Is Moore's Law Still Relevant?

I believe this trigate technology is getting a bit overestimated, altough I truly wish I'm wrong.

As long as it can pay Crysis and fit in my pocket?

I doubt it's overestimated. If the claims that Intel makes are true then it will be pretty significant improvement, although the biggest gains will likely be in terms of reduced power consumption. I doubt performance will rise massively because architectural improvements are what bring about the greatest improvements in performance, not improved transistor designs, although, the higher clock speeds that tri-gate transistors enable will still have some impact on performance.

i think the new smart phones, netbooks, SSDs and tablets threw a wrench into it...

an ARMy of chip designers?

The real benchmark is: Can it play Crysis at 5760*1080 in 3D?

My question is, has Moore's law ever been relevent? Granted, I do software, but I play at all levels from firmware on up and at no point in my day does the question as to how many transistors something has ever come up. The hardware people never mention it either. The things that matter, die size, power consuption and functionality provided. Transistor count seems more of a pissing match than anything. I mean, being a software guy, I could code algorithm X in 10 clever lines of code, or I could do it in 50 lines without much issue. I could probably stretch it to 100 lines if I was clever. Transistor count is similar. Who cares about how many transistors. It's just an interesting statistic, nothing more, nothing less.

I think this is a significant step forwards! It's like adding another story to your house. This invention will be around for years to come. Well done intel.

First of all, I disagree with the statement that Netburst was a 'dead end' - the architecture incorporated many novel ideas which are now being recycled in Sandy Bridge and in Bulldozer. While it was not as good performance-wise as AMD's K8 (due to too much leakage so that the clocks never got up to '10GHz', plus the branch prediction was not up to snuff for the 32-stage pipeline), it was ahead of its time. I suggest reading Kanter's analysis of both Sandy Bridge architecture http://www.realworldtech.com/page. [...] 191937&p=1 and Bulldozer architecture http://www.realworldtech.com/page. [...] 181333&p=1 for more information.

Second, transistor count does correlate to capability. Sure you could have some lousy design where a particular circuit uses 10,000 transistors while a good design uses only 2,000, same as in software coding. But assuming a similar degree of optimization, a CPU with 1 billion transistors will usually outperform (or be more capable) than one with a mere 500 million of the same transistors (i.e., same process node and characteristics). For example, in heavily-threaded loads a quad-core will usually outperform a dual core.

However I do think that Moore's law (process shrink) is in the realm of diminishing returns, as is core-count and architectural changes. What we need is some breakthrough, out-of-the-box design - graphene transistors, quantum computing, neural networks, even true trinary logic instead of binary. Trouble is, binary silicon designs are where all the expertise and money is, until it butts up against a dead end..

Intel have been making pathetick AMD style CPUs for few yeara. I had 3.4GHz Pentium 4 6 years ago. Now I have just bought i7 2600K wchih is stupid Athlon style name for i7 3.8GHz... just 400MHz faster than i have 6 years ago. I had also pathetic 3.33GHz Core2 Duo E8600. It was slower than my P4, but just a litle bit and I bought it because of new motherboard features. Where are times when CPU were known by its speed 386DX 40MHz, 486DX2 66MHz, Pentium 100MHz, Pentium 200MMx, Pentium II 300MHz, Pentium III 450MHz, Petium III 700MHz, Pentium 4 1.6GHz, Pentium 4 2.8GHz and finally Pentium 4 3.4GHz... then stupid consumers started complaining about power consumption. I wish nVidia started making x86 CPUs. they would made 20GHz 1kW TDP CPU just like they do theier GeForce GPUs.

In conclusion: Intel, AMD, Nvidia are stupid and you're smart
Dude, you're a software guy right? then for your sake, do avoid ranting about stuff you don't understand.

Nothing of what you wrote made sense.

Bu.. but I AM THE LAW! D:

I fought the law, and the, law won...

"However, Moore's Law has also been somewhat abused as a marketing tool to justify new processors and force innovation into a tight pair of shoes, that was not always the best choice, such as Intel's Netburst products that turned out to be a dead end and almost brought the company down to its knees"


That's very inaccurate, yes Intel lost some marketshare and mindshare at the time, but it was in NO WAY in any financial trouble. It was INTEL it could have been selling cow's turd as processors and the vast majority of people would still choose intel procs over AMD's counterparts.

lolwut?

More transistors per unit area means you can add more to a design or make it smaller. Physical components (MUX's, registers, logic gates) all require transistors. Of course the amount of transistors you can fit per unit area is important.

This is huge for semi-conductor fabrication, which is probably on a software level that not many people "play on", but tends to affect us all in the industry in that the embedded processors I work on continue to get faster and contain more features from year to year.

Sounds like someone needs to divide their drug stash by 0 and take a vacay....

I have a feeling triniti knows absolutely nothing about CPU architecture or how CPUs in general work... plus that whole drug thing too...

