On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 01:52:01PM +1200, LizR wrote: > > Moore's law appears to have stopped working about 10 years ago, going by a > comparison of modern home computers with old ones. That is, the processors > haven't increased much in speed, but they have gained more "cores", i.e. > they've been parallelised, and more memory and more storage. But the > density of the components on the chips hasn't increased by the predicted > amount (or so I'm told). >
Moore's law was never about GHz. It was originally about number of transistors per dollar, and with greater transistor counts per CPU, that has been turned into bigger caches and multiple cores (with 50+ core chips now on the market). But of real interest is processing power per dollar as a function of time. This has been exponential since the start of the computing age (perhaps even with a reduction of the time constant sometime in the '90s), and shows no sign of slowing down. The rate of 1 order of magnitude of performance improvement at a given price point every 5 years has held throughout my professional life. In my career, the following purchases were made*: 1992 CM5, 4GFlops $1.5M 1996 SGI Power Challenge, 8GFlops, $800K 2000 SGI Origin 56 GFlops $1.2M 2004 Dell cluster, 1TF, $500K 2013 HP GPU cluster, 300TF, $500K * subject to a certain amount uncertainty due to my recall of the facts Attached is an image of the performance per dollar plotted as a function of year. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
