Re:Moore's law hits the roof
by interdrift on Sunday December 27, 2015 @07:41AM
(#10797270)
That could be good for us.It means its time for innovation.
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Re:Moore's law hits the roof
by marcosdumay on Sunday December 27, 2015 @07:50AM
(#10797291)
If you mean innovation in software, yes, that's probably the time for that.
If you mean innovation in specialized hardware, it's just too early. Those last iterations of fab improvement threw the prices over the roof, everything is expensive now. If Moore's law is really over, things will get cheap as they get stale, but not now.
If you mean innovation on fabrication, well, there's still some fat to cut on power consumption, and if one comes out with an absolutely flawless process, higher frequencies are still possible. But overall, one can not innovate against the laws of Nature.
That sounds like Moore law is not propelled by innovation. It's not the expanding universe which causes our transistor counts to double, it's engineers innovating.
You already see innovation from Intel to segment the market so that they can maximize profit without increasing processing speed (for example the way they artificially separate their server from their desktop CPUs). In the long run I hope you're right (and AMD is able to catch up)
Let's hope AMD and various ARM CPU vendors catch up. Intel Xenon are overpriced i7 with enabled ECC memory. And we are stuck with ~3GHz single core raw speed since 2004 (memory got faster, etc - we know!). We would benefit from 10GHz single core performance.