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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?

#31

Post by ipsum2 »

silisili wrote: post #25
epicureanideal wrote: post #21

According to Jim Keller, not dead: https://www.youtube.com/live/oIG9ztQw2Gc?feature=share This isn’t the best recording on YouTube but it’s late and I couldn’t quickly find the other one.

Yeah, after listening to Keller speak about it on Lex's podcast, I'm convinced he probably knows more than about anybody. Another vote for not dead.

Why do you feel the need to appeal to authority here? Moore's law states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. Looking at the data[0] confirms, yes, Moore's law is still alive.

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Moore%27...

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

#32

Post by hef19898 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #29
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…

Nvidia is trying to reset expectations of consumers. Jensen aims to charge more for more GPU computing power into the future. This is because Nvidia has close to monopoly power this is able to break Moores Law single handedly.

Hell, they are able to sell graphic cards, well not nVidia themselves but still, in excess of 2k bucks. They'd be stupid not to try to keep prices that high, now the market seemlingy accept them.

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

#34

Post by hedgehog »

It's over but Intel's marketing department likes to redefine it to mean whatever suits the message of the day. You can read the original paper's definition and do the math on transistor counts say typical desktop processors and arrive at something well under 50% year over year growth over the last decade.

"The complexity for minimum component costs has in creased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase."

  1. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/resources/moores-law.html
  2. https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2023/manufacturing/moores-law-electronics.pdf

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

#35

Post by namelosw »

I thought Moore's Law was dead long ago. I don't understand why some people still bring it up from time to time.

I remember reading in a magazine when I was a kid that Pentium 4 Extreme failed to reach 4.0 GHz in 2003 or 2004.

Since then, it took Intel quite some years to hit 4.0 GHz. Instead, the industry shifted to multi-core CPU, starting with the Core 2 series.

Does multi-core CPU count? I would say it's a bit of a stretch. It's more about horizontal scaling, where multi-CPU or even cluster also work in similar ways - there's no hard limit on how many CPUs you can add as long as you can cool them down. You can also make it much larger and sparse then put it in a large box to deal with the heating problem.

P.S. From the perspective of programming paradigm, people would then find "share nothing" and "message passing" is the way to harness concurrent and multi-core programming, after getting burned again and again with shared memory. These disciplines of not sharing RAM would further make multi-core more like programming on multi-CPU or clusters.

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

#36

Post by ascar »

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…

> but the timing for an individual single-threaded computation hasn't really improved in the last 15 years

The clock speeds haven't really gone up anymore, but computations still got considerably faster. From an i7 2700k (2011) to an i7 13700k single core benchmark scores went up 131%

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-2700K-vs...

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

#37

Post by formerly_proven »

jumploops wrote: post #3

General purpose CPUs can only get so good. With that said, there are still many advancements that can be made to shrink die sizes and/or shove more transistors more closely together (3D is hard due to heat… but…). I’m excited about photon-based processors, but until that’s a reality we still have a ton of headway for application-specific scaling. If you rip specific loops out of a general purpose CPU, there are still…

> General purpose CPUs can only get so good

People claimed this - “single core is over” - years ago when Intel was stuck doing Skylake refreshes and AMD’s Ryzen only matched the older Haswell CPUs.

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

#38

Post by gpjanik »

No. The Moore Law has been declared dead since at least 2010 and nothing changed in terms of increase of density of transistors in chips. Doubling every two year, just as stably as in the 90s.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/transistors-per-microproc...

(the stagnation of 2019-2020 has nothing to do with technology; it's COVID)

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

#40

Post by mpweiher »

namelosw wrote: post #35

I thought Moore's Law was dead long ago. I don't understand why some people still bring it up from time to time. I remember reading in a magazine when I was a kid that Pentium 4 Extreme failed to reach 4.0 GHz in 2003 or 2004. Since then, it took Intel quite some years to hit 4.0 GHz. Instead, the industry shifted to multi-core CPU, starting with the Core 2 series. Does multi-core CPU count? I would say it's a bit of…

What you are talking about is Dennard scaling, which had transistors being able to go faster as they got smaller.

We still have Moore's law, which gives us more transistors. We just can't use them all at the same time and the individual transistors aren't getting faster (much).

For a while, we were able to use those extra transistors to wring out more performance out of sequential instruction streams by creating ever more complex out-of-order execution engines to figure out parallelism dynamically at run time. That also appears to have run its course.

Now we can use those extra transistors to add more cores, more cache and more specialised execution engines.

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