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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Previously, die shrinks enabled faster clocking. It is a shame you missed those days, but to deny they happened is just sad.

We did not go from 1MHz 6502s to 4GHz Pentiums without a generous series of doublings. Twelve, in fact.

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I get that you are being intentionally condescending and obtuse here, but you were talking about 'the end of Moore's' law, which only talks about transistor density increases in addition to cost, and both of those are still increasing. Clock speeds, instructions per clock, cache, latency, prefetching, out of order execution and many other aspects of CPU performance were not the trend Gordon Moore outlined. You are conflating things that stem from transistor density with Moore's Law.

While Moore's original, concise expression was in terms of transistor areal density, the faster clock rate was implied and expected, just as lower latency is implied by the faster clock. Thus, the stagnation of clock rates is rightly recognized as the beginning of its end. Allocation of the newly available transistors to caches, functional units, execution units, and ultimately extra cores was also implied: the transistors are not decorative: they are there to be used.

With feature sizes approaching a single lattice unit cell, its final stage will be reached shortly.

To insist that transistor count is the only point of Moore's Law is to be deliberately obtuse: it was the exactly the extra value provided by the extra transistors and the machinery built of them, and the faster clocks, that would (and did) generate the capital investment needed to develop each succeeding, more expensive, generation.

This is all rationalizing whatever you were trying to say about performance stalling. People only talk about 'the intent' when they realize they have been regurgitating news headlines and haven't looked any deeper. The point is that performance hasn't stalled at all just because clock rates aren't going up. Faster clocks are diminishing returns in performance due to memory latency. Transistor density was the point and performance is still increasing due to transistor density, even if you don't know how to use multiple cores.

It is an objective fact that performance increases are much, much smaller than 20 years ago. It is easy to see why, and why continuing (for now) shrinkage of transistors is failing to deliver as much as before.

You are welcome to die on your "Moore's Law is about feature size and nothing else" hill, but you will have sparse company there.

"Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. "

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

It doesn't matter how forcefully you repeat yourself without backing it up.

Also performance has increased with transistor density with more cores.

I see that you are convinced that Gordon Moore was an idiot who cared only for counting transistors, and had no interest in how they are used.

I also see that you have confused "much smaller increase", which is observed by everyone, with "no increase", which literally no one has said.

I quoted Moore's Law and linked you the actual history, you have some reading to do.

I read it in the '80s. And understood it. You could, too, with some thought. It's not too late.

Don't you think maybe you should take a step back when you repeat the same things over and over, never back them up and have multiple people link you different Wikipedia articles to correct you?

Now you are multiple people?

Anybody can read Wikipedia, but evidently not everybody can understand what it says.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926724

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking

And anybody can link to Wikipedia, but very evidently need not understand what it says.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_by_assertion

Proof by Wikipedia link does not even make the list of fallacies.

2015, Gordon Moore: "I see Moore's law dying here in the next decade or so." <http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/gordon-moore-the...

Brian Krzanich, the former CEO of Intel: "Our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two." <https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/07/16/intel-rechisels-the-...

John L. Hennessy; David A. Patterson (June 4, 2018): "The ending of Dennard Scaling and Moore’s Law also slowed this path; single core performance improved only 3% last year!" <https://iscaconf.org/isca2018/turing_lecture.html>

You didn't confront anything I linked. Again, Moore's law is about transistor density, which hasn't stopped yet and has gone into to more cores. It was never about single core performance. Now it seems like you are including dennard scaling after someone else mentioned it.

You have a quote about the time frame increasing which has never been disputed either.

I'm sure you can find links to some tech blogs that have the same misunderstandings as you do, why don't you go hunt those down too?

I will pass your comments along to Mr. Moore.

I showed him already and he wondered why someone would say computers aren't getting faster when AMD released a 64 desktop.

If we're being pedants, "Dennard scaling" is the term for the phenomena that allowed for increased clocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling

Dennard scaling was a nice side benefit of transistor shrinks.

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