There's this contrarian conversation in reddit about the possibility that moore's law has greatly slowed innovation in the chip manufacturing industry[1].<p>What does HN think about this ?<p>[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/229ggx/the_future_doesnt_have_to_be_incremental/cglalgg
As far as I can tell, Moore's Law ended about 10 years ago, because 3 GHz CPUs were available then and most CPUs are slower than that now. Sure transistor counts have gone up, but the amount of computation that can be done in a single thread hasn't seen the 100x speedup that it did in previous decades. Mostly there's only been cheating by adding pipeline stages or ram latencies to get the frequencies up.<p>Also just before I graduated college in 1999 I remember my VLSI professors talking about how chips had passed the point where the interconnect had a square cross section and were moving to rectangular. So today chips look like skyscrapers, with tall ribbons of interconnect that suffer from crosstalk.<p>On top of that, there's been failure to move to distributed and multicore processing outside of GPUs, or for FPGAs to get adopted by the mainstream. I've given up on innovation on the hardware front from the big players, but I'm optimistic that approaches like Google's Go running inside hypervisors on diverse hardware is going to bring the high throughput we see in gaming and DSP to the mainstream. I’m unimpressed by OpenCL and CUDA and won’t really consider parallel computation as having arrived until more readable languages like Python and MATLAB generate accelerated code for us.<p>I realize there are holes in my statements here that one could fly a 747 through, but when the single fastest increase in my computing in a decade came from installing a 512 GB SSD drive, it means that something went terribly wrong. Moore’s Law ending could have more to do with computers reaching a point of being “good enough”, essentially becoming disposable appliances, than limitations with technology or cleverness. So they may not be getting any faster, but they are becoming so cheap that I think we’ll see life change in rather interesting ways in coming years.
Moore's Law hasn't slowed innovation. The cost of fab toolsets and the cost of chip design are the culprits.<p>Many cutting-edge tools (etchers, deposition, others) now come with price tags of >$5M. A new 200mm fab can easily run north of $4B. The relentless trend of feature size shrinkage is still happening - some designs are underway using 16nm FinFet technology - but at the cost of increased power consumption and increased cost-per-transistor. I believe it was Nvidia that put a shot across the bow of chip manufacturers by saying they saw no economic advantage in chasing the lastest process node.<p>A clean-sheet-of-paper microprocessor design can easily hit $50M in expenses before the first chip is seen. Much of that expense is sheer manpower & verification processing cycles - a billion transistors' worth of real estate is worthless unless you can run a test suite against it. If you're spending >$50M on a new design, you'd better have a locked-in customer. Projecting that amount of investment for a squishy market like a new consumer electronics widge is the surest way to get your project killed.<p>Running a microprocessor at ever-greater frequencies doesn't help either. First, you're cooking your chip. Frequency = heat. Second, every processor vendor in the world is limited by the processor-memory chokepoint. You can't read data & code from memory into the processor(s) fast enough to keep the processor pipeline full. And the gap is widening.
If some company could have built 10x better transistors than the competition they could have made billions, if not tens of billions. Yet no company did this. The simplest explanation is that it wasn't possible.