Excuse me? Hostile much? Where did I say anything about my being smarter or anybody else being dumber? I mearly stated that transistor count is a meaningless statistic in the big picture of the world. I'd be willing to bet if you ask anybody who works in tech their honest opinion, they'll agree. I'm willing to put money on it that Gordon Moore would agree.

tirinti, the same tirinti from polish forums? What a find He's been saying the same shit about how fast Netburst is and how pathetic high IPC designs are for as long as I can remember.Hey, BD is supposed to be a high speed design with low FO4 number so maybe you will get what you want after all...

Transistor count per Unit area is an incredibly important underlying statistic that drives the embedded circuits / microprocessor industry. Most people might think its meaningless, because it's an incredibly low level concept.

Transistor count / Area leads to better processor/circuit capabilities -> hardware performance -> software performance. Its not a single driving force though. Architecture improvements don't have much to do with transistor count and have a huge effect on processor performance.

can someone please explain to me why a processor, that is not really parallel, needs so many transistors?

Mainly cache. Each bit of cache requires six transistors, IIRC, so a byte requires 6*8 = 48 transistors minimum. Modern quad-core CPUs have upwards of 9MB total cache, so 9 Million bytes * 48 transistors per byte = 432,000,000,000 transistors, although that figure may be slightly inflated. There's also the matter of the out-of-order execution engine that modern CPUs use, which I hear is pretty large, and the instruction decoders and instruction fetch logic is quite complex as well.

IndignantSkeptic... A single transistor is not a computer. It takes a whole number of transistors just to do a simple task like adding two values together. Even to reverse a value you need at least two transistors. To do an "AND" operation, you need six (2 for the inverter, 4 for the NAND)

Well I can't say I fully agree on the transistors being 3D, first of all, they always where manufactured in 3D, only now they are a bit extruded from their previous designs.

What I see coming may be REAL 3D transistors, that could conduct electricity on a vertical, as well as on a traditional horizontal plane.
That way CPU processors won't become cookie shaped flat rectangle squares, but cubes!

The technology is not there yet to make such things on a mass scale, however, I would not be surprised if Intel or IBM have been able to manufacture a chip with two or more vertical layers of transistors on top of each other. The hardest part would probably be to align the top layer with the bottom, which is kind of like technologies today thought to be impossible, or at least very difficult to achieve and unaffordably expensive to manufacture many years ago.


I believe we have reached a point where the average human being is no longer searching or hoping for the fastest computer, but for the one with best energy efficiency; because computers today have reached a level where most people can do with them what they want, without feeling limited to slow hardware.
Kind of the same way that the automotive industry is going to, what matters more today is having environment friendly devices that save money in the long run, rather than powerful mammoths in the bedroom that suck $1000's of dollars of electricity per year, even when just browsing online!

For that purpose I stated that Moore's law is going to be over very soon. Especially since Intel's newer technology offers greater performance, for lower power consumption, we might assume that most people can do with processors built on this technology with LESS transistors, instead of more, since performance increased by 20-35% on these newer technologies.

The few customers that will want transistors to increase will be web servers (like cloud, search engines, etc...), rendering farms, businesses, and small businesses like those that convert multimedia like movies and audio on a regular base.

The end user is going to have more experiences with Cloud servers, and aside from playing an occasional game, is probably going to have more than enough cpu processing power for the jobs he needs to do!

If the i7-K is so pathetic, Why didn't you keep your old P4?

Many people here complain about transistor count not being the same as cpu speed improvement, but I think we need to understand that back when moore's law was invented, all the way up to the early 90's when out of order processors where getting the new norm, transistor count was a good way to benchmark a cpu; and in some ways still is.
Although with corei processors with integrated graphics, the transistor count of the whole processor also includes the transistors of the GPU. So in some sense intel 'cheated' Moore's law (which is not really a law, but a rough prediction based on a mathematical calculation).
Intel knew the CPU did not need that many transistors, and people would not buy computers with CPU's of a 100-140W TDP, with an additional 100-200W for the graphics cards.
That's why they incorporated the GPU within the CPU, so that the transistor count of the whole unit went up, but not overall power consumption. And when using a plugin graphics card, ~33% of the CPU's transistors would become deactivated, resulting in ~20% less power draw (rough estimates based on guess work) for the CPU.

lol!
Funniest comment I've read in a while!

The other guy clearly is a noob!

Yes, Intel should have suffered more if it wasn't for their advertisement campaign and history. Along with IBM, they were the pioneers of the computing industry. Their reputation and the hertz myth are what kept AMD from coming out top. Intel Innovation pushed through that storm to bring us the Core series, while AMD Applicability lost steam and became the Luigi of processors. Second string, but still quite the powerhouse in other tasks. Think about it, most of the top supercomputers are powered by Opterons.




Yeaaaaahhhh, no. Go back to your magical oldschool P4, and we'll be over here outside the bomb shelter playing our nice games and computing our newest problems.

Just to clear thing up with all of the FUD. Intel didn't "invent" tri-gate transistors. The were developed in the lab and funded by Darpa. Reseach started over 10 years ago. Tri-gate transistors were then made Public Domain. Do a little research on "tri-gate transistors" rather than "3-d transistors" (Intel marketing spin) if you want to know the history.