Gordon Moore has died
moore.org
moore.org
Late 90s and early 2000s, I recall that Intel Inside, Lee Iacocca’s book, Who Moved my Cheese, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, Jack Welch’s book, etc were commonly sold, in addition to the latest novels. I even remember buying Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind (was popular because of the movie then) from a roadside vendor.
The old book shops have been disrupted. Sapna is one that has adapted well, with a publishing house, decent web-presence, and has grown too.
For the best technical books, you now go to Tata Book House (may be others, I am unaware of). Novels, and such, Blossom's on Church Street is one of the best. Then there are cafe-bookshop types like Crossword, etc.
Kannada and other language book stores are also thriving.
Thank you Gordon Moore. RIP.
Is this person someone who is (was) traveling with you, and therefore you knew that he/she knew Gordon Moore, or did you just got to know this person by random chance?
Given he/she knew him, can you ask to share some memories, and post it here?
RIP.
I was pushing code while on a transatlantic flight the other day and I got a little overwhelmed with just how cool it was. There I was in a metal tube staying aloft with 2 jet engines, and had wifi at 30k feet while traveling at ~600 mph.
There are so many bugs in features you never heard of, just like software. It is inevitable given the complexity.
"When PA12 is used as GPIO or alternate function in input or output mode, the data read from flash memory (bank2, upper 1MB) might be corrupted."
I can't even imagine the head scratching one might go through if hit by this, particularly late in development process (when the firmware becomes larger than 1MB).
It's a testament to those unsung heroes that most high-level language users can remain blissfully unaware of how much is automatically fixed by compilers in their emitted instructions.
Q: In the age of Pentium, how do you pronounce IEEE-754? -- A: AAAAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEE!
But also, I don't know too much about this, but when Linus tech tips did a tour of a chip fabrication plant, I remember learning that apparently the high end chips are chips where all the little bits inside all work, and if they detect like, busted wee transistors or whatever, they can just use that chip as a lower power processor. If that's the case that's like... Kinda a bug, but they just "code around it," right?
I heard that the last processor where they still used VLSI by hand was DECs ALPHA. Now everything comes from HDL synthesis so bugs are common.
Points to the value of sticking close to the problem domain.
Thanks for sharing it.
If you're failing, pivot to what your replacement will do before you fail.
"In the midst of the doldrums of 1985, Grove posed a hypothetical question to his colleague Gordon Moore: “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?” Moore answered without hesitation, “He would get us out of memories.” To which Grove responded, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?” [1]
Relationship is failing (and you want to save it): what will their next partner do differently? Do it now!
Worried you might be kicked off a sports team: what will the new player do better than you? Practice that!
Imposter syndrome has you worried your boss will fire you: what will the replacement, the "real" person do that you aren't? Start doing that today.
When deciding what to do, imagine that you are not talking to yourself but rather what you would tell someone else to do in your situation.
This simple mental shift apparently removes a lot of cognitive biases and emotional baggage that might be affecting your decision making process.
The analytical knowing mind has to drag all this other stuff around!
Did EE/CS and have all the standard electronic lab bits from a trinocular microscope w/ polarized ring light to the JBC knock-off soldering station. I keep meaning to buy an HP 54600B to get the Tetris easter egg.
Software and systems are where the money's at now (until the tech singularity ruins it), hardware is just for fun.
To everyone around them and especially themselves, they were just pushing the ball forward day-by-day; they weren't heroes or insanely prescient, they were just doing the next logical thing to do. It's only after they've climbed the mountain that you can appreciate what they did.
That's probably the hardest thing about innovation. To everyone who wants to innovate, they only see the mountain. They have the grand idea of where they will end up, when the reality of innovation is just pushing the ball forward one step at a time. It's not heroism or being a genius necessarily, it's persistence and being able to think on the fly.
I think "genius" knows where the general destination is but I feel like most aren't doing it for the destination, they are doing it because they feel it is a calling and what they must do.
Point being: they only serve the generation who survive them, Moore, will outlive us all, in fact and in legacy.
Edit: What I said isn't true, music, movies and arts will outlive us. We have different lists.
Will they? Who watches old movies?
Often they're right. They'd be much more watchable with an AI that could sharpen the picture and colorize it.
