I don’t pay enough attention to the chip market to really know whether this is a big deal or not, but if I read it right, Moore’s Law won’t apply to consumer chips anymore:
Intel Corp. on Thursday canceled plans to introduce its highest-speed desktop computer chip, ending for now a 25-year run that has seen the speeds of Intel’s microprocessors increase by more than 750 times.Posted by Bill Stilwell at October 14, 2004 04:57 PM…
Both Intel and its arch-rival, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. , have shifted their focus from increasing clock speed — a measure of how fast a chip can crunch numbers — to a less quantitative goal of performance encompassing multi-tasking, security, and multimedia.
If anything, it may be a more traditional return to Moore's law. Moore never really put forth a law, but rather an observation that the trend had been for the density of circuitry on microprocessor dies had been doubling every 18 months.
When the trend continued, he was made a prophet. At some point the trend changed, but people started making the assertion that he meant CPU speeds (measured, I dunno, in clock cycles per second?). Since RISC made rapid clock cycles possible with less complicated chips, that may have been the start of the "Megahertz Myth" in which consumers began associating a single integer with overall computer performance.
computer performance is a very difficult thing to pin down nowadays, unless you're doing some heavy number crunching or I/O management. Most people want their games to run smoothly and their input devices to cause immediate reactions on the screen. Beyond that, they don't much care.
And Moore was still only talking about circuit density. So there.
Posted by: Nick Moffitt at October 14, 2004 05:12 PM