back to article The huge flaw in Moore’s Law? It's NOT a law after all

Critics have had half a century to pick apart and predict the end of Moore’s Law, which marked its Big Five Zero birthday this week. It’s unlikely that Gordon Earle Moore, the former electrical engineer who authored the eponymous law for a 1965 article, and who two-years later co-founded Intel, has any doubts over its value. …

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  1. fortran

    Spelling Police

    Two mistakes, a missing s and a missing capitalisation.

    http://www.jhuapl.edu/

    Johns Hopkins University - Applied Physics Laboratory

    1. Kubla Cant
      Headmaster

      Re: Spelling Police

      I was also bemused by this:

      ... the number of transistors used in a typical CPU — the CPU transistor count — would double ....

      Given that this is a techie site I should think most readers would be able to guess that the number of transistors used in a typical CPU is also known as "the CPU transistor count".

      1. NoneSuch Silver badge

        Inspiring Entrepreneurs

        Go on kids. start making nitroglycerin with your store bought chem sets. Oh no, better not or Homeland Security will get involved.

        1. Cynic_999

          Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

          Nowadays chemistry sets are unlikely to contain chemicals any more dangerous than table salt and baking soda - and then only in very small quantities.

          1. BlartVersenwaldIII

            Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

            If reading the Daily Mail and nutritional advice from Experts on facebook has taught me anything, it's that chemicals are uniformly bad news. It's a little-known fact but the ingredients for table salt include both sodium (which explodes on contact with water and is also used by the nucular industry) and chlorine (used as a poison gas in world war one), baking soda (chemical food additive designation E500) also contains sodium, hydrogen (highly flammable and responsible for the Hindenburg disaster) and carbon (used, amongst other things, for extremely sharp industrial cutting tools).

            I think putting stuff like that in the hands of a child and encouraging them to "play" with them isn't only a recipe for disaster but should also be classified as dangerous abuse.

            1. Wilseus

              Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

              And don't forget deadly dihydrogen monoxide, which is found in cancerous tumours, is often used to cool nuclear reactors, can cause vehicle brakes to fail, can be deadly if inhaled and causes severe burns when in gaseous form and so on.

              1. naylorjs

                Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

                I laugh in the face of these so-called dangers. I drink Dihydrogen Monoxide in both cold and hot forms, often with elements of dead plant leaves or beans as appropriate.

                Remember though: fish make love in it.

                1. BlartVersenwaldIII

                  Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

                  Well more fool you. Scientists say that over 85% of cancer victims have been routinely exposed to dihydrogen monoxide* on a regular basis and as Wilseus points out, it's a key component of tumours. Perhaps I'm just a better parent than most but I bring my children up in a completely DHMO-free environment and so far not one of them has died from cancer.

                  * Even this term is making light of the issue and is a flagrant tool of hiding behind science-tiffic jargon to make this terrifying chemical seem less dangerous. The proper term is hydronium hydroxide or hydroxyl acid.

                  1. oldcoder

                    Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

                    Umm... Actually that would be 100% of the cancer victims...

                2. Roger Kynaston
                  Pint

                  Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

                  You could really put yourself in harms way by adding a bit of a highly inflammable and volatile liquid with the chemical formula C6H6O which is known to have serious psychoactive effects on human brains and make them do stupid things but it does guarantee that us ugly buggers get to have sex.

                  1. John H Woods Silver badge

                    Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

                    "...by adding a bit of a highly inflammable and volatile liquid with the chemical formula C6H6O" -- Roger Kynaston

                    Phenol? You first!

                3. oldcoder

                  Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

                  And pee in it too...

            2. lambda_beta
              Linux

              Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

              Let's not forget that really nasty substance H20 (I'm too lazy to figure out subscripts). It not only can make things blow up, it makes rust. I'm surprised it's still legal!

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

          Kids chemistry kits these days just contain a few plastic containers (no glass), plastic spatulas and some harmless salts. Adding bicarb to vinegar is about as dangerous as it gets.

          1. AndrueC Silver badge
            1. AbelSoul
              Coat

              Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

              Down with this sort of thing.

        3. Dan Paul

          Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

          The brother of a dear friend of mine who has since passed away; blew the cornice of the building (of the college dorm he stayed in) completely off while making nitro and waiting for it to cool. Obviously this was back in the early 1940's or he would have been branded a criminal.

