hOwGee.en.: Moore's law is just not suitable anymore

Sunday, June 25, 2006

Moore's law is just not suitable anymore

computers

Gordon Moore is, originally, an American chemist. Now 77 years old, he's the cofounder of Intel (1968).

In 1965, for the 35 years of the magazine Electronics, he was asked to write an article on the future of semiconductors for the ten next years. To answer this question, he carried out a small extrapolation: the largest circuit available at that time contained about 30 components. Looking at the history, he concluded that their number doubled almost every 2 year. In his article, he imagined the same behaviour for the next ten years.

The article also includes two other points: the clock frequency of the processors will double every 2 year and the prices will continue to decrease.
Then it was proved that his forecast was much more precise than he could ever have imagined. One of his friends baptized this postulate “the Moore's Law” and still is the name.

Now that we broke the prophetic myth around this law, let's continue… In 1975, ten years after this article, his statement underwent a small face lift (18 months instead of 2 years) but it was still correct ... until now.

End of year 2003, Intel wrote an article announcing that they could not decrease indefinitely the size of the components and that, around 2018, this particular point of the Moore's law won't be applicable anymore. And, end of year 2004, it was realized that the speed of processors does not really increase anymore. It's a long time we run at 4 GHz, Intel or not.

Obviously, the frequency is not an end: more components (transistors) during about 15 years and multi-core processors with a better distribution of the tasks.

And ya, let's note that the Moore's article described a future where everybody would have his own home-computer and where we would wear electronic watches!
1965...

Source : stuff, end of May.
For those who do not know:
- A semiconductor is a material with an electrical conductivity that is intermediate between that of an insulator and a conductor.
- A multi-core microprocessor is one which combines two or more independent processors into a single package, often a single integrated circuit (IC). A dual-core device contains only two independent microprocessors. In general, multi-core microprocessors allow a computing device to exhibit some form of thread-level parallelism (TLP) without including multiple microprocessors in separate physical packages. This form of TLP is often known as chip-level multiprocessing, or CMP.

Labels: computers