Hard disagree on the colorization bit. I don’t see how color would improve some thing like Psycho or Citizen Kane
As a kid I watched many films from my parent's generation. Mary Poppins (1964) or Great Escape (1963) come to mind as being staples every christmas -- Great Escape on boxing day especially
A generation before that people watched "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) for much the same reason.
I've subjected my kids to a few old films from well before they were born, but they were films from my youth -- Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, Men in Black, Muppet Christmas Carol etc. And yes they've seen Star Wars, which was from before I was born (just), but that's an ongoing franchise.
I don't see them watching films from the 1960s like I did though, and I doubt they'll make their kids sit through films from the 90s.
Some of us still watch it!
Of course the vast majority of old movies are long forgotten (and no great loss), just as the vast majority of what we're producing today will be. But there are a minority of classics that endure. Just as there's still a market for Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mozart, despite all the plays, books and music that have been written since.
"I think youngsters need to start thinking about the kind of world they are going to leave for me and Keith Richards (79)." - Willie Nelson (89)
A huge one for me is Mel Brooks, it is pretty rare for a celebrity death to have an impact on me but that one will.
You can only properly assess and appreciate the impact sufficient to assign 'legend' status to an individual or institution retroactively, decades hence from the actions that elevated them there.
> I wish there was a way to know you were in the good old days before you actually left them. > - Andy Bernard
it's always 5pm somewhere for someone.
But many other such figures achieved 'legendary' status while they were very much alive and in their prime: Edison, Ford, Bell, Wright Bros, Disney, Carnegie, Einstein, Oppenheimer, etc.
Moore himself was a member of an elite crew and one of Shockley's (the inventor of the transistor) "Traitorous Eight" which spun out from their former mentor to join Fairchild Semiconductor before all of them spun out from that enterprise to found their own companies and in the process create Silicon Valley proper.
Regardless, I bid Dr Moore a fond farewell. He lived to see the horizon of his law.
And sadly, there are millions living out their lives in poorer parts of the world who might have become giants, if only they'd had access to nutrition, good parenting, education, connections, etc.
But my comment doesn't come out of a sense of desire to emulate. Just out of a sense that especially in the early-to-mid 20th century, we had these titanic characters: Einstein, Tesla, Von Neumann, The Beatles, and so forth.
In a lot of ways, I think it comes down to these folks existing in the beginnings of the information age, and how many advances were unlocked by the increase in communication speed.
That was probably a lot more groundbreaking than the digital revolution. For all the progress we've seen since I was born in the 80s, there's not a lot of things that have fundamentally changed in terms of human capability. Although, we may see in the next decade or two the same sort of paradigm shift.
Whatever legacy and mature rebranding they attempt wont be apparent until 2070
Only the paranoid survive, one of his colleagues once said, and I guess Intel stopped being sufficiently paranoid.
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/664484-only-the-parano...
He got Parkinson’s and died 7 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11333402
Somehow it feels like we'll never have legends in an age when GPT-4/5/... are accessible to everyone.
People attempted to use dog sleds to traverse up the antarctic plateau, which is nearly the same altitude as Tibet, and reach the pole.
Many died in the process, their names are remembered (though slid out of public discourse as its over a century ago).
In our industry fortunately people don't die, but trailblazer had to do a similar thing - they used the proverbial dog sleds to build a camp in the middle of antarctic plateau.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtcLzokagAw
What I learned is that I had no idea how semiconductors are actually made and how they made them early on.
Its really interesting interview!
i like this. keeps people guessing as to why it was phrased as such. makes it more mysterious
Yesterday, it was a few days ago.
Today, it was many days ago :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
We lost a visionary and a pioneer. I like to think we have people who not only think like he did, but who can get the message across.
I would think a intelligence capable of self modification could use the scientific method to increase it's performance (even if it means scaling in size like a matrioshka brain).
“ In fact, in a 2005 interview, Moore personally stated that his prediction of exponential growth would not hold indefinitely, simply due to "the nature of exponentials."
No.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
(a bit more explanation if anyone cares: aggressive pejoratives tend to poison curious conversation and are easy to cut, so this isn't a hard one. I think mostly people write like that online because it's how many of us would talk in person with people we're friendly with—and there it's totally normal, because there's already a 'contract' that takes care of understanding each other's good intention. That's absent online, so many commenters are on a hair trigger with this kind of thing and will react in ways that take the conversation to less interesting, more conflictual places.)
