Other than sometimes pedants like myself, most people don’t use Moore’s Law in its literal sense. That sense being Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s 1965 observation that each year saw a doubling of transistors in an integrated circuit. This doubling in turn meant that transistors kept getting proportionately cheaper and smaller.
But it’s the performance increases - the speed gains that come from denser integrated circuits – that most people focus on when it comes to Moore’s Law. The process shrinks enabling those density increases are only part of the overall performance ramp-up story of microprocessors and other integrated circuits, yet they’ve mostly overshadowed other engineering advances. However, those process shrinks are slowing down and are running up against fundamental physical limits as features approach a few atoms in length.
Thus, it’s perhaps not surprising that the recent computer engineering definition Hot Chips Conference chose to highlight the many ways “Moore’s Law” is alive and well through a variety of design innovations while largely glossing over the now sedate pace at which components are continuing to shrink.
Comments
Post a Comment