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Gordon Moore has died

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Re: Gordon Moore has died

#221
post #120

How incredible is it, that I'm writing software on a laptop, connected to the internet over wifi, all while being 38,000 feet in the air. And all this enabled by billions of tiny transistors made from sand. And to make this all the more surreal, I'm sitting next to someone who knew him. Thank you Gordon Moore. RIP.

> all while being 38,000 feet in the air I was pushing code while on a transatlantic flight the other day and I got a little overwhelmed with just how cool it was. There I was in a metal tube staying aloft with 2 jet engines, and had wifi at 30k feet while traveling at ~600 mph.

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Re: Gordon Moore has died

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all while being 38,000 feet in the air I was pushing code while on a transatlantic flight the other day and I got a little overwhelmed with just how cool it was. There I was in a metal tube staying aloft with 2 jet engines, and had wifi at 30k feet while traveling at ~600 mph.

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Re: Gordon Moore has died

#223
post #185
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard error count is proportional to LoC + # of developers involved in writing it. So as well as the accidental complexity from LoC, the more people touch a code base, the greater the chance of broken communication and misunderstandings. Ie bugs.

I suspect lines of code and number of developers are strongly enough correlated that it's hard to get any additional predictive power from the latter!

I think that's true when the source is first written. But # of devs only ever goes up during maintenance lifecycle, while loc may not change much.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#224
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is not dead, wounded perhaps. I would still be very surprised to see them disappear.

they'll survive due to geopolitics if nothing else, the US government has no choice but to make sure they stay viable due to the potential issues in Taiwan

This, anything happening to Taiwan will shaken IT and electronics industry severely. We are ahead of "chip-covid" event in my opinion as IT wasn't enough shaken by SARS-Cov2 or Ukraine, I hope I am wrong. Intel stock price would sky rocket then.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#226
post #179

I would like to propose "Grove's Axiom" which basically states: If you're failing, pivot to what your replacement will do before you fail. "In the midst of the doldrums of 1985, Grove posed a hypothetical question to his colleague Gordon Moore: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moore answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” To which Grove…

This reminds me of the advice: When deciding what to do, imagine that you are not talking to yourself but rather what you would tell someone else to do in your situation. This simple mental shift apparently removes a lot of cognitive biases and emotional baggage that might be affecting your decision making process.

(Prompt engineering is a powerful technique with humans as well as LLMs!)

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smaller transistors is one way to get more transistors per chip. Chips could also get bigger, or the transistors could be packed in more densely (my VLSI is rusty, but not all transistors are minimally sized; a wider transistor can be used to push more power for example).

And how sustainable is making chips bigger or packing transistors more densely without making them smaller as a solution to getting chips with more transistors?

This is more of an engineering question than a physics one I think.

GPU dies are quite large compared to CPU, ballpark 2X to 3X, so I guess we could get a generation to generation and a half of transistor doubling out of increasing the size of the chips at least.

But the question is, do workloads benefit from all these transistors? Server workloads, I guess so, you can get some pretty big Xeons, or lots of transistors per package with AMD and multi-chip packaging. Consumer workloads, I think the issue is more that consumers don’t have these massively parallel workloads that servers and workstations have. Consumers have stated their preference by not paying for more than a handful of cores per chip.

The obvious way to get more transistors per core is fewer, bigger cores per chip. But changing the cores is a big engineering project. And yield issues are already a big problem, which would only become worse with more complex circuits. But until we end up with one core per chip, I think we have hit an engineering/economics problem rather than a physics one.

And the engineering/economics problem is a really big one, I mean AMD has had great success by going in the opposite direction; breaking things up further with multi-chip packages.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch old ones, too, but always by myself. Nobody else wants to. It's always "eww, black and white!" Often they're right. They'd be much more watchable with an AI that could sharpen the picture and colorize it.

I don’t know. Sometimes poor contrast black and white film does really well for the atmosphere/vibe/whatever the hell you want to call it.

"Sometimes" is the right word. Usually, it's just inferior. B+W was used for artistic purposes only rarely, the rest of the time it was because it was cheap and easy.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smaller transistors is one way to get more transistors per chip. Chips could also get bigger, or the transistors could be packed in more densely (my VLSI is rusty, but not all transistors are minimally sized; a wider transistor can be used to push more power for example).

Chips are not getting bigger really. Its just very large 'chips' are multible chiplets package in on bigger part. And that's not what Moore was talking about.

GPU dies are pretty big, right?

I’m just saying it is possible to follow Moore’s law. Physics didn’t limit us, engineering and economics did. Multi-chip packaging is a fantastic response to the engineering/economic problem of low yields.

Re: Gordon Moore has died

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how sustainable is making chips bigger or packing transistors more densely without making them smaller as a solution to getting chips with more transistors?

This is more of an engineering question than a physics one I think. GPU dies are quite large compared to CPU, ballpark 2X to 3X, so I guess we could get a generation to generation and a half of transistor doubling out of increasing the size of the chips at least. But the question is, do workloads benefit from all these transistors? Server workloads, I guess so, you can get some pretty big Xeons, or lots of transistor…

But the question is, do workloads benefit from all these transistors?

That's not the question at all, this was about transistors getting smaller. Now you're way out in left field talking about how gpu chips being bigger than cpus somehow means that transistors don't need to get smaller, benefits, workloads, cores per chips and a lot of other irrelevant strange goal post shifting.

All I said was that transistors are still shrinking and density is increasing, I don't know where all this other stuff is coming from.

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