The article starts with a falsehood. Moore's law is not finished. Much like Mark Twain's death, reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated. Transistor count is still surprisingly following Moore's curve, and single threaded performance, while having taken a hit, is still growing at a healthy 25% per year.
Oh well opening lines are what opening lines need to be. I'm just pedantic about stepping on solid ground.
When people say Moore's law is finished they are saying that the free lunch that was the growth rate of single threaded performance is gone.
25% isn't bad, but is no where near the 60% we were getting before. Especially since a 2 year wait used to be a 150% boost but is now a 56% one (with many analysts thinking that is generous).
You have to be careful about what Moore's law actually says. It says that transistor density doubles roughly every 2 years. So transistor count can still be increasing while Moore's law is null and void. Most lithographers I've talked with have said that Moore's law is basically done for, and its demise is due to economics and not physics. It's getting MORE expensive to produce higher transistor densities due to the very complicated manufacturing processes. So fabs can still produce processors with smaller transistors but you probably won't buy them.
It was also careful to frame it in terms of clock speed. I remember fondly the ramp up from 4.77 MHz to our current clock rates, and we have really plateaued around 3.4 GHz at the top end. [1] There have been challenges to reach higher speeds, and I think the highest clock rate is an impressive 8+ GHz, but that isn't off-the-shelf stock you just pick up at Newegg. That blog post has some interesting and relevant data. It is a few years old now, but still applies.
> single threaded performance, while having taken a hit, is still growing at a healthy 25% per year.
That's false.
Moore's Law used to translate into increased clock rate. In consumer CPUs, this clock rate has stagnated at around 3 GHz ever since 2002 !!! This happens due to issues with power dissipation and increasing GHz count was a waste anyway, because performance increases from higher GHz isn't linear (i.e. a 25% increase in GHz count translates in less than 25% increase in performance and the difference in top of the line consumer CPUs running at 3 or 4 GHz and over-clocked prototypes running at 8 GHz is much smaller than you'd think ;))
Ever since then, single-threaded performance has been improving by design changes (e.g. instruction-level parallelism, caching, etc.), however this doesn't scale and isn't necessarily related to Moore's Law (i.e. the processor doesn't know the code's intention and so there are hard limits to how many smarts it can pull off).
Moore's law "translates" to transistor count. Any other interpretation is your own. I couldn't care less about clock frequency. I care about operations per second, and these are following the numbers I referenced.
Moore's law "translates" to transistor count. Any other interpretation is your own. I don't care about "operations per second", because (1) it depends on what you're counting and (2) the numbers you referenced aren't necessarily due to Moore's Law.
Oh well opening lines are what opening lines need to be. I'm just pedantic about stepping on solid ground.