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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) 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.