Moore's Law

Report: IBM researcher says Moore's Law at end

Moore's Law is maxing out. This is an oft-made prediction in the computer industry. The latest to chime in is an IBM fellow, according to a report.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a microprocessor would double approximately every two years--a prediction that has proved to be remarkably resilient. But IBM Fellow Carl Anderson, who researches server computer design at IBM, claims the end of the era of Moore's Law is nigh, according to a report in EE Times.

Exponential growth in every industry eventually has to come to an end, … Read more

One step closer to age of nanowire transistors?

Moore's Law may get a new lease on life thanks to a discovery jointly announced Friday by researchers at IBM and Purdue University.

Named after Gordon Moore, former Intel co-founder and chairman, the well-known predict posits that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. But while Moore's Law has held true for the last 43 years, scientists say the computer industry is bound to bump up against limits to the shrinkage of conventional silicon transistor dimensions sometime in the next decade.

But that may no longer be true. IBM and Purdue researchers say … Read more

VIA and NVIDIA offer new chips for small systems

It's been a big week for small systems.

On May 29, VIA formally announced (here) its "Nano" family of low-power x86 processors. These chips will be especially valuable in small laptops, UMPCs, and so-called mobile Internet devices (MIDs).

Then on June 2, NVIDIA announced (here) its Tegra 600 family, which is also being marketed for MIDs. But Tegra is a very different animal. It's based on an ARM11 processor core, which can run Windows Mobile or Linux but not Windows XP or Vista.

VIA's Nano processors are based on a new microarchitecture that is a … Read more

Thanks, Rambus

Second only to Moore's Law as a source of story ideas for pundits in the computer industry, Rambus was back in the news again last week.

This particular verdict was favorable to Rambus, but it wasn't the final word, nor was it exceptionally important. CNET News.com didn't even publish a news article about it, though Tom Krazit did write a pretty good blog post on the subject and it inspired a good post on intellectual property development from former Rambus exec Steve Tobak on his blog. Rambus has been involved in a great many lawsuits. Some … Read more

Episode 625: Whither StarTrek.com?

Silicon: It's worth a billion an acre

SAN FRANCISCO--Chipmakers regularly shrink the size of their products, improve their performance, and cut their prices. But chips still sell for about the same price about the same when you measure it by the acre.

That's the view of Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, who strolled about the press and analyst room after his on-stage talk at the Intel Developer Forum. An acre of chips is worth $1 billion, he estimated, about the same as it was several years ago. You get more chips now, but the old chips sold for more.

It's a great factoid to know. Other … Read more

Moore's Law to conk in 10, 15 years, says Moore

SAN FRANCISCO--Moore's Law has got time left, but we will hit a wall, said Intel co-founder Gordon Moore.

"We have another decade, a decade and a half, before we hit something that is fairly fundamental," he said during a question-and-answer session Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum taking place here.

The problem is that semiconductor manufacturing has become so efficient, and structures inside chips have shrunk so much over the last forty hears, that not much more can be taken out. Intel's 45-nanometer chips, coming out later this year, employ the element hafnium as an insulator. … Read more

$100 laptop: The end of Moore's Law?

The One Laptop Per Child organization's XO computer, aka the $100 laptop, has just started mass production. And while Crave is happy that thousands of underprivileged African children will reap the benefits of a PC and the Internet, we can't help but feel a little jealous--and even embarrassed.

Here we are, extolling the virtues of laptops such as the $4,000+ Sony Vaio TZ, when for most users the $100 XO would be just as effective. Sure, it doesn't have a premium badge on the lid, and its 433MHz AMD CPU won't win any speed records, … Read more

'Moore's Law under fire again,' again and again

My friend Jerry Pournelle calls Unix the full-employment act for computer wizards (presumably a reference to the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978).

Similarly, I regard Moore's Law as the full-employment act for computer pundits. I've written about it several times myself (e.g. here and here); the phrase gets 930,000 hits on Google today.

One of the duties of any publication in the computer industry is to cast periodic doubt on the future reliability of Moore's Law, thus keeping the phrase prominent in the public perception. EDN Magazine discharged its duty for this year with … Read more

Robotics as a hobby... and a way of life

Have you ever heard of the Homebrew Computer Club? I'm sure you've heard of the products designed by its members: the Apple I and Apple II, the Osborne I, maybe even the earlier Sol-20 (one of the prettiest little personal computers ever; I have a beautiful example myself).

Wikipedia reports that the Homebrew Computer Club stopped meeting in "roughly 1977"-- about 30 years ago. But a small part of it survives. Some of the people in the Homebrew Computer Club spun off the Homebrew Robotics Club, and that club still meets regularly.

I try to … Read more