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Earliest forms Moore's original statement can be found in his publication "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19 April, 1965• Moore may have heard Douglas Engelbart, a co-inventor of today's mechanical computer mouse, discuss the projected downscaling of integrated circuit size in a 1960 lecture. In 1975, Moore projected a doubling only every two years. He is adamant that he himself never said "every 18 months", but that is how it has been quoted. The SEMATECH roadmap follows a 24 month cycle. In April 2005 Intel offered $10,000 to purchase a copy of the original Electronics Magazine.• Formulations of Moores Law The most popular formulation is of the doubling of the number of transistors on integrated circuits (a rough measure of computer processing power) every 18 months. At the end of the 1970s, Moore's Law became known as the limit for the number of transistors on the most complex chips. However, it is also common to cite Moore's Law to refer to the rapidly continuing advance in computing power per unit cost. A similar law has held for hard disk storage cost per unit of information.• The rate of progression in disk storage over the past decades has actually sped up more than once, corresponding to the utilization of error correcting codes, the magnetoresistive effect and the giant magnetoresistive effect. The current rate of increase in hard drive capacity is roughly similar to the rate of increase in transistor count. However, recent trends show that this rate is dropping, and has not been met for the last three years. See Hard disk capacity. Another version states that RAM storage capacity increases at the same rate as processing power. An industry driver Although Moore's Law was initially made in the form of an observation and forecast, the more widely it became accepted, the more it served as a goal for an entire industry. This drove both marketing and engineering departments of semiconductor manufacturers to focus enormous energy aiming for the specified increase in processing power that it was presumed one or more of their competitors would soon actually attain. In this regard, it can be viewed as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The implications of Moore's Law for computer component suppliers are very significant. A typical major design project (such as an all-new CPU or hard drive) takes between two and five years to reach production-ready status. In consequence, component manufacturers face enormous timescale pressures—just a few weeks of delay in a major project can spell the difference between great success and massive losses, even bankruptcy. Expressed as "a doubling every 18 months", Moore's Law suggests the phenomenal progress of technology in recent years. Expressed on a shorter timescale, however, Moore's Law equates to an average performance improvement in the industry as a whole of over 1% per week. For a manufacturer competing in the competitive CPU market, a new product that is expected to take three years to develop and is just two or three months late is 10 to 15% slower, bulkier, or lower in storage capacity than the directly competing products, and is usually unsellable. Future trends
Other considerations Not all aspects of computing technology develop in capacities and speed according to Moore's Law. Random Access Memory (RAM) speeds and hard drive seek times improve at best a few percentage points each year. Since the capacity of RAM and hard drives is increasing much faster than is their access speed, intelligent use of their capacity becomes more and more important. It now makes sense in many cases to trade space for time, such as by precomputing indexes and storing them in ways that facilitate rapid access, at the cost of using more disk and memory space: space is getting cheaper relative to time. Another, sometimes misunderstood, point is that exponentially improved hardware does not necessarily imply exponentially improved software to go with it. The productivity of software developers most assuredly does not increase exponentially with the improvement in hardware, but by most measures has increased only slowly and fitfully over the decades. Software tends to get larger and more complicated over time, and Wirth's law even states that "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster". Moreover, there is popular misconception that the clock speed of a processor determines its speed, also known as the Megahertz Myth. This actually also depends on the number of instructions per tick which can be executed (as well as the complexity of each instruction, see MIPS, RISC and CISC), and so the clock speed can only be used for comparison between two identical circuits. Of course, other factors must be taken into consideration such as the bus size and speed of the peripherals. Therefore, most popular evaluations of "computer speed" are inherently biased, without an understanding of the underlying technology. This was especially true during the Pentium era when popular manufacturers played with public perceptions of speed, focusing on advertising the clock rate of new products.• It is also important to note that transistor density in multi-core CPUs does not necessarily reflect a similar increase in practical computing power, due to the unparallelized nature of most applications. As the cost to the consumer of computer power falls, the cost for producers to achieve Moore's Law has the opposite trend: R&D, manufacturing, and test costs have increased steadily with each new generation of chips. As the cost of semiconductor equipment is expected to continue increasing, manufacturers must sell larger and larger quantities of chips to remain profitable. (The cost to tape-out a chip at 180nm was roughly $300,000 USD. The cost to tape-out a chip at 90nm exceeds $750,000 USD, and the cost is expected to exceed $1.0M USD for 65nm.) In recent years, analysts have observed a decline in the number of "design starts" at advanced process nodes (0.13μm and below.) While these observations were made in the period after the 2000 economic downturn, the decline may be evidence that traditional manufacturers in the long-term global market cannot economically sustain Moore's Law. However, Intel was reported in 2005 as stating that the downsizing of silicon chips with good economics can continue for the next decade.• Intel's prediction of increasing use of materials other than silicon, was verified in mid-2006, as was its intent of using trigate transistors around 2009. Researchers from IBM and Georgia Tech created a new speed record when they ran a silicon/germanium helium supercooled chip at 500 gigahertz (GHz).• The chip operated above 500 GHz at 4.5 K (—451°F) • and simulations showed that it could likely run at 1 THz (1,000 GHz). See also Articles Data FAQs | ||||||||||||
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