Moore's Law stopped being Moore's Law a few years ago, otherwise we would be using 12 GHz computers right now.
Moore's Law has little to do with frequency.
Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware: the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an
integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
en.wikipedia.org...'s_law
And essentially it has, although it might be a little slower in the future.
The problem is heat and programming tendencies and methods, their solution was to make dual/quad core cpus that aren't really any faster
running single applications,
Silicon scales poorly past about 3.5ghz and it can be difficult to make applications that scale across many cores. So chip designers have been busy
slowly adding cores, slowly increasing frequency, adding dynamic frequency (turbo boost & turbo core) as well as increasing the number of instructions
per clock.
A modern processor like the i7-2600 has a 3.4ghz base frequency and 3.8ghz turbo frequency. Per core performance is
2.7 times higher than a Pentium 4
at the
same frequency which means at minimum an i7 is about 3 times faster in a single threaded application than an old Pentium 4 @ 3.4ghz and
at maximum about 11 times faster in a multithreaded application. So a modern processor will be much faster in single threaded applications and
massively faster in multithreaded ones.
Most modern demanding programs usually scale well with 2-4 cores, but not perfectly. This isn't 2006 anymore.
Die size for the Pentium 4 (Prescott) is 122mm^2 with 125 million transistors. Came out in about 2005. Density of is therefore 1 million transistors
per square mm. Die size of quad core 2nd gen i7 (Sandy Bridge) is 216mm^2 with 1160 million transistors. Bear in mind the Sandy Bridge die also
includes integrated graphics and north bridge. Came out in 2011. Density is therefore about 5.5 million transistors per square mm.
If Moores law was completely accurate, we would expect about 8 million transistors per square mm. But this, Sandy Bridge vs Prescott would suggest
that transistor density goes up by about 80% every two years (1.8^(6/2) = 5.5). In reality this is just one example, and it's transistor density
rather than the total number of transistors in a chip. But in any case it's pretty close to Moore's law and shows the general tend. The number of
transistors
has gone up by a factor of 8 however.
The sweet-spot for desktop processors at the moment is four cores. That won't change soon. The replacement to intels current generation of desktop
Core series processors will only be slightly faster (+100mhz boost and 5-10% higher IPC) than their predecessors because the core count is about the
same and so is the architecture (the integrated graphics will be much faster though) but Moore's Law will still not be broken by much because the die
size will
decrease from 217mm^2 to 172mm^2 while transistors increases from 1.16 billion to 1.4 billion.
On the other hand, server and workstation software typically scales better with cores so they have more at slightly lower frequency.
Graphics cards have different design requirements - the fastest GPU at the moment is the 7970 which has 4313 million transistors, at 925mhz. It has
2048 'cores' but this is sort of PR. Graphics scales almost linearly with cores, unlike normal CPU performance.
edit on 25/1/12 by C0bzz
because: (no reason given)
edit on 25/1/12 by C0bzz because: (no reason given)
edit on 25/1/12 by C0bzz because: (no
reason given)