It gets modified to suit the current processor trends of the day with the exclamation it isn't dead. I don't think most bother about such silliness, TBH.
Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
61–70 of 94 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#62I worked at Intel when the first mobile Pentiums were being developed. Back then, gate oxides were 10-12 atoms thick. That was nearly 30 years ago and feature size was 350nm or .35 micron.
Today's 3nm processes use 3 dimensional gates that have film thicknesses on the order of 5 to 8 atoms thick and the features size is smaller than the wavelength of light used to measure expose wafers' different mask reticles that rely on using light slit interference to make features smaller than the EUV wavelength of around 10nm.
To get much smaller than 1nm using these techniques is going to run into fundamental physical limits in a decade and probably that limit will be around .5nm feature size.
The next frontier in silicon will be building three dimensional chips and IBM is a pioneer in 3D stacking of CMOS gates.
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#63Earlier today on HN there was a submission about great CPU stagnation. In the blog post was an interesting link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-tr... This graph to me show that while yes technically Moore's law of doubling transistor per "thing Intel or AMD sells you" is still holding, it has ended for single threaded workloads. Moore's law is only holding due to core count increase. For ev…
>Writing amazing programs taking full advantage of the core count increase is simply impossible (see Amdahl's law). So even if one wanted to rearchitect programs to take full advantage of the overall transistor count from ~2005 to now, they won't be able to.
I don]t think that's the goal right now, though - it's about parallelizing multiple separate tasks/programs/etc: IOW, you can run 50 applications on a single 64 core CPU that used to take 50 individual servers
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
They might be putting themselves in a similar position as Intel though (maybe worse since I don’t recall Intel ever being as greedy..) if their competitors eventually catch up. Unlike in gaming in the data center initial cost + performance per watt are the only thing that really matter (besides software, Nvidia has a huge moat there..). And in relation to how much Nvidia is charging per GPU total power costs are clos…
> Unlike in gaming in the data center initial cost + performance per watt are the only thing that really matter That's not true from a hardware perspective either. You can't just plug in 4 worse cards in the same rack. The savings on the graphics cards become less significant if you need to double/quadruple all other hardware to increase the number of racks. A 1U blade can easily cost $10000 without a graphics card.
You can plug in multiple GPUs on a computer. AWS has fleets with 4 and 8, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dlami/latest/devguide/gpu.html for pricing.
For anything datacenter related, customers are very sensitive to price per performance. And datacenters are happy to oblige.
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#65Earlier today on HN there was a submission about great CPU stagnation. In the blog post was an interesting link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-tr... This graph to me show that while yes technically Moore's law of doubling transistor per "thing Intel or AMD sells you" is still holding, it has ended for single threaded workloads. Moore's law is only holding due to core count increase. For ev…
My most CPU-intensive usage is compilation and "make -j8" is doing a pretty good job at scaling things to fully utilize my CPU. It's not about one program using all your resources.
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#66Nvidia 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…
> Intel is technologically behind, and it is easier to improve when there is someone to learn from This is interesting to me, how did they end up like this?
They put BK as CEO and hired that Murthy guy.
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#67[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#68[flagged]
first time im seeing spam on HN
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#69It's also crucial to not forget about wirth's law, that states that software is getting slower than hardware is getting faster. So don't fall for software vendors that want to convince you that you need a faster CPU every x year. You don't.
But if software is getting slower doesn't that apply you do need a faster cpu unless you are okay running outdated software?
Re: Ask HN: Is Moore's Law over, or not?
#70Earlier today on HN there was a submission about great CPU stagnation. In the blog post was an interesting link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karlrupp/microprocessor-tr... This graph to me show that while yes technically Moore's law of doubling transistor per "thing Intel or AMD sells you" is still holding, it has ended for single threaded workloads. Moore's law is only holding due to core count increase. For ev…
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