Moore's law plateaued years ago. Sure they are adding more cores but thats because they have made no progress on the clock speed in nearly a decade. FPGA's are going to be the next go to for performance until cpu clock speeds improve
Sure they are adding more cores but thats because
they have made no progress on the clock speed in
nearly a decade.
Per-core IPC (instructions executed per clock cycle) have soared since then. That's why a modern 4-core Core i7 is roughly 20-30x faster than a "Netburst" Pentium 4 from 10 years ago.
Looked at another way, each individual core of a modern i7 is about 5x-7x faster than those old Pentium 4 CPUs.
FPGA's are going to be the next go to for performance until
cpu clock speeds improve
Maybe. What would also be cool is decreasing the latency of main memory. That is the current single biggest bottleneck in processors today. A cache miss usually means that the CPU sits around doing nothing for hundreds of cycles while it's waiting for data to be fetched from main memory.
Moore's Law is about transistor count, not clock speed. They used to go together, now they don't, but Moore's Law is still doing OK. This is an indication that it may be coming to an end, finally.
I thought Moore's law had more to do with density than clock speed. I thought that increased density helped to increase clock speed but that was not really Moore's Law. Recent increases in density have not helped clock speed as much due to other constraints on clock speed, but the density has still been increasing, hasn't it?
