will we ever get back Moore's Law?

[bwanaaa]

rememnber there for a while how quickly mhz were scaling? every time things got smaller (lsi->vlsi->etc) they got faster. Something that doesnt get much airtime any more is code bloat. Apps got bigger,Bigger, and BIGGER. I cant believe i used to write assembly code measured in bytes that would do things like word processing, graphics and games. But I did.

I guess that not much is to be gained any more with the new optimizing compilers- but I wonder?

remember the macplus? it ran a gui with 128k of ram! the macplus used 512 k. An it was pretty snappy too. 8 bit colr bogged things down a little, but pcs ran with a LOT less than a ghz cpu. If pcs are now 100x faster than they were in the 286 era, why are we still doing the same old interface?

 

[BrownTown]

moores law is # of transistors, not clockspeed, so doubling cores every 18 months gets you all you need...

 

[Brunnis]

100 times faster than a 286? More like a thousand times faster...

What do you mean with "the same old interface"? I think things have changed quite a bit! Also, why change something that works?

In terms of Moore's law, we're still on track, as far as I know. Moore never said anything about frequency, it was all about transistor count, although that has been twisted through the years...

EDIT: BrownTown beat me to it.

 

[pm]

Moore's Law is solidly on track - in fact, if anything it's getting faster.

Moore's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law

Moore's law is about the empirical observation that at our rate of technological development, the complexity of an integrated circuit, with respect to minimum component cost, will double in about 18 months.

It has nothing to do with clock frequency. As far as I'm aware there is no "Law" about clock frequency, there's Wirth's Law (software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster), Rook's Law about fabrication facility costs, Amdahls' Law, and several others. But none that target clock frequency specifically. There are a few "laws" about performance, but performance is not entirely dependent on clock frequency/pipeline depth.

 

[Bobthelost]

Moore's law was an observation, not a law at all strictly speaking.

 

[bwanaaa]

hahah
indeed
the cpu will just get fatter and hotter but not more elegant.
someone (negroponte or kurzweil?) predicted that a pc will have the same number of transistors as synapses in the human brain by 2011. I can only imagine how fat and hot it will be by then. but the upside is that i will theoretically upload my mind ala Lawnmower Man into an intel chip. Now lets talk overclocking!

interface improvements you ask?
well, how about an integrated iris cursor-move the mouse with your gaze
how about voice recognition-it's been out for years and i am not talking about dragon or trainable timesinks.

yep, just keep doubling the cores and the heat every18months...how long will it take before we ignite the planet.

 

[Unkno]

Moore's Law is actually getting is actually getting faster.....a good example of this is dual and quad cores...

 

[RampantAndroid]

You cannot count dual cores....as the law applies to transistors in an area, or in other words the density. Since a dual core die space is twice as big, its the same as a single core so far as moore's law is concerned......to put it in other words, YES, the # of transistors per processor has double, but so has the area of the die.

It will go up for a bit now since we are suddenly having the war for who can hit 30nm, but the size jumps weren't as fast in the past....

It will level off eventually, since there is a limit to how small we have make a transistor.

 

[RampantAndroid]

Originally posted by: bwanaaa
hahah
indeed
the cpu will just get fatter and hotter but not more elegant.
someone (negroponte or kurzweil?) predicted that a pc will have the same number of transistors as synapses in the human brain by 2011. I can only imagine how fat and hot it will be by then. but the upside is that i will theoretically upload my mind ala Lawnmower Man into an intel chip. Now lets talk overclocking!

interface improvements you ask?
well, how about an integrated iris cursor-move the mouse with your gaze
how about voice recognition-it's been out for years and i am not talking about dragon or trainable timesinks.

yep, just keep doubling the cores and the heat every18months...how long will it take before we ignite the planet.

About the iris movement thing....a french team did that with a surveillance camera, where a computer would monter where you were looking...if you were following a moving object, it would move the camera to keep the moving object as your focus. That was showcased at IEEE in 2000.

Keep in mind, before we went to CMOS circuitry, we were using a hotter technology (forget what it was called)...CMOS can't sink as much in th end, so we use other transistors for power sinking....

Temps will never go that high. Intel has really taken AMD's approach and gone to cooler slower CPUs that perform just as well.

 

[TuxDave]

Originally posted by: RampantAndroid
You cannot count dual cores....as the law applies to transistors in an area, or in other words the density. Since a dual core die space is twice as big, its the same as a single core so far as moore's law is concerned......to put it in other words, YES, the # of transistors per processor has double, but so has the area of the die.

It will go up for a bit now since we are suddenly having the war for who can hit 30nm, but the size jumps weren't as fast in the past....

It will level off eventually, since this is a limit to how small we have make a transistor.

As far as I remember, Moore's law was referring to number of transistors and not device density.

 

[RampantAndroid]

Well, it doesn't say it outright, it dances around that though, as it says on a single IC in one place, and other a single die.

Yeah, we can increase the area, but thats that much further for data to travel and such. Die sizes area pretty standard, and I'd be very surprised if anyone decided to suddenly increase the area...and again, I don't think dual cores count, as they are really two seperate ICs.