Comment by robotcookies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robotcookies | Hacker News Reader

> Moore's law, the principle that has powered the information-technology revolution since the 1960s, is nearing its end.

I don't understand why people keep saying Moore's law will end soon... as if it's a forecast. I just checked an online site for cpus and the fastest one available was at 3.7 GHZ. It was maybe 3.2 GHZ two years ago. In 2001, I bought a computer that ran at 1 GHZ. That's 15 years ago! Moore's law is usually defined as doubling every 18 months. Even if we stretched it to every 24 months, we should be at well over 100 GHZ. Even if we account for the 4 cores, it's still not happening.

What am I missing here? It seems like Moore's law has been dead for years. Please don't tell me about experimental cpus that are faster or theoretical processors. Moore's law is defined as speed increases while the price stays the same. What matters is what cpus are available to consumers.

Moore's Law properly expressed is about transistor density and not switching speed. Clock rates have been static over the last decade, but register widths have climbed by a factor of 8 and we're now packing a dozen or more cores on a die that used to hold one.

Pentium 4s ten years ago could hit around 4 GHz. Running any faster than that runs into some issues with the basic physics. Some good explanations here[1]. Now we're into the era of "well, that's as fast as we can go on one core, let's chuck more cores at it". Except writing parallel code is hard, and parallelism doesn't help if what you're doing is effectively single-threaded. Great for mass processing of vertex data in a 3D mesh

The next frontier was faster caches and memory, so we could keep those processors burning at max speed more of the time, with fewer idles waiting on input or output. Then we needed faster main storage, so we could spend less time fetching data from slow spinning disks into our limited, fast memory. Voila, SSDs. Now we're down to fast CPUs, fast caches, fast memory, fast disks, and slow networking. Someday we'll get wide-spread fiber deployed, and that gate becomes less of a problem.

Through all of this, the effective speed of computers has continued to rise, although the top-line limit of CPU Hz hasn't changed much.

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/122050/what-l...

> Moore's law is defined as speed increases while the price stays the same.

No. As stated in the second paragraph of the article, Moore's law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip will double every two years or so.

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