For anyone who has interest / time and lives in the Bay Area, watch this PBS program for the history of the "Fairchildren" and the roots of Silicon Valley. (of which Gordon Moore was one of the "traitorous eight" who contributed to making SV what it is today) If you live, drive, work around the area, there are so many landmarks and legacies of this phase of history that you can still see today (but only if you keep an eye out and take a little effort to learn the past).
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/#f...
(links to Amazon Prime, Apple TV there, and you can also find this on your favorite BitTorrent source...)
Truly an incredible place, and thanks in very large part to the Moores. RIP Gordon.
In every thread people confuse Moore's law with Dennard scaling (which states roughly that, as transistors get smaller, their power density stays constant, so that the power use stays in proportion with area; both voltage and current scale (downward) with length.)
[1] https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/moores-law-is-not-real...
And this held longer then even he thought. But it has ended. While things still get denser, its no longer on that same trend.
This interview with Moore explains it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtcLzokagAw
History by Cantrill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM9h89Vo_Qo
David Patterson perspective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFT54hO1X8M
Opposing point of view Jim Keller:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
Patterson response to Keller:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz0eJA1TP3Y
There are talks by David Patterson, Jim Keller and
I'm not a physicist, but I think they need to get smaller to do that.
GPU dies are quite large compared to CPU, ballpark 2X to 3X, so I guess we could get a generation to generation and a half of transistor doubling out of increasing the size of the chips at least.
But the question is, do workloads benefit from all these transistors? Server workloads, I guess so, you can get some pretty big Xeons, or lots of transistors per package with AMD and multi-chip packaging. Consumer workloads, I think the issue is more that consumers don’t have these massively parallel workloads that servers and workstations have. Consumers have stated their preference by not paying for more than a handful of cores per chip.
The obvious way to get more transistors per core is fewer, bigger cores per chip. But changing the cores is a big engineering project. And yield issues are already a big problem, which would only become worse with more complex circuits. But until we end up with one core per chip, I think we have hit an engineering/economics problem rather than a physics one.
And the engineering/economics problem is a really big one, I mean AMD has had great success by going in the opposite direction; breaking things up further with multi-chip packages.
That's not the question at all, this was about transistors getting smaller. Now you're way out in left field talking about how gpu chips being bigger than cpus somehow means that transistors don't need to get smaller, benefits, workloads, cores per chips and a lot of other irrelevant strange goal post shifting.
All I said was that transistors are still shrinking and density is increasing, I don't know where all this other stuff is coming from.
I’m just saying it is possible to follow Moore’s law. Physics didn’t limit us, engineering and economics did. Multi-chip packaging is a fantastic response to the engineering/economic problem of low yields.
[1] https://www.kurzweilai.net/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
[2] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-05642-4_...
[1] https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/1*vlmZ_Y3a-PGsK0S...
In case you missed it, my point is not that flops didn’t increased exponentially for most of the last century, it’s that Kurzweil wasn’t the first to observe it, and didn’t add anything rigorous to what Moore & others had already done. Kurzweil only made a mockery of it by fabricating some of the data and using the larger argument to claim we’re headed toward immortality, joining an illustrious list of people who get attention by hawking the fountain of youth.
BTW feel free to re-read Kurzweil’s predictions about computation growth in the article and ask yourself whether they’re true. One of his scheduled predictions is up this year. He’s off by a few orders of magnitude according to his own definitions, and furthermore his definitions are off by a few more orders of magnitude according to other researchers, and on top of that his claim that enough flops equal human brain capability are, to date, false. These things put the remainder of his predictions really far behind schedule, and possibly slipping at an exponential rate, which kinda undermines the whole point, right?
I was fortunate to be able to meet Gordon at his house in Hawaii a few years back, which was an amazing experience for an engineer that grew up learning from his wisdoms and accomplishments.
Rest in peace
A big, sincere pressing of the F to pay respects. May he rest in peace.
And as John Donne said:
"any man's death diminishes me"
but some more than others.
Anyway rest in peace Gordon Moore, a true captain of industry.
