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Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#11

Post by sanxiyn »

brancz wrote: post #5

In its original form as in "transistors double every two years" it certainly already seems over. Apple silicon is at 5mn today, and Intel claims they'll conquer 3mn by 2030, so even these facts and theoretical statements already don't fit anymore. We'll probably have a couple more innovations and might get to making a transistor out of a single atom (silicon atom is 0.262nm; carbon atom is 0.3). 5nm / (2*2*2*2) =~ 0.…

"5 nm" does not correspond to any physical dimension, so it is nonsensical to compare to size of atom.

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#12

Post by IshKebab »

It is dead in the sense that transistor density isn't doubling every 18/24 months. It is still increasing but not very much.

People are starting to move to getting performance improvements by increasing chip sizes and power budgets - part of the reason why GPUs are more expensive than they used to be.

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#13

Post by JauntyHatAngle »

brancz wrote: post #5

In its original form as in "transistors double every two years" it certainly already seems over. Apple silicon is at 5mn today, and Intel claims they'll conquer 3mn by 2030, so even these facts and theoretical statements already don't fit anymore. We'll probably have a couple more innovations and might get to making a transistor out of a single atom (silicon atom is 0.262nm; carbon atom is 0.3). 5nm / (2*2*2*2) =~ 0.…

Really dumb question from someone who barely knows this stuff, but does quantum computing in theory reduce that size again if it takes off in the future?

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#14

Post by sanxiyn »

sanxiyn wrote: post #9

Transistor is scaling, for now. SRAM is not! TSMC N3E SRAM density is equal to N5 SRAM density. This is something of an inflection point. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/no-sram-scaling-implies-on...

I believe this report by WikiChip from IEDM 2022 is an accurate summary of the situation:

> While there were a great number of interesting papers from both academia and industry, it was the one by TSMC that brought frighteningly bad news: whereas logic is still scaling more-or-less along the historical trendline, SRAM scaling appears to have completely collapsed.

https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/7343/iedm-2022-did-we-just-wi...

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#15

Post by mrcode007 »

Curzel wrote: post #7

Dead, but we're heading into new a new paradigm of hardware accelerators (encoders, decoders, AI-optimized chips, multi-die GPUs, ...) and new packaging systems (M1 SoC's, GPU Chiplets, ...), all powered by what was previously the big bottleneck, interconnection within these components (AMD's Infinity Fabric, Apple's UltraFusion, ...)

This is a very old paradigm. We’ve been here before:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087

The problem is memory bandwidth. This is also a place we’ve been to before :)

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#17

Post by pvaldes »

sanxiyn wrote: post #11
brancz wrote: post #5

In its original form as in "transistors double every two years" it certainly already seems over. Apple silicon is at 5mn today, and Intel claims they'll conquer 3mn by 2030, so even these facts and theoretical statements already don't fit anymore. We'll probably have a couple more innovations and might get to making a transistor out of a single atom (silicon atom is 0.262nm; carbon atom is 0.3). 5nm / (2*2*2*2) =~ 0.…

"5 nm" does not correspond to any physical dimension, so it is nonsensical to compare to size of atom.

A nanometer is a well defined physical dimension. If we split a milimeter in a million parts, each one is a nanometer

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#18

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

Moore's Law has become a snowclone [1], the current iteration is:

"AI's Rule: Just as Moore's Law unfolds, the language models might expand, doubling the size and inference capability every [insert timeframe], revolutionizing communication and comprehension in unprecedented ways." (generated by ChatGPT)

[1] "a cliché and phrasal template that can be used and recognized in multiple variants", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#19

Post by quickthrower2 »

sanxiyn wrote: post #11
brancz wrote: post #5

In its original form as in "transistors double every two years" it certainly already seems over. Apple silicon is at 5mn today, and Intel claims they'll conquer 3mn by 2030, so even these facts and theoretical statements already don't fit anymore. We'll probably have a couple more innovations and might get to making a transistor out of a single atom (silicon atom is 0.262nm; carbon atom is 0.3). 5nm / (2*2*2*2) =~ 0.…

"5 nm" does not correspond to any physical dimension, so it is nonsensical to compare to size of atom.

“5 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 51 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 30 nanometers” - wikipedia

Its a marketing term

Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?

#20

Post by sanxiyn »

btilly wrote: post #4

Nvidia thinks that Moore's Law is dead. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/09/do-expensive-nvidia-g... Intel, by contrast, says that Moore's Law is still alive. But Intel is technologically behind, and it is easier to improve when there is someone to learn from, so maybe there is a wall that they haven't yet hit. Regardless, it is a very different law than when I was young, when code just magically got faster each y…

If you read the article, it is clear Jensen Huang is commenting only on the price aspect. It used to be the case that as density goes up, price goes down. Huang is saying that price is no longer going down, and he is probably right. But density is going up. It is even unclear whether it is slowing down.
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