End of Moore's law?

[Mark Komarinski]

On 7/10/2010 3:19 PM, Mark Woodward wrote:
> Any thoughts?
>    

Start off by reading what Moore's Law actually is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law^

Moore's law say nothing about performance.  It merely says that the 
number of transistors that can be inexpensively put on an IC doubles 
every 2 years.  Let's see what improvements have appeared in the last 
few years:

- went from a single core per CPU (hyperthreading doesn't count) to 8, 
with 12 around the corner (and hypertheading is back in the mix now, so 
16-24 possible cores, depending on if you're using threads)
- moved memory controller and PCI-E controller into the CPU and removing 
the northbridge
- went to a 32nm die from 90nm in 2002

There's likely others, but I don't follow CPU design that closely.  But 
to say that Moore's law is dead ignores a lot of what's been going on, 
especially on the server side.

Your new laptop may not have all of these features, but I'll bet that 
your current laptop is faster than your old one (go and run some 
benchmarks).  Prices are off a bit since I know memory is more expensive 
now than it was two years ago.  Hard drives are roughly the same as well.

-Mark