          Sometimes the best scientists are just normal people who ignore the rules that were put in place by lesser men.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Coat

            Re: Inspiring Entrepreneurs

            The brother of a dear friend of mine who has since passed away; blew the cornice of the building (of the college dorm he stayed in) completely off while making nitro and waiting for it to cool.

            Damn hipster chemists, they had to be blowing up buildings with nitro before it was cool...

      2. bozoid

        Re: Spelling Police

        While we're being picky, what's with this modern trend to always use hyphens after numbers?

        ...and who two-years later co-founded Intel...

        1. J.G.Harston Silver badge

          Re: Spelling Police

          That's just plain wrong. two-year (*singular*!) is a *PRE*positional adjective: a two-year turnaround. two years (*plural!*) is a postpositional descripitve phrase: two years later.

        2. Disko
          Stop

          Re: Spelling Police

          Conflating-words is athing now, just like alot of other/newspeak thekids are into these-days.

          1. Nehmo

            Re: Spelling Police

            More correctly, it's catenating words. That is, the words are connected in a series. "Theregister" is a catenation in the url above. Some exponentially increasing technological trends conflate to form what's called "Moore's law".

            Confused about "conflate"?

            http://www.cjr.org/language_corner/language_corner_020915.php

            1. Bleu

              Re: Spelling Police

              It's concatenation, not catenation.

              Catenation is a term in chemistry. A url is not language. Running words together as in the article and several comments is simple ineptitude (although I'll grant that a commentor may have had the intention of highlighting the writer's ineptitude).

              You've done a good job of highlighting your own ineptitude with misuse of 'catenation' and not knowing 'concatenation'.

              What kind of techie are you?

              1. Graham Dawson Silver badge

                Re: Spelling Police

                Catenation is also a term in linguistics. It's less frequently used than concatenation, but nevertheless you can catenate words.

                Sadly the wikipedia article about the word doesn't include that definition, which is presumably why this isn't so widely known today.

                And, for the record, I'm still waiting for you to back up that accusation of plagiarism you made against me. But then I've noticed something of a pattern in your posting recently. Accuse someone of something, declare yourself superior in some way and then bugger off when you're called on it.

              2. Frumious Bandersnatch

                Re: Spelling Police

                re cat vs concat, I learned many years ago that the Unix 'cat' command was short for 'catenate' which is an obscure and/or archaic variant of 'concatenate'. Personally, I have no problem with 'catenate' as a synonym for 'concatenate' (and yes, either is probably what the OP meant instead of 'conflate').

                /said in an isn't-it-interesting-that-the-thread-talks-about-both-catenation-and-proper-use-of-hyphens* kind of way

                (*no doubt that's a proper word in German, but let's not get distracted)

        3. Bleu

          Re: Spelling Police

          It's called semi-literacy.

        4. Frumious Bandersnatch

          Re: Spelling Police

          I think it's a mistake rather than language drift. I could take a two-year sabbatical, and the hyphen is acceptable (and normal) usage there, but I'd be back to work two years later (no hyphen).

          edit: I didn't see the later post by J.G.Harston that makes the same point, but uses grammar-type words.

        5. RegGuy1 Silver badge

          Re: Spelling Police

          Are these the same people that turn numbers into genitives?

          1990s => 1990's

          1. John H Woods Silver badge

            Re: Spelling Police

            "1990s => 1990's"

            I think this is a mistake by people confused by '90s which is, of course, acceptable.

      3. Charles Manning

        Well of course it would double....

        They counted both the number of transistors in the CPU and the CPU transistor count.

        But seriously... the trend is also going the other way. Look at the ARM Coretex M0s they're bringing the transistor count for 32-bit CPUs to unprcedented lows.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Spelling Police

        Makes me think of "And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black."

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Spelling Police

          Black is not a colour

          1. DropBear
            Trollface

            Re: Spelling Police

            "Black is not a colour" - Right, and octarine isn't one either. Suuuure...

      5. Bleu

        Re: Spelling Police

        Paid by the word, perhaps? I can't stand the '... count' expressions, must be the influence of Sesame Street.

