Dean's World

Which version of Moore's Law are you using? The 1-year, 18 month, or 2-year version?

Chris, I'm using the same one that Moore uses, and the same exact one that the article I linked describes: The number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every 18-24 months.

This is not the only thing in the IT field that is still on a decades-long exponential growth curve of course, but different parts are moving at different rates. Storage, clock ratings, MIPS, etc. all also tend to double, but some more quickly and some more slowly than an 18-24 month cycle.

The sloppiness of the term came in when people started using "Moore's Law" to describe the exponential growth of tech in general. Which works as a rule of thumb but is far more generalized than anything Moore ever said.

I suggest reading this article if you want to really be informed about the discussion.

I think maybe you're a little older Martin. In any case I hadn't even heard of Moore's Law until the late 1980s, so I didn't hear that it was hitting the wall until the early 1990s.

You're otherwise right I suspect.

I got into computers right around the time when the price of blazingly fast 450 nanosecond ram plummeted from over $100 for 16K to under $20. A little more recently than 1978, and I remember discussion then as to how much more dense semiconductors could become.

There was also discussion, parallel, as you say, to Moore's law as to how dense magnetic recording on a disk could get. I scavenged an early SGI workstation which contained a 158 megabyte hard drive - 5-1/4 inch full height - which had to have been state of the art when ordered.

By the standards of 1980, when I soldered together my first computer, I have a million dollars worth of computer capacity sitting idle under my workbench.

Imagine if the law of gravity was F=Gm1m1/(d^2 ish).

Hahahaha.

Sorry but that was funny.

Dean,

I wasn't saying that the thing was wrong; that would be asinine to do after skimming it. But clarifying what you mean is hardly illegitimate after not thoroughly reading someone else. The problem is that over the years either you or people who closely agree with you (and who you never corrected) have used the term "Moore's Law" about more than just transistor counts.

In short, I was more interested in what you got out of the article than what's actually in it. (Incidentally, I should ask if you're talking about Moore's Law including on-chip caches in the transistor count, or excluding caches, because my recollection is that you get different validity for this "law" if you exclude caches.)

And Dean, if you really think that wishy washy fudge factors are part of "laws", you're the one who needs to re-think things. Especially in mathematics, there are precisely no laws in which the statement is vague and uncertain. There are certainly laws having to do with probabilities, and laws having to do with ranges, but none of them simply fudge the claim. But the problem is that "law" is not well defined, since we never clarified what sort of law. This is certainly not a mathematical law, at least not in its ordinary statement.

And the truth is, it's not any other sort of law, either. It can't continue forever, if for no other reason than that there are a finite number of particles in the universe, and you can't make infinitely many transistors out of finitely man particles.

Look, name me another technology which has consistently doubled every 18-24 months for two decades. Of course new fields experience exponential growth, that's not at all the same thing as keeping up the exponential growth for 20 generations of doubling. Nor for forty generations of doubling.

But that's what moore's law means: that transistors will never be a mature technology.

Look, the reason that this bugs me so much is that the way you talk about processors and transistors is precisely the way that people talk about the stock market during the bubbles which precede crashes. You don't talk about underlying mechanisms, you only talk about past performance. It's unsettling because that type of reasoning has lead to huge disasters in the past.

(But about the particulars, I dearly hope that you're right. Processors aren't nearly fast enough, and neither is RAM or disk space. Actually, there's another one that has doubled an amazing amount. And I believe that that will keep doubling for quite some time too. But RAM hasn't been doubling in size. There was a very long time there where RAM wasn't getting any bigger (at the same price), it was only getting faster. Hopefully vista will finally push things in the direction of getting bigger again.)

So in short, Chris: you laugh and say "this can't go on forever." And I say, "Yes, but I've been listening to that particular line of argument for almost as long as you've been alive and it hasn't happened yet."

My only argument for you otherwise is that you're simply wrong: scientific laws often DO have fudging--otherwise known as "averages"--around the edges.

Indeed, the entirety of Darwinism rests upon just such averages. Is there a Law of Natural Selection? Or is it simply a fact that evolution continues apace all around us?

It may be that Moore's Law should not be stated as a law. Probably that's true. Nevertheless that's the appellation it's currently known by, and so far it has continued to remain true. After nearly 20 years of listening to how it's a joke and won't hold true much longer (or has already stopped), and watching it continue to hold true even while people assure me that it ain't so, it's hard for me not to laugh.

When you give me answers like "cars haven't continued to double in speed in decades" all I can think is, "wow, you haven't really read much about this, have you?" Cars some time ago reached a certain--probably temporary--technological maturity when they reached speeds beyond which humans could safely control them. We can and do make cars that are massively faster than your average production vehicle. We can do it right now. In fact we've built cars that can break the sound barrier. The only limit--the limit that has caused a maturity in the field for the moment--is that no human being can safely control a car that goes over 70 or 80 miles per hour for any sustained period of time. It's not that we can't go faster, it's just that it's not safe anymore.

Until the cars drive themselves, anyway.

The only other thing I'd observe for you is what I've said before: you're foolish if you think that exponential technological growth is restricted solely to the number of transistors on a chip. It's happening in multiple areas, not just this one.

I'd suggest doing more than skimming on this matter. It has profound implications, after all, and is not mere utopianism. Indeed, dismissing it all as utopianism is terribly seductive; if you dismiss it all as utopianism, you automatically lock yourself out of very important conversations that need to take place between intelligent people.