Nvidia: Moore's Law is Dead
PrintSome 45 years ago, Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, published a paper predicting that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double each year. This would later be revised to every 18 months and became known as Moore's Law, which while technically incorrect, has also been used to predict the doubling of CPU performance in the same time frame. According to Nvidia, Moore's Law is no more.
"Moore's paper also contained another prediction that has received far less attention over the years," Bill Daily, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at Nvidia wrote in Forbes. "He projected that the amount of energy consumed by each unit of computing would decrease as the number of transistors increased. This enabled computing performance to scale up while the electrical power consumed remained constant. This power scaling, in addition to transistor scaling, is needed to scale CPU performance.
But in development that's been largely overlooked, this power scaling has ended. And as a result, the CPU scaling predicted by Moore's Law is now dead."
Daily went on to say that CPU performance no longer doubles every 18 months, claiming this "poses a grave threat" to the industries that have traditionally relied on the growth in processor performance. According to Daily, a fundamental change in our approach to computing is needed, and multi-core processing is not the answer. Not surprisingly, he sees GPUs as the key.
"Parallel computers, such as graphics processing units, or GPUs, enable continued scaling of computing performance in today's energy-constrained environment," Daily argues. "Every three years we can increase the number of transistors (and cores) by a factor of four."
Read all of what Daily had to say here, and then hit the jump and tell us if you think the future of computing lies in the GPU.
Image Credit: Tombstone Generator (jjchandler.com)
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megamegaprocessor
August 31, 2010 at 12:51am
Moores Law is still alive !
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Cruzg10
May 04, 2010 at 11:29am
Sounds like hes just bitching to justify the outragous power consumption of the fermi cards.
ATI did managed to pull it off, why cant you Nvidia!?
133794m3r
May 05, 2010 at 7:03pm
after the 260's power consumption and heat that it puts out, i'm going back to AMD, way back in the day ~5 years ago i had an ati card it was well decent but it's performance wasn't the greatest now that AMD is putting out performance almost on par with Nvidia AND it's actually USING LESS POWER AND thus means that it's going to be running cooler Nvidia's dead to me for laptops. I'm tired of a normal idling temp being ~55-60*C that's way beyond what any gpu should idle at. I remember my little ati card and i thought that 50*C was aflame now i see this nvidia card going up past 100*C when doing simple gaming. Needles to say Nvidia's losing their grip on the mobile front.
Also combine that with amd's ability to keep power consumption steady on both the mobile and desktop market they're going to be hard pressed to hold onto their grip over people. I was like "wow nvidia's really nice" since my past experience was well with old ati but now it's seeming as though i'll give them another shot since nvidia's just like "oh well screw it who cares if our temps are way above human standards for our mobile systems".
aviaggio
May 04, 2010 at 11:20am
Apparently this dumbass doesn't know that GPU computing is VERY specialized and NOT useful for most computing tasks. But what else would you expect from an Nvidia mouthpiece?
CentiZen
May 04, 2010 at 10:51am
Oh yeah, moores law is dead... just like the last 5 times...
SHEILA: AMD X4 965 3.2GHZ ; 4 GB G.SKILL GAMING RAM ; RADEON HD 5770 1GB
Caboose
May 04, 2010 at 9:14am
Wow! nVidia thinks that GPU's are the future of computing and that we don't need CPU's anymore... How interesting... </sarcasm>
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
B10H4Z4RD
May 04, 2010 at 7:21am
Rest in peace......
______________________________________________________________________
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, FIght Club.
Intel Q6600@3.2
ASUS P5N-D
Evga GTX 275 896
Spartacus
May 04, 2010 at 8:39am
Nvidia is just spewing this crap in an attempt to justify Fermi's power consumption. Until micro-transistors hit their lower size limit, Moore's law will remain mostly true.
TechJunkie
May 04, 2010 at 5:28am
Hey dimwit. Yeah you...Daily...come here. Pssst, If what you say is true, then please explain to me how AMD is still able to pull it off? Just because nvidia can't seem to increase performance while lowering it's energy intake, hence the 4xx series, doesn't mean it can't be done, It just means Nvidia can't do it and you need someone to blame. I do however, believe that parallel computing will indeed speed up processing as we know it, but you still need many cores to tackle the processes at which software inflicts itself on PC's. So more cores are better. You said it yourself there buddy....
"Parallel computers, such as graphics processing units, or GPUs, enable continued scaling of computing performance in today's energy-constrained environment," Daily argues. "Every three years we can increase the number of transistors (and cores) by a factor of four."
I do understand however that more cores in a GPU speeds up the data processing making the GPU spit out faster frame rates with all the goodies turned up and that more CPU cores don't speed up the actual proc, but it does make it much more efficient by being able to run multiple processes at the same time without taxing it's relative speed. So more cores in a proc do make a difference in either platform. This daily dude needs to be fired for just being stupid.
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