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Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Table of Contents Expand. What Is Moore's Law? Understanding Moore's Law.
Nearly 60 Years Old; Still Strong. Moore's Law's Impending End. Creating the Impossible? Special Considerations. Key Takeaways Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years, though the cost of computers is halved.
Moore, the co-founder of Intel, made this observation that became known as Moore's Law. Another tenet of Moore's Law says that the growth of microprocessors is exponential.
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Or what if, as some suspect, it has already died, and we are already running on the fumes of the greatest technology engine of our time? The newest Intel fabrication plant, meant to build chips with minimum feature sizes of 10 nanometers, was much delayed, delivering chips in , five years after the previous generation of chips with nanometer features. In early , the CEO of the large chipmaker Nvidia agreed. Over the decades, some, including Moore himself at times, fretted that they could see the end in sight, as it got harder to make smaller and smaller transistors.
For years the chip industry managed to evade these physical roadblocks. New transistor designs were introduced to better corral the electrons. New lithography methods using extreme ultraviolet radiation were invented when the wavelengths of visible light were too thick to precisely carve out silicon features of only a few tens of nanometers.
But progress grew ever more expensive. Likewise, the fabs that make the most advanced chips are becoming prohibitively pricey. Not coincidentally, the number of companies with plans to make the next generation of chips has now shrunk to only three, down from eight in and 25 in He leads a team of some 8, hardware engineers and chip designers at Intel.
But Keller found ample technical opportunities for advances. It means there are many ways to keep doubling the number of devices on a chip—innovations such as 3D architectures and new transistor designs.
These days Keller sounds optimistic. Still, even if Intel and the other remaining chipmakers can squeeze out a few more generations of even more advanced microchips, the days when you could reliably count on faster, cheaper chips every couple of years are clearly over.
In a new paper, the two document ample room for improving computational performance through better software, algorithms, and specialized chip architecture. One opportunity is in slimming down so-called software bloat to wring the most out of existing chips. And they often failed to take full advantage of changes in hardware architecture, such as the multiple cores, or processors, seen in chips used today. By: Jonathan Strickland.
There's a joke about personal computers that has been around almost as long as the devices have been on the market: You buy a new computer, take it home and just as you finish unpacking it you see an advertisement for a new computer that makes yours obsolete.
If you're the kind of person who demands to have the fastest, most powerful machines, it seems like you're destined for frustration and a lot of trips to the computer store.
While the joke is obviously an exaggeration, it's not that far off the mark. Even one of today's modest personal computers has more processing power and storage space than the famous Cray-1 supercomputer. In , the Cray-1 was state-of-the-art: it could process million floating-point operations per second flops and had 8 megabytes MB of memory.
Today, many personal computers can perform more than 10 times that number of floating-point operations in a second and have times the amount of memory. The prefix peta means 10 to the 15th power -- in other words, one quadrillion.
That means the Cray XT5 can process 8.
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