
Moore’s Law Is Alive And Well, And Intel Will Prove It Today - tilt
http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/20110504/moores-law-is-alive-and-well-and-intel-will-prove-it-today/
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onan_barbarian
GODDAMMIT, Moore never 'observed' this: "Perhaps you’ve heard of Moore’s Law.
This was the observation in 1965 by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore
(pictured at the Intel Museum in 2005) that the number of transistors that
could be crammed onto a chip doubles and the size of those chips tended to
shrink as manufacturing technology improved on a fairly regular basis: About
every 18 to 24 months."

Moore's observation was that the density yielding the minimum cost per
transistor doubled with each generation (which doesn't actually predict that
the density itself will double, only the point at the bottom of the cost curve
will move to 2x density), not that the density doubled or that everything got
2x MOAR AWESUM in some random way.

Yes, it's sad, but it's true. The number of mis-statements of Moore's Law in
the computing press will double every 18 to 24 months.

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dstein
Moore's Law has become synonymous with any technology getting
faster/smaller/cheaper logarithmically.

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0x44
There are several exponential growth laws in computer science: for example,
Nielsen's law for bandwidth, Kryder's law for storage. It's misleading to
address them all as Moore's.

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zandorg
Also (George) Gilder's law.

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yread
Perhaps the announcement will be more concerned about the chip stacking (i.e.
that is a bigger deal than going 22nm):

[http://semiaccurate.com/2011/04/07/intel-goes-finfet-
on-22nm...](http://semiaccurate.com/2011/04/07/intel-goes-finfet-on-22nm-
somewhat/)

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Brashman
The current prediction among computer architects I've talked to is that
Moore's Law will go for another 10-20 years. I don't think anyone's surprised
to hear about 22nm being achieved (not to say that these continual technology
shrinkings aren't hard).

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jackfoxy
I thought the long term trend has shown for a long time the size of chip
components converging to the size of an atom by the late teens. A little hard
to imagine how physical transistors can get smaller than that. Possibly qubits
could built from smaller particles: photons, electrons

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Symmetry
We could still get speed ups from higher electron and/or hole mobility after
we stop shrinking things by going to different materials, but yeah - that
really won't be Moore's law any more.

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purephase
Here's a video explaining the new transistor design:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkMaQJSyP8&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkMaQJSyP8&feature=player_embedded)

Pretty cool stuff.

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ck2
22nm is exciting to me for power consumption.

Imagine a computer that uses nearly 50% less power than even the current 32nm
state-of-the-art.

But the problem is the support chipsets (north/southbridge) aren't keeping up?

ARM is going 28nm next year too.

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warfangle
I wonder if this is not just the 22nm process. I wonder if they'll be
unveiling something to do with memristors.

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Brashman
From talking to people working on on-chip non-volatile memory, my impression
is that memristors are still too immature for production. If anything, phase-
change memory seems more viable at this point in time.

