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Blogger undergoes a significant update. Notes on the very nice looking new designs are here.
- jim 5-10-2004 8:01 pm [link] [1 comment]

From IBM's chief technology officer's speech at the International Electronics Forum:

"Somewhere between 130-nm and 90-nm the whole system fell apart. Things stopped working and nobody seemed to notice." He added, "Scaling is already dead but nobody noticed it had stopped breathing and its lips had turned blue."
We are always seeing stories about "the end of Moore's law" and for years these stories have consistently turned out to be untrue. But this seems a little more specific and a lot more believable.

In a possibly related story, Intel has recently announced a complete change in their future processor roadmap, dropping their massive, and monolithic, P4 flagship in favor of a more energy efficient dual core design.

So perhaps CPUs have hit the wall in some sense. But does it really matter? My amateur understanding is that we will still continue to see total system performance increase, but more and more those increases will come from other links in the chain (from mass storage speed increases, from bus speed increases, etc...) as well as from redesigning toward parallelism.

In other words, while we might not see 6 ghz processors, we will for sure see dual core 3 ghz processors (very soon,) and for most applications this will amount to the same thing. So expect more breathless "Moore's law is invalidated!" stories (even though it's not really a law and can't be invalidated,) but don't get too worked up. There is plenty of room still for innovation.
- jim 5-10-2004 7:10 pm [link] [1 comment]

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