[HN Gopher] Moore on Moore - The past, present and uncertain fut...
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Moore on Moore - The past, present and uncertain future of Moore's
Law
Author : klelatti
Score : 49 points
Date : 2024-03-10 09:15 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thechipletter.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thechipletter.substack.com)
| jdontillman wrote:
| Also see my article "The Mechanics of Moore's Law" for an
| analysis in terms of economic feedback loops with usual adaptive
| characteristics.
|
| https://till.com/articles/MooresLaw
| gfody wrote:
| Jim Keller gave a talk at Berkeley titled "Moore's Law is not
| dead" (2019) where he summarized a bunch of up and coming
| technologies that will enable the continued scaling of transistor
| density - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
| hinkley wrote:
| How many of those are invalidated by Specter? We've been
| building chips that are literally impossibly fast for half of
| the last decade at least.
| xw390111 wrote:
| Moore's Law has been entirely coopted by the media and, as
| such, lost all meaning and predictive power, which is what made
| it famous in the first place. Once upon a time it was a useful
| tool to plan programs with.
|
| So outside of popular culture, it is dead...
| Legend2440 wrote:
| >the end of Dennard Scaling around 2006 has meant that the rate
| of increase in performance has slowed even as Moore's Law has
| continued.
|
| This is why parallel compute (multi core/GPUs) has taken off
| since 2006 - heat puts a cap on clock speed, so the only option
| is to do more operations per cycle. Even some microcontrollers
| are dual-core now.
|
| I don't see this trend stopping. Massive parallelism is the
| future of computing.
| arein3 wrote:
| We need moore's nvidia law.
|
| Price increases 50% every 2 years
| sigmoid10 wrote:
| That's just what monopolies get you. If they had serious
| competitors, they couldn't charge a 1000% markup.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Some discussion around applying Ngrams to your investigation:
| It's really easy to make ngrams say something wrong by accident.
| I don't think these ones turned out too poorly for what the
| conclusions were trying trying to convey but for modern terms
| there are two things you want to keep an eye out for or adapt
| for:
|
| 1) Enable case insensitivity, particularly for things like
| "transistor" which are rarely capitalized or "integrated circuit"
| but even for "should be capitalized things" like "Moore's Law" vs
| "Moore's law".
|
| 2) (Especially on things spanning less than a century) check the
| impact of smoothing. It can "smooth out" the introduction of term
| to appear to take off years early or hide the true
| peaks/variabilities because they only lasted a couple of years
| instead of decades like the default smoothing might be better
| suited for.
|
| 3) (Not as applicable here) make sure the terms are popular
| enough you're not just comparing noise.
|
| 4) Adjust your range so the data is properly scaled. If your term
| was coined around the 1970s (and comparatively uncommon prior to
| that)then the 1870s shouldn't be midway through your graph.
|
| 5) If various case insensitive spellings create a messy set of
| graph lines adding in a less popular term like "exaflops" will
| cause them to be merged and you can extract that line.
|
| 6) Be careful comparing things that can be pluralized or
| otherwise modified with things that aren't. E.g. "Moore's Law" vs
| "Integrated Circuit[s]?"
|
| Combining some of these, notes like "Here is a further ngram of
| the 'End of Moore's Law' which has clearly been a live topic of
| discussion since the late 1990s." actually look to be a bit off
| when you switch the graph to clue in on the last 30 years, set
| smoothing to 0, and enable case sensitivity to catch "[Ee]nd of
| [Mm]oore's [Ll]aw". Case insensitivity changes the shape of the
| humps and 2019 ends up significantly higher than the peak in the
| early 2000s. Shrinking the x-axis and not smoothing out the peak
| to be wider than it is shows there is very little in the way of
| the end of Moore's Law in the late 90's, only really starting to
| take off in 99 and not peaking until 2003.
|
| A similar story repeats for the opening graph, the gap between
| variants of "Moore's Law" and variants of "Integrated Circuit" is
| more than double the frequency, adding in that variants of
| "Integrate Circuits" are even more than either and counted
| separately.
|
| Overall the points turn out right enough (a few years difference
| in when the phrase found its first wave doesn't impact the story,
| nor does how frequent the use of Moore's law is vs ICs as much as
| the general rise of one and decline of the other) but I always
| want to highlight how the friendly interface of Google's Ngram
| viewer can easily lead you to the wrong conclusion on the data.
|
| I'd also like to point out the above tips are neither exhaustive
| or universally applicable to any type of search. Sometimes you
| want more smoothing, sometimes you do want an exact version of a
| phrase, sometimes you do want to show the term was used long
| before the modern meaning, and sometimes there are additional
| things that can bite you. E.g. one I was worried about here was
| "Moores Law" typos excluding the ' but it turned out to not be
| common at all. You really don't know until you check each
| possibility though.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| Pretty much every time I've seen an article that used Google
| ngrams as a secondary anecdote, it's a bit of introductory
| fluff, and I pay zero attention to the integrity of the
| analysis. It's the equivalent of a journalist writing "people
| are saying...".
| zamadatix wrote:
| One example being once the phrase "sweet summer child" came up
| with someone asking where it originated and why it was popular
| all of the sudden. Some were insistent it was a common phrase
| in recent times prior to A Game of Thrones using it and others
| were saying it's always been a common thing and GoT was just
| the latest media but not related to its modern usage. A default
| ngrams search will show some decent activity in the 1800s then
| the phrase catching on a bit in the early 90s, staying steady
| through the late 90s, until it took off in the late 2000s. The
| phrase turns out to have definitely been said in the 1800s but
| maybe not with the frequency the graph might hint at initially
| because of the infrequency of recorded material at the time.
| Then unsmoothing things and shrinking the date range you'll see
| it really didn't take off until just after 1996 where it died
| down pretty quickly until 2011.
|
| I.e. what initially looked like something that had been a
| common phrase before and into popularity in recent times turned
| out to be something that had been previously mentioned but not
| really in use then lines up exactly with the release dates of
| the book and movies for A Game of Thrones instead of something
| which slightly preceded it. This shows how easy it is to end up
| with two opposite conclusions by using Ngram Viewer slightly
| differently.
|
| Alright, enough rambling about the hazards of Ngram Viewer in a
| post focused on Moore's Law :p.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > Gargini, who is chairman of the IEEE International Roadmap for
| Devices and Systems (IRDS), proposed in April that the industry
| "return to reality" by adopting a three-number metric that
| combines contacted gate pitch (G), metal pitch (M), and,
| crucially for future chips, the number of layers, or tiers, of
| devices on the chip (T).
|
| It's not my field of expertise, but couldn't we adopt a measure
| of density of transistors? Billions per mm or something like it.
|
| A single number is also good for marketing as the MHz of the 90s
| have shown us
| xw390111 wrote:
| I suppose it depends on who the measure is for.
|
| If it's for engineers: In 2024 a single metric is going to be
| far too simplistic to realistically drive any decision.
|
| If it's for the general public: Any metric will do, might as
| well stick with nm.
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