NVIDIA: “Moore’s Law dead”

3 May 2010

Moore’s law, in case you don’t know, is a theory which estimates the speed at which technology will advance, based on the idea that you can double the amount of transistors on an integrated circuit every 20 months (roughly). In basic terms, it means that the processing power that you can fit on a standard sized chip should double around every two years, again, roughly. 

OK, so it’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist and it has become a well established principle over the past 40 years. 

Nvidia’s Vice President Bill Dally has declared that Moore’s law is no longer relevant, and that we should look at new ways to predict the development of modern hardware. 

He also took a stab at multi core processing, claiming that adding cores to existing architecture is like building “an airplane by putting wings on a train.”

Dally had a lot to say about green computing, putting an emphasis on conserving energy, arguing that adding cores increases the impact of the processor on the environment, while not increasing performance accordingly.

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