Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Fnoord

You wrote:

> [..] divided by two every 18 months [..]

Wikipedia wrote:

> [..] whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit [..]

Godfrey Cheng, Head of Global Marketing, TSMC wrote:

> [..] The number of transistors in an integrated device or chip doubles about every 2 years. [..]

(Even if we ignore the difference on the cost versus number of transistors or components.)

12 months, 18 months, 24 months. How long is it? I have no clue with regards to the answer. It seems to me we first need to agree on the definition of a law before we can discuss it.

View on HN

> Moore also affirmed he never said transistor count would double every 18 months, as is commonly said. Initially, he said transistors on a chip would double every year. He then recalibrated it to every two years in 1975. David House, an Intel executive at the time, noted that the changes would cause computer performance to double every 18 months.

From https://www.cnet.com/news/moores-law-to-roll-on-for-another-... (a source for the the Wikipedia page).

18 month or 24 month, this is not very important. I was essentially talking about the fact that the cost per transistor was steadily going down, which is almost finished now.

Is there any data on the cost per transistor not going down? They seem to be able to pack an awful lot onto chips these days, the current record apparently being Samsungs 1tb memory chip with 2 trillion.

I cannot find a source for this outside of HN, but I have read here that R&D costs to build the next generations fabrication plants double each iteration which limits the total number of sustainable independent chipmakers. Currently, only 3 are left (TSMC, Samsung and Intel) and they all might give up within a few generations when it gets too expensive to scale down further.

It's quite easy to compute:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

2019 - Epyc ROME: 32B transistors 2009 - Six-core Opteron 2400 - 0.9B transistors

(32/0.9)^(1/5) = 2.04, so it seems that Moore's law is actually working well.

Rome exists in a gray area between "single integrated device" and "9 integrated devices tightly coupled together."

I don't see what difference 12/18/24 makes, as it's still exponential regardless.

Big difference is impact of the law.

If it was once 100 years it was also still exponential.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com