"Moore’s law—that the computing power available for a given price doubles about every 18 months—continues to apply. "
Then why are Intel desktop CPU's not getting any better the last 3 years?
Then why are Intel desktop CPU's not getting any better the last 3 years?
It's merely a business practice adopted by Intel, which they attempt to adhere to. The fact that they refer to it as a law, and that journalists around the world parrot their term, is all merely a magical marketing sales pitch.
They TRY to double the transistor count on a periodic basis, and, when they do, suddenly, they've got a newer, better, more expensive thing to market and sell. Wowee! The future is such a miracle!
Moore's law is about their success in doing so. Your car's horse power doesn't increase twofold every 1,5 years neither its gas consumption decreases, but with transistors it actually happens.
Moore's law ... OBSERVES that the number of transistors we can fit on a chip doubles every two years.
If you are trying to argue with me calling it "Moore's law", you are too late. You missed the boat. That's what it is called, law or not.
> Jesus H. Christ, Gordon, that's a fucking fantastic idea! Get marketing on the phone. Holy shit, we're gonna be fucking rich.
Yeah, okay, "observe" whatever you want. Sorry to contradict you on a website. Don't forget to down vote this comment as well. Boo hoo.
P.S. HN doesn't let me downvote your comments, because you are replying to my comments. But, I suppose it's impossible I'm the only one that disagrees with you, so I must be hacking the website.
In any case, the costs are going down, the number of cores are growing, and, more importantly, computing power is not restricted to CPUs (see GPUs/APUs).
More importantly 2013 Xeons do much more per clock cycle than 2006 Xeons (and 2013 Opterons for that matter). Improvements in pipelining, branch prediction, caches, etc are harder to nail down to one number like clock speed or core count but can be huge contributors to real-world performance.
That's a big enough difference to count as significant. Especially when you consider that Intel's been lowering their power budget and spending larger portions of their transistor budget on the integrated GPU. The Pentiums on the market in 1995 were 10-12W, and the Pentium 2s on the market in 1998 were 30-45W followed by a die shrink that brought power back down to 20-30W.