21–30 of 123 posts
Moore’s law was a marketing road map for intel. It was basically a monopolistic warning from one of the founders not to release new products too fast so the company wouldn’t burn out. It worked. But it’s not some scientific or physical law and I hate when people refer to it as such.
Not about transistor size of performance.
So it was an economic insight, more than anything else.
Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.
4.5 years later and Intel is bragging that their upcoming topline CPU will run 6GHz stock. I suppose one could call this a plateau compared to the good old days of the 80s and 90s, but it’s definitely still progress.
Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.
Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.
Have clock speeds really plateaued? Sure it’s not “double every 18 months”, but in mid 2018 I bought an Intel 8700K that turbo’d to 4.7GHz and could (with liquid metal, dark magic and luck) overclock to exactly 5GHz. I remember people saying progress was slowing down, that we might not make it to 6GHz. 4.5 years later and Intel is bragging that their upcoming topline CPU will run 6GHz stock. I suppose one could call…
Moore's Law is dead - can anyone think of a more cliche article title in the tech world?
Moore's Law is dead - can anyone think of a more cliche article title in the tech world?
Moore's Law is transisters per square mm or something like that. Just drop a second layer on top with 3d fabbing and im sure moore's law will go on for a decade. inbe4 we have 2,4,8,16,32 etc layer architectures in the future.
Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.
Have clock speeds really plateaued? Sure it’s not “double every 18 months”, but in mid 2018 I bought an Intel 8700K that turbo’d to 4.7GHz and could (with liquid metal, dark magic and luck) overclock to exactly 5GHz. I remember people saying progress was slowing down, that we might not make it to 6GHz. 4.5 years later and Intel is bragging that their upcoming topline CPU will run 6GHz stock. I suppose one could call…
Pentium 4 HT 3.8F, November 2004, 3.8GHz, 115W TDP
Core i9-13900KF, October 2022, 3.0GHz, 125W TDP
Of course, the latter does give you 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores so performance-per-watt has clearly improved; and it has 'turbo boost'. But in terms of sustained single-core performance? It's clear Intel's attention has been elsewhere. Such as on the laptop market, where power efficiency is king.
Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.
It's at least enough that we have to take it into account:
We run our workloads across multiple Intel cpu generations and to be able to optimize utilization we have a "speedup factor" which is currently up to 1.7 for the latest generation we've tuned it for. And the base 1.0 performance is from Ivy Bridge, launched 2013.
Even if the Moore's law is not dead, single-thread performance and clock frequency have plateaued 10 years ago. This is the key factor. Because of heating even if you squeeze more transistors onto a chip you need to reduce the clock, so even if you may get higher computational throughput the latency will go down. And this is another argument for chiplets or any other alternative computational architectures.
Have clock speeds really plateaued? Sure it’s not “double every 18 months”, but in mid 2018 I bought an Intel 8700K that turbo’d to 4.7GHz and could (with liquid metal, dark magic and luck) overclock to exactly 5GHz. I remember people saying progress was slowing down, that we might not make it to 6GHz. 4.5 years later and Intel is bragging that their upcoming topline CPU will run 6GHz stock. I suppose one could call…
In late 2000, Intel promised that Pentium 4s will hit 10GHz by 2005 – on a presumed 130W power budget –, after the last 5 years saw clock speeds increase from 150MHz to 1.4GHz for the P6 architecture (at a stable 30-40W power budget), and other vendors saw similar increases.
Over 20 years later, we're barely scratching the 6GHz barrier with an opportunistic turbo mode that isn't guaranteed to kick in, if your cooling isn't up to the task of dissipating a record-breaking 250W of peak power consumption.