|
I, too, am not even sure what the root of this argument is about, but this discussion about "Moore's law" is a bit aggravating to read. "The end of Moore's law" was a respectable position... 4 or so years ago. It's slightly out of date. The panic got its start because of what's called "Dennard scaling". You used to be able to take the same transistor design, make it smaller, and you could pack in more transistors, at faster speeds, using less power, all for less money. Dennard scaling was the one-trick-pony of the entire semiconductor industry for quite awhile. It's apparent end in roughly 2006 with about the 65nm process, and the recognition of this change a few years later, lead to a lot of panic-running-around-screaming-while-setting-yourself-on-fire. For awhile, it looked like the "end of Moore's law." The one-trick-pony is dead, but all that's actually changed is that we actually have to find innovative transistor designs, instead of just "the old one but smaller, done!" We invented FinFETs and optimization of this kind of transistor has taken us to 14nm, and it seems to a 10nm process too. After that, there's a laundry list of more transistor designs in the works, we'll see what wins. Since the end of Dennard scaling, we've still made transistors smaller and cheaper and lower power. Just about the only thing that hasn't improved as much as it used to is clock speeds. Oh well. You can call that "the end of Moore's law" if you want, but to say that scaling has "ground to a halt" is absolutely wrong. If you're interested in this stuff, I recommend following a trade outlet like semiengineering. The industry seems to think it has a pretty good idea of what it's doing for the next 15-20 years, and that the economics will work out to at least 3nm processes.
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2017 21:51
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 20, 2024 03:50 |
|
|
You're talking about CPU, I'm talking about fundamentals about the transistor switching speeds. You can still kinda see the difference when looking at CPUs, but you're right you have to be wary of the companies making bad decisions. Roughly the right inflection point to pick is the introduction of the i3/5/7 branding, which is post-pentium 4 era mistakes, and they had base clocks of almost 3 GHz. So in the last 7 years, we've gone up 30% in clock speeds, while in the previous 20 years we went up 12000%. That's what Dennard scaling was doing for us.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2017 23:30
|
|