In a previous post Eliezer referenced a good critique of Moore's Law: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/index.html
Assuming the facts presented in that paper, I agree with the conclusions that Moore's Law was never a valid law. But I have researched Moore's Law references on the Web and found good material at Intel's web site that indicates that Moore's Law may be valid as a semiconductor manufacturing company management planning/funding guideline. Intel is deliberately scheduling lithography process improvements on a two year basis to achieve progress at the rate predicted by Moore's Law. For example, Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) is being researched now to be used in manufacturing after 2007. I believe they could schedule these improvement steps either faster or slower but Intel finds some economic optimum using the Moore's Law interval. A valid critique of Moore's Law is the confusion between progress in the number of transistors per CPU and the progress in CPU performance. I believe that Intel (and other CPU manufacturers) will have enough transistors (perhaps 1 billion by 2009) on each chip that performance will continue exponential progress from the current point via multiple arithmetic/logic cores per CPU, e.g. clock speed in MHz alone will not give the exponential performance increase predicted by Moore's Law but the presence of multiple ALU's per CPU will. I read recently that the PlayStation3 chip will be based upon multiple IBM PowerPC cores to achieve high vector graphics performance, and is evidence of the utility of this approach to using all those transistors. My comments in this message are restricted to CPU's alone, and I accept that Human Equivalent Computing will require similar advances with regard to other system bottlenecks, but for Cyc the CPU integer performance is key. Today's systems appear optimized for Cyc's usage pattern. If you share my enthusiasm for technology predictors/indicators leading to the Singularity, then take a look at the following Intel presentation on their lithography plans out to 2009. By then I estimate that commodity computers will only be 1000 times less powerful (-30 db HEC) than human equivalent brain power (including eyesight and other senses). The Intel paper shows a transistor gate designed for Terahertz operation under development now for production when predicted/guided by Moore's Law. http://www.intel.com/idf/us/fall2002/presentations/IRD191PS.pdf -Steve -- =========================================================== Stephen L. Reed phone: 512.342.4036 Cycorp, Suite 100 fax: 512.342.4040 3721 Executive Center Drive email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Austin, TX 78731 web: http://www.cyc.com download OpenCyc at http://www.opencyc.org =========================================================== ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