  2. Little Mouse

    More Moore

    "Moore’s idea not only predicted the development rate of computing power, it set an ambitious pace for all IC manufacturers to maintain"

    And that's where its real relevance lies. Moore's Law has for a long time now been the expected rate of change that all chip designers and manufacturers have had to try and keep up with, and as such has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Imagine where we'd be now If only he'd tweaked the numbers a bit and "predicted" a tripling or quadrupling or more. Heh heh heh.

    1. TonyWilk

      Re: More Moore

      Interesting to imagine if the hardware rate of change had been much less... would we have better software tools to cram functionality into less memory and/or cpu speed ?

      Is there an equivalent 'Bloat Law' for software which has kept pace with Moore's?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Alien

        Re: Bloat Law

        I think you'll find that's Gates' Law, in that however powerful a computing system, they can write an operating system and word processor which will slow it down to perform at least as badly as the last one, if not worse.

        1. Disko
          Trollface

          Re: Bloat Law

          Which is why you always bring a typewriter. Where's the hipster icon?

        2. Bob Wheeler

          Re: Bloat Law a.k.a. Gate's Curse

          "....640KB (of RAM) is more then enough for anyone...."

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Is there some stupid rule about phone thickness? the way they're going they'll end up as thick as a sheet of paper and the battery will last 2 seconds.

    1. Naselus

      I believe you're thinking Cook's Law - each generation of iStuff will cram exponentially more profit margin into the same sized case.

      1. theblackhand

        The Black Hand's Law

        Not every law is real and some are just made up on the spot....

      2. PNGuinn
        Go

        @ Naselus

        Don't you mean Crook's Law? (The crookedness of an ithing after being in one's jeans pocket will double with each iteraiton of said ithing.)

        Cooks Law is a fundamental law of physics:

        Sod's Law: The experimental result always turns out wrong.

        Cooks Law: Raise or the denominator as required the get the expected result.

        Sturgeon's Law: Remember to allow for experimental error or the result will appear fishy.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. M7S

    Timing is everything

    In the days when he played with such chemicals it may have been illegal, with some consequences but if he were to do this in the UK today (I do not know about the US where I assume he was) as a youth that would be his entire future probably blighted, in the legal sense, beyond any hope of redemption.

    Similarly the modern equivalent, cracking systems, seems to lead (from other comments I have read here in the past) to a very significant proportion of the IT security community vowing never to employ such a person regardless of any real talent* they might have.

    Yet among many readers of this article there's probably a combination of admiration and yearning for the things he did in his youth. Certainly I would wish to be able to let my nipper do such things (within certain safety boundaries) but probably even raising the issue with his teachers to try to do so in a responsible way would get me reported for, well, something. Probably terrorism. And child abuse.

    I feel it doesn't bode well for the ability of the human race to discover and incubate talent**. It's a shame really.

    *Not script kiddies

    ** I concede that doing a "Sheldon" and building a fusion reactor in the garage might be going a bit far.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. h3

      Re: Timing is everything

      Not sure it was illegal at all. (My grandfather used to be the needed chemicals and test tubes from the chemist not making any secrets of what he was going to be doing even asking for advice).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Timing is everything

        In the 1960s the corner chemist happily sold schoolboys sulphur, potassium nitrate, strontium nitrate etc - as well as glass tubing to bend, blow, and stretch into various equipment configurations. GCE "O" Level Chemistry placed an emphasis on practical lab work.

        These days it is probably impossible to buy even the ingredients for a "chemical garden" from a local source. Although I did see a kit, possibly with the Science Museum branding, in the charity shop - "unused - as new".

        1. Neil Lewis

          Re: Timing is everything

          Indeed. I remember buying a couple of litres of ether in my local chemist as a young teenager for use in home-brewed model diesel engine fuel. There was no problem once I explained to the owner what I wanted it for. Can't imagine that happening now though.

          1. PNGuinn
            Flame

            @ Neil Lewis

            Yes, times have changed, and not for the better methinks. I can remember making explosives, as part of O-level chemistry practicals - working with chemials like chlorine, ammonia, (great togeather - the head always put the manufacture of chlorine and ammonia on the same bench for open days) hydrogen sulphide, phosphorus...

            Chemistry WAS FUN then. A-level even more so.

            MInd you, a colleage at work in the seventies did tell me that questions were asked when he was sent by his firm to the local chemist for choloform and some glass syringes and needles.

            Perspex gluing for the enquiring minds out there. Chemist would not supply without a letter from the company.

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