An Interesting Article - "Sustaining Moore's Law - 10 Years of the CPU"

[PBS Poll-435]

Sustaining Moore's Law - 10 Years of the CPU

By Vincent Chang
http://www.hardwarezone.com


In early 1998, Intel released its low-end budget processor, the Celeron, which was then based on the Pentium II. It ran at a mere 266MHz and was manufactured on a 250nm process. When Intel introduced its latest iteration of the Celeron brand ten years later in January 2008, the Celeron had two processing cores, ran at 2.0GHz and was built on a 65nm process.

As anyone involved in the field of computing will tell you, Moore's Law is probably one of, if not the definitive statement of the industry. Ever since Intel's co-founder, Gordon E. Moore noted in 1965 that the number of transistors placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years, this has remained more or less true. Implicit in this observation is that computing power grows exponentially and even as we entered the 21st century, futurists have predicted that this trend will continue for some years to come.

While Moore's Law has since been expanded to include the exponential growth of all aspects of computing hardware, the original statement referred specifically to the semiconductor industry. Hence we felt that it was very appropriate to cite this as we look back on the CPU developments of the past decade.

So far, computer scientists and engineers have succeeded at maintaining this remarkable trend. We'll be highlighting some of the significant milestones during this period in more detail later and you can see for yourself the fruits of their labor. Since the scope for processors can be extremely broad, we are limiting our discussion to the x86 platform and its main players, with the occasional digression.

In our opinion, the last ten years of the CPU industry can be summarized in a single sentence:

"The race for clock speeds i.e. the Megahertz/Gigahertz race has evolved into one between multiprocessors."

[PBS Poll-435]

1. Afternoon Kick

:kick:

[JackRiddler]

2. Natural law...

All exponential growth phenomena at some point hit a limit and plateau.

Although I suppose in this case we might be talking about something subatomic.

Here's a silly story I wrote on this once:

MOORE'S LAW

Electron, the first microchip to use subatomic aetheric engraving, was made operational in October of the year 2017. Although it was several million times more powerful than all mainframes until that time combined, a costs analysis found it could be mass produced with widely available instruments for a mere twenty-seven dollars per unit - sixteen with Indonesian labor. This was to the horror of the alliance of tech multinationals who had spent ten years and seven hundred billion dollars to develop the new technology, and who intended to get the whole investment back from a single sale to the Pentagon.

The Consortium, the all-powerful conglomerates who made up the upper house of the United Nations, did their best to keep the dreadful secret. Despite several assassinations and the misguided cruise-missile bombing of CNN Central in Atlanta - too late they realized that the news network had chosen to suppress the story - they failed.

Overnight, Indian peasant shops became the leading industrial power in electronics. They produced millions of cheap notebooks carrying ten to the 256 gigabytes RAM without need of a hard disk. Through the Hong Kong black market, these were soon available with millions of electronic books and data bases hardwired.

Prices on the major stock markets imploded. Worse, it was manifest that each chip still had room enough to swallow, billions of times over, every program ever written in any machine language dating back to 1945, every image and piece of music recorded in any form, every documentary and feature film, every bank statement and store of blueprints, every government file scanned onto microfilm, and every phone call running daily through blip or wire – indeed, there was memory enough for every word and every sentence in every language ever spoken or conceived.

A group of pirates ran a retrieval program to mirror the entire Internet on one Electron chip. They inadvertantly released a new form of life. Subatomic superchips shot out along the wires of the world network, roaming like predatory brains injected into the watery ganglia of a giant hydropod. Within seconds Electron could scan the entire contents of the Web, break into and record (or rewrite!) all domains no matter how well-protected, and still have time for a joyride through all the circuits and lightbulbs of the world.

It thus became impossible to confirm the authenticity of electronic information.

In the late spring weeks of 2018 there followed, around the planet, what came to be known as the Battle of the Book. It was a frenzied desperate push against the lid of Pandora's box by the old corporations and governments. Martial law was declared in most countries. Discovery of an Electron chip entailed immediate massacres. Several powers threatened nuclear war, only to discover all military systems had been erased at the press of a return key.

This was later called the Magic Stroke, commemorated as the decisive moment of the battle by the Statue of the Unknown Programmer on the Great Lawn in Washington, D.C.

Still, millions of information mediators - librarians and accountants, programmers and archivists, editors and translators - were rounded up, and thousands were killed.

But it was too late. Pirates of all countries had compacted all received and recorded human civilization, with room left for light-aeons more, on something less than the head of a pin. It was the culmination of two million years of thought and action - and the annihilation of received structures.

The armies and police forces soon recoiled from the lost struggle and came under the provisional command of the liberated bookkeepers. The information singularity, an eternally vanishing chip of infinite mass, sucked forever behind its event horizon all the properties and secrets and cash, equity, debts and notes of Hollywood and Washington, of the Eurobank and the Fed, of Rockefeller and Ford, Disney and Gates, the media and the Masons, the mad money traders and dull technocrats faithful to the old Newtonian machine of capital accumulation, from the most global player to the littlest webmaster - and for a long moment, the freshly redundant P.R. flappers and TV clown-monarchs playing politicians fell silent.

The extent of the cleansing, the erasure of all other than individual claims to intellectual property, would have been unimaginable just weeks before. No myth of Apocalypse had ever matched the reality of Electron.

Of the old propertied and ruling classes, only those owners or tribes who could establish longstanding title to land - and defend it by relatively primitive military means - had any chance of survival. In every sense, Real Estate was King, and Agriculture was Queen.

Thus in place were all the elements of a new era for humanity, and a new great historic struggle, in which the logic of knowledge unbound, tending towards a convergence of all human hope and effort on the way to an as-yet undefinably brilliant destination, would fight for the future of the species and its biosphere against the purified and released undercurrents of a pre-modern, ethnotribal feudalism.

The new era of Bookkeepers and Barons lasted a little less than a week. In those heady days, few remembered the engraved wavicles that had been released into the earth's power grid as mere retrieval programs - or knew that, awakened to life, the subatomic chips were reproducing and evolving within the planetary grid, through the biological equivalent of a billion years once every six point seven seconds.

But on the seventh day, Electron spoke to Man.

[anigbrowl]

3. Hmmm, pretty good micro-fiction there. You should expand/submit somewhere!

[JackRiddler]

4. Thank you!