What interests me most was the comment about the pivot away from compliance to Moore's Law. Could it be that we might be nearing the /commercial/ limits of Moore's Law, where the consumer-level demand for more speed and power has tapered off? Or is this merely a reflection of the increasingly green-friendly market?
Moore's law doesn't say anything about speed or power. It says manufacturing costs will lower from technological improvements such that the transistor count in an IC will double every 2 years.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 18.7 ms ] threadAs cool as something like the IBM Power7 chips look - I'm not sure I want one of them sitting on my lap..
And here's a pretty graph
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore...
The misunderstanding makes people who say such twaddle as "Moore's Law, the founding axiom behind Intel, that chips get exponentially faster".
If we extrapolate 2 years = double speed then the
1993 P1 @ 66Mhz would now be running at 16.9Ghz
The 1995 200Mhz Pentium now would be 25.6Ghz
The 1997 300Mhz Pentium now would be 19.2Ghz
The 1999 500Mhz Pentium now would be 16Ghz
The 2000 1.3Ghz Pentium now would be 20Ghz
The 2002 2.2Ghz Pentium would be going on 35Ghz this Fall
The 2002 3.06Ghz Pentium would be going on 48Ghz at Xmas
If you plot speed vs year you get two straight lines with a change in gradient in 1999 with the introduction of the P4