 of the remaining cores to enforce DRM and TPM and report mysterious metrics back to the mothership, leaving us with the same ole one remaining core to run Minecraft on.
All "new" ideas are recycled "old" ideas in software, so I expect a new generation of annoying "win-devices" to arise. Why use a 50 cent microcontroller in your mouse if you have 24 cores in your CPU and could devote one of them to running your mouse? Of course if you spent $400 on that 24 core CPU then each core cost you $17 which is why sane linux users would prefer the 50 cent microcontroller in the mouse, but "someone already paid for that core so its "free"" means we're probably going to be stuck with win-devices again. As if winModems were not shitty enough of an experience in 1995 we're gonna have shitty barely working winCableModems in 2030, I bet.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PiMuNu on Friday August 06 2021, @06:36PM
> one remaining core to run Minecraft on.
Minecraft is owned by M$ so looks like Minecraft is sending back telemetry as well...
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:20PM
None of these transistors are actually approaching "1nm". So there is more (naming) room at the bottom with 20A, 18A, 16A... etc.
If you just look at TSMC [anandtech.com] and take N7 (AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3) as a baseline:
N5 from N7 = 30% power reduction at same speeds OR +15% performance at same power, ~82% increased transistor density (logic, not SRAM)
N3 from N5 = 25-30% power reduction at same speeds OR +10-15% performance at same power, ~72% increased transistor density (logic)
This is with the same old FinFETs. With two new nodes, mild performance gains and decent efficiency gains are possible, and core density can double if 70% of the chip is logic. 3D stacking can be used as soon as next year to increase SRAM cache on chips, although it will be expensive.
After that, N2 will move to gate-all-around (GAA) transistors (Samsung will use GAA at "3nm", Intel at "20A" with RibbonFET aka nanosheets aka GAA), possibly with bigger gains than N5 or N3. TSMC hasn't published any numbers for N2 yet.
Below that, there are refinements to GAA, other transistor types, monolithic 3D chips, optical, etc. The pace of improvements will probably slow down and each new "node" will become more expensive due to the combination of insatiable demand, rising fab costs, and a lack of competition.
Breaking The 2nm Barrier [semiengineering.com]
The Increasingly Uneven Race To 3nm/2nm [semiengineering.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Subsentient on Thursday August 05 2021, @10:51PM
Savor thetexture, the taste, thearoma.
Now, insertyour throbbing, aching cockinto grandpa's love canal, thrusting overand over,hunchedover him, reaching under him totwisthisnipplesas hard as you can.As you cum, pinchthem as hard as you can, not being afraid to let yourthumbnails cut intothem. Afteryou've completed shootingpulseafter pulseof babybatter intograndpa'sfuck hole, removeyour cock.
Nowduck down, soyour mouth is at his anus. Inhale deeply, savoring the scent. Now pressyour lipsto his asshole,andsuck.Suck for dearlife.Suck,whilehisdiarrhea mixed withyour own seed spills out ofhis tremblinghole and intoyour waiting mouth, back intoyour body. Backfrom where itcame.
Roll it around inside your mouth for a few seconds with your tongue, making sure to taste allthereis totaste.
Swallow.
Nowit's timeto reward him.
Go findsome peanut butter, thechunky kind. Latheryour grandfather's testicles inthecreamy substance.Once his balls are glistening with the oilytreat, now move to his anus. Cover your fist inthepeanut butter, thick, so muchthat globs fallonto the floor.
Now insert yourfist intohiswaitingass, slowly, making sure tosavor thesensationof his intestines squirming around yourhand.Remove your hand.Smeartheremainderof the feces-saturated peanut butter around his anal rim.
Call your dog. Tellgrandpato hold still.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 06 2021, @12:36AM
Doubling every 18 months is only half of Moore's Law. The second half is an explosion of useless "features" and all manufacturing moving to China.
(Score: 1) by jddimarco on Friday August 06 2021, @06:55PM
AMD's RX6900XT is about twice as fast as the Radeon VII and it came out less that two years later, so Moore's law is not so dead. However more and more, hardware performance needs to be delivered as parallelism (ability to do more at once) rather than clock (ability to do one thing faster) because of physical limits. Parallelism is harder to exploit in (most) software.