Items tagged with Moore's Law

Gordon Moore, whose infamous observation in the field of semiconductors was known as Moore's Law, has died at the age of 94. According to Intel and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation he passed away "peacefully on Friday, March 24, 2023" at his home in Hawaii, surrounded by family members. Moore's contributions... Read more...
Usually when the topic of Moore's Law comes up, it's either Intel extolling its continued relevance and focus (like Pat Gelsinger vowing to exhaust the periodic table to keep Moore's Law alive), or NVIDIA declaring it is dead as it did (again) just a few weeks ago. But where does AMD stand on the observation made by... Read more...
Depending on who you ask, Moore's Law is either dead and obsolete (NVIDIA) or the decades-old observation laid out by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore is alive and well (Intel), and will continue to thrive into the future. The latter opinion is that of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger. It's also not a new one, but in a post on... Read more...
Moore’s Law has been at the beating heart of technology advancement ever since it was first posited in 1965. Gordon Moore coined the golden rule which observes and predicts that the number of transistors in a microchip double roughly every two years. This is largely accomplished by making transistors ever smaller, but... Read more...
During last year's Intel InnovatiON event, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger boldly declared the chip maker would aggressively pursue Moore's Law "until the periodic table is exhausted." Then during yesterday's ribbon cutting ceremony in Oregon, Gelsinger doubled down on the claim, while also reiterating that the Intel 18A node... Read more...
A couple months ago, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said he would exhaust the periodic table if necessary to keep Moore's Law relevant into the future. We'll see if the engineers at Intel have to actually do that or not. Either way, Intel is confident it can propel Moore's Law beyond 2025 by tapping advances in chip... Read more...
During today's Intel InnovatiON event, the chip maker covered a variety of topics across a range of product and service categories. Alder Lake is of course the major news today, as it gets off the ground with the first batch of desktop SKUs. But one of the more interesting nuggets from the event was the state of... Read more...
Microsoft recently published a preview video of the Xbox Series X’s design. The upcoming console design has garnered both praise, concern, and confusion. Microsoft's next-gen game console appears to be rather large and bears many similarities to a PC. One critic included Gearbox executive Randy Pitchford, who took to... Read more...
Moore's Law, as revised in 1975, states the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit will double around every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor, and it's driven processor design for several decades. But what happens when Moore's Law is no... Read more...
It's a pretty remarkable thing that, for the most part, Moore's Law has been accurate for over 50 years, helping to set the pace for processor design for several decades. However, Moore's Law is in serious trouble of being broken if, as a group of researchers predict, transistors stop shrinking within the next five... Read more...
For nearly a decade, Intel has followed a "tick-tock" release strategy for its processors. However, as Intel attempts to transition its manufacturing process from 14 nanometers to 10 nanometers, it's running into challenges that has the Santa Clara chip maker seemingly thinking about abandoning its tick-tock... Read more...
Three atoms thick. According to a paper published this week in the science journal Nature by a group of researchers from Cornell University, that is the breadth of the transistors that can now be produced using an experimental — and highly conductive — material called transition metal dichalcogenide (also called a... Read more...
The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005... Read more...
Intel announced a major technology shift today in a move that fundamentally changes how the company will build transistors in the years to come. Starting with Ivy Bridge, Intel is adopting what it calls Tri-Gate (3D) transistors. Up to this point, Intel has relied on conventional bulk silicon, but its ability to scale this base technology... Read more...
We don't know what to do with all the multi-core chips we already have, never mind the eight and sixteen core processors looming on the horizon. The software is not keeping pace with the hardware.  That realization is dawning over all the big players in computer chip design and tech educators. Think tanks dedicated to parallel computing... Read more...
IBM has announced a new breakthrough in chip-stacking technology in a manufacturing environment that paves the way for three-dimensional chips... "The IBM breakthrough enables the move from horizontal 2-D chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, which takes chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side by side on a silicon wafer and stacks... Read more...
Hewlett-Packard researchers realized they could pack more transistors on a chip, without shrinking them, simply by moving their connections to a nano-wire grid on top of them and packing more of them in the space they saved. "For a long time, we in the industry have been obsessed with this... Read more...
Multicore chips are a kind of cheating as far as Moore's Law goes. You're bringing a gang to the fight for faster processors. The battle to store the information those chips handle is where a lot of the action is now. Wired took a tour at Seagate's R and D labs, and they're talking about terabits per inch now: Their current... Read more...
For all you computer engineers out there, this may come as a shock:  Moore's Law is dead according to the man himself.  All those years of "the number of transistors on a die will double every 18mo" beaten into your heads is all for naught.  Truth be told, the real reason for the death of Moore's Law has to... Read more...
Moore's Law, for all of you folks that think overclocking is sleeping late and driving to work faster, is the rule of thumb that computing power will double every eighteen months or so. It's seems to have been stuck a bit lately, and everyone was wondering where the next goose your chip needs -- to show you glistening beads of... Read more...