
Chipping Away at Moore's Law - rbanffy
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3388515&doi=10.1145%2F3387945.3388515
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antisthenes
Nanometer wars became marketing bullshit pretty much around the shift down
from 22nm to 14nm and lower (2013-ish and later)

At this point, we should just be looking at IPC improvements at the same
frequency/voltage and power consumption to see if there are any improvements.

And yes, sure, more cores are nice, but tons of useful software is still
bottlenecked by single core speed. So is general computer responsiveness.

~~~
ido
"general computer responsiveness" at this point is 100% on software/OS - QNX
for example was perfectly responsive in the 90s on Pentium II class hardware
(and you can probably find earlier examples with weaker CPUs like BeOS on
early PPC, but these were just the first to come to my mind - someone will
probably chime in below with Amiga anecdotes or something).

I refuse to believe at current high end intel/amd levels (i7-9 & ryzen 7-9) &
even mid-range that lack of responsiveness is due to the CPU rather than
windows/mac.

~~~
lostmsu
Sure it was. Back then screens had 16+ times less pixels (multiply it by 2-8
for text mode), Linux (the kernel) source code was still relatively small, and
the games played had 10 2D levels of a few million pixels each.

~~~
ido
I'm not talking about games, I'm talking general computer use responsiveness.
the difference in computing resources between a pentium II @ 266mhz and
modern-day CPUs is much bigger than 16x and even back then win95 was a lot
slower than it should have been (we were saying basically the same thing -
"why is this 266mhz PII not feeling any faster than my old 8mhz amiga?").

Again the "poster boy" for responsive interaction is probably BeOS - the
original BeBox used dual ppc 603 CPUs at 66mhz: if you consider IPC, Mhz &
number of cores a modern CPU probably has 1000x the computation power at its
disposal & RAM is also generally 1000x more plentiful (we have as many GBs as
we used to have MBs back then). I'll bet with GPUs the difference is even
bigger.

~~~
lostmsu
Single 4k screen @ 60Hz requires transfer rate of 3840x2160x3 bytes 60 times
per second = ~1.5GB/s just to copy pixels without any logic applied.

Typical RAM module (DDR-266) in late 90s could only provide ~2.1GB/s, leaving
almost no room to perform any compute on a single 4k screen, and simply
insufficient to run two of them.

PC66 of early 90s could only do 0.5GB/s.

DDR3, commonly used now in integrated GPUs does 13GB/s.

What I am getting at, is that the task to just copy pixels to a screen became
proportionally harder as RAM progressed forward (26x faster per module since
1990, 6.5x per module since 1999 vs 60x more work per screen since 1990 (256
colors), 10x per screen since 1999).

And that is just screen rendering. Same happened to source code, documents,
images, everything.

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thedudeabides5
Anyone have up to date data on the progress of Moore's law through today? All
the stuff on google looks like it taps out in 2015

[https://www.google.com/search?q=moore+law+&tbm=isch&ved=2ahU...](https://www.google.com/search?q=moore+law+&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwicu9nQ9O3rAhUxPH0KHRb0Ci0Q2-cCegQIABAA&oq=moore+law+)

~~~
rockostrich
5 nm node products are being released to consumers this year so we're still on
track. I think at this point the next node is always questionable because it
takes a pretty big breakthrough in manufacturing techniques, resist chemistry,
and node design to shave off another nanometer.

~~~
gameswithgo
"Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense
integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years"

We are not on track, haven't been on track.

~~~
bryan0
Do you have graphs for this? a quick search shows that at least in some
sectors they're still doubling every 2 years

[https://www.icinsights.com/news/bulletins/Transistor-
Count-T...](https://www.icinsights.com/news/bulletins/Transistor-Count-Trends-
Continue-To-Track-With-Moores-Law/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#/media/File:M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#/media/File:Moore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2018.png)

[https://medium.com/predict/moores-law-is-alive-and-well-
eaa4...](https://medium.com/predict/moores-law-is-alive-and-well-eaa49a450188)