Not qualified to say whether this is exactly the case here, but I think this video about charities/funds as power-wielding vehicles bears some relevance: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cu6EbELZ6I
Disclaimer: not a big fan of the delivery style in the video.
Thus when they find themselves with the time and money to support new innovators, they end up handing out grants as that's an easy way to support fundamental research of the sort that they too once did.
And no, there really is very little work done evaluating private foundations. They operate with very few guardrails and oversight is extremely minimal. It is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of charities, so how do you evaluate foundations that give grants to charities?
I am an academic that studies foundations and would be happy to talk more about it if you have other questions.
>> By the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law in 2015, Intel estimated that the pace of innovation engendered by Moore’s Law had ushered in some $3 trillion in additional value to the U.S. gross domestic product over the prior 20 years. Moore’s Law had become the cornerstone of the semiconductor industry, and of the constantly evolving technologies that depend on it.
Critical to that engine of growth had been U.S. investment in basic research and STEM education, ten percent of the U.S. Federal Budget in 1968. By 2015, however, that had been reduced to a mere four percent. To Gordon, investment in discovery-driven science was another key impetus behind creating the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in 2000, especially in the context of a widening funding gap for something he recognized as critical to human progress.
RIP.
Moore admits as a kid he had an explosives lab at home (unlicensed) back in the day. Even Elon Musk admitted he made pipe bombs as a kid.
Wonder how many similar promising science kids today would be / have been arrested and imprisoned today by the goons at Homeland for experiments like these ?
https://www.sciencehistory.org/files/scientists-you-must-kno...
Unmentioned so far- I was watching the University of Utah's 50th Anniversary of CS sessions[1], and- apologies I forget who- someone mentioned that it was Carver Mead who largely promoted "Moore's Law" as an idea. Just some random trivia, to highlight how such a strong piece of identity around such a more dynamic & wide-ranging man came about.
Hopefully not the "Douglas Engelbart: creator of the mouse" identity.
This was back when engineers/product people ran things and competition via skill not just funding was the driving force. Imagine a new company today fully controlled by the engineers/creatives/product people, it happens but not as often. We need to get back to that.
The Moore's Law is an interesting case study in creating a term/law that supersedes you and inspires your self interest but also the interest of the industry and innovation. The root of Moore's Law was making more products and cheaper, allowing more to use computing.[2]
> Prior to establishing Intel, Moore and Noyce participated in the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor, where they played central roles in the first commercial production of diffused silicon transistors and later the world’s first commercially viable integrated circuits. The two had previously worked together under William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor and founder of Shockley Semiconductor, which was the first semiconductor company established in what would become Silicon Valley. Upon striking out on their own, Moore and Noyce hired future Intel CEO Andy Grove as the third employee, and the three of them built Intel into one of the world’s great companies. Together they became known as the “Intel Trinity,” and their legacy continues today.
> In addition to Moore’s seminal role in founding two of the world’s pioneering technology companies, he famously forecast in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every year – a prediction that came to be known as Moore’s Law.
> "All I was trying to do was get that message across, that by putting more and more stuff on a chip we were going to make all electronics cheaper," Moore said in a 2008 interview.
> With his 1965 prediction proven correct, in 1975 Moore revised his estimate to the doubling of transistors on an integrated circuit every two years for the next 10 years. Regardless, the idea of chip technology growing at an exponential rate, continually making electronics faster, smaller and cheaper, became the driving force behind the semiconductor industry and paved the way for the ubiquitous use of chips in millions of everyday products.
When he did become successful he also gave back.
Moore gave us more. Then when he made it he gave even more.
> During his lifetime, Moore also dedicated his focus and energy to philanthropy, particularly environmental conservation, science and patient care improvements. Along with his wife of 72 years, he established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which has donated more than $5.1 billion to charitable causes since its founding in 2000. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
[2] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/gordon...
Truly, one of the giants upon whose shoulders we all stand.
Your actions have powered billions of dreamers and saved trillions of hours for the mankind.
Edit>> Though I suppose there's a confirmation process HN goes through before sporting the black band.
I'm sure HN is willing to defer that research to someone like Intel in this case.
Please chill with your inane takes on why this "wasn't fast enough"
RIP, we will continue to break your law.
RIP and we will continue to kill the law. Hope the humor reaches you. Rest well.
Interesting way for them to put it, i think I like it.