Yes, old Gordon Moore called it very well indeed, I think, and with only a couple of modest amendments it applied for the best part of half a century. It's a great achievement.
I wasn't trying to invalidate his observation at all.
What I sought to invalidate was the common belief that it means:
Computers get twice as quick every year and a half.
And, secondarily, that:
Multicore computers are faster than single core computers.
What really matters most, most of the time, for most software, is single-thread performance. The rate of improvement in single-thread performance fell off a cliff about 20 years ago now and apart from the modest bump from Apple Silicon nothing much has changed.
From roughly 1975 to 2005, as CPUs got bigger, every 18mth-2ye, the new generation was about twice as quick as the old one.
From roughly 2005 to 2025 and continuing, every new generation is about 10-15% quicker than the previous one.
Part of the problem is that people increasingly regard computers as magic boxes and don't understand how they work.
When people argue, and they often do, I tell them that they need to read Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man-Month. It's 336 pages: not that big.
Better still, buy 2 copies, then you can read it twice as fast!
If they have a clue about them, this makes the point: adding more people to a team does not make the team work faster, just as owning more copies of a book does not help you read it faster, and so adding more CPUs to a computer does not make it compute faster.
Secondly, there's another problem:
Although since roughly the Core 2 Duo, chips stopped getting dramatically quicker, since then RAM has got a lot bigger and a little faster, and hard disks have been largely replaced by SSDs. Both these things make computers much faster, but not because the processors are quicker.
It's not an illusion. It's real but it's misleading. It hides the real problem.
The point about dark silicon you can't use is inspired by this talk by Sophie Wilson:
Re: A bit of offtopic, I guess?
Thanks for that!
Yes, old Gordon Moore called it very well indeed, I think, and with only a couple of modest amendments it applied for the best part of half a century. It's a great achievement.
I wasn't trying to invalidate his observation at all.
What I sought to invalidate was the common belief that it means:
And, secondarily, that:
What really matters most, most of the time, for most software, is single-thread performance. The rate of improvement in single-thread performance fell off a cliff about 20 years ago now and apart from the modest bump from Apple Silicon nothing much has changed.
From roughly 1975 to 2005, as CPUs got bigger, every 18mth-2ye, the new generation was about twice as quick as the old one.
From roughly 2005 to 2025 and continuing, every new generation is about 10-15% quicker than the previous one.
Part of the problem is that people increasingly regard computers as magic boxes and don't understand how they work.
When people argue, and they often do, I tell them that they need to read Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man-Month. It's 336 pages: not that big.
Better still, buy 2 copies, then you can read it twice as fast!
If they have a clue about them, this makes the point: adding more people to a team does not make the team work faster, just as owning more copies of a book does not help you read it faster, and so adding more CPUs to a computer does not make it compute faster.
Secondly, there's another problem:
Although since roughly the Core 2 Duo, chips stopped getting dramatically quicker, since then RAM has got a lot bigger and a little faster, and hard disks have been largely replaced by SSDs. Both these things make computers much faster, but not because the processors are quicker.
It's not an illusion. It's real but it's misleading. It hides the real problem.
The point about dark silicon you can't use is inspired by this talk by Sophie Wilson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lOnpQgn-9s