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inkyototoday at 3:15 AM1 replyview on HN

> […] we're at a bit of an inflection point where mooore's law has proved itself to be an scurve […]

Well. May's law[0], which states that:

  Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's Law.
effectively counterbalances Moore's Law and, with continued technological process improvements and optimisations, the proverbial arm's race is likely to continue for a very, very long time – just a few days I was reading a wonderful article from 1998 on the state-of-the-art DEC Alpha 21264 CPU which mentioned the 21264 and POWER3 as the world's most complex CPU's each boasting 15+ million transistors and also mentioned the equally state-of-the-art 0.18 micron processes. The 3 old year M3 Max design, in comparison, supplies over 90 billion transistors to the mainstream consumer.

Humans are resourceful, after all.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)...


Replies

monocasatoday at 3:29 AM

That's sort of orthogonal to what I'm saying.

And the M5 doesn't have 500B transistors. We're well into the beginning of the ossification. Hell, it arguably started ~2006 with the end of dennard scaling leaving us with Tomasulo OoO cores being the design that makes the most sense for application cores, just getting wider over time as we get more gates.