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

And well Nvidia is almost a monopoly at this point so they have barely any incentives to continue innovating as opposed trying to extract as much money as possible from their clients.

On the other hand look at what happened with CPUs over the last few years. Huge improvements in efficiency (including Intel)

> hasn't really improved in the last 15 years.

I don’t think that’s even close to being the case in almost all use cases. Increasing complexity/bloat has obfuscated that to a large degree though.

On desktop, anyway. Mobile is a different store, back in the mid 2000s they had everything to dominate the market for the next 10+ years (e.g. the fastest ARM chips) yet choose not to due to reasons..

- Transistor count doubles every ~24 months (Moore's law) - still going strong

- Total power stays ~constant (Dennard Scaling) - no longer holds

- Total cost stays ~constant - don't know if there is a name for this, but it no longer holds either

The real magic was when you had all three trends working together, you would get more transistors for the same power and same total cost. As the last two trends have fallen off, the benefit of Moore's law by itself is reduced.

There is still some effect of the last two trends, power per transistor and cost per transistor are still dropping, just at a slower rate than density is increasing. So power budgets and costs continue to grow. Hence 450W GPUs and 400W CPUs.

otoh it can be said that gpu's just look like they improved longer than cpu's because their workload is vastly more susceptible to parallelism.

Moore posited in 1965 that the the amount of transistor per chip will roughly double every year - something he himself called "a wild extrapolation" in a later interview.

Actual development speed proved slower than that, so in 1975 he revised his prediction to transistors doubling every two years - so, the original "Moore's Law" was already dead by then. The second revision of his prediction proved more long-lived, in part because manufacturers were actively planning their development and releases around fulfilling that expectation - making it sorta a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There was another slow down in 2010 though - with actual development falling behind "schedule" since then.

But neither the "doubling" - nor the "year" or "two years" were ever anywhere near precise to begin with, so the question "is it dead" depends highly on how much leeway you are willing to give.

If you demand strict doubling every year - that's been dead since before 1975.

If you demand roughly doubling every two years - that's probably mostly dead since 2010.

If you allow for basically exponential growth but with a tiny bit of slow down over time - then it's still alive and well.

There can be no precise answer to the question - since the whole prediction was so imprecise to begin with. I don't think there's any benefit to getting hung up on drawing a supposedly precise line in the sand...