Intel / Moore's law

Ubbquittious

I never trusted this Intel crowd.



For the past 40 years or so like clockwork they have come out every few months and said "Here's a brand new processor we invented, so much better than the previous one" and rarely did they skip a beat. I reckon these cute hoors found a way to manufacture the processors they are selling today and even smaller ones way back in the 70's or 80's and are just drip feeding incremental improvements to us and passing it off as genuine progress.


They must have some corporate drones up in a glass building somewhere deciding this is the best way to make money out of selling processors but think about all the e-waste that would have been saved if they made today's processors 30 years ago. They pushed their luck with this profit-maxmising strategy back in the early-mid 2000s when AMD almost caught up with them but besides that it's worked almost flawlessly for them.



Obviously they still need people to design the chips and add features to them that the market finds useful but I reckon all the (something)-nanometer manufacturing processes were invented way back in the day. Intel are the "De Beers" of the tech industry.

Chips are almost as small as they can be. Soon, quantum tunneling will prohibit them from becoming any smaller.

Also, you have to remember the upfront costs, and difficulty, of setting up the production of these chips. They know how to make it smaller, but it takes a long time to get it happening within acceptable error rates.

The focus now is mostly on lower power consumption.


Your De Beers comparison in nonsensical.

Ubbquittious

Deleted User wrote: »

Chips are almost as small as they can be. Soon, quantum tunneling will prohibit them from becoming any smaller.

Also, you have to remember the upfront costs, and difficulty, of setting up the production of these chips. They know how to make it smaller, but it takes a long time to get it happening within acceptable error rates.

The focus now is mostly on lower power consumption.


Your De Beers comparison in nonsensical.

They have been 'almost as small as they can be' for ages now and every time Intel magically pulls another rabbit out of their arse as the competition catches up. Even if it's finite they would have been better off financially smearing the progress out over 50 years instead of 5

Ubbquittious

Ubbquittious wrote: »

They have been 'almost as small as they can be' for ages now and every time Intel magically pulls another rabbit out of their arse as the competition catches up. Even if it's finite they would have been better off financially smearing the progress out over 50 years instead of 5

Why didn't they then if they're that clever?

Zebra3

OP,

You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. No corporation can risk hiding away technological advances from the customer.

The risk of espionage and the theft of such advances ending up in the hands of a competitor is just far too great.

The likes of the US, France and Israel have parts of their secret police devoted to industrial espionage.

Ubbquittious

Zebra3 wrote: »

OP,

You haven’t a clue what you’re talking about. No corporation can risk hiding away technological advances from the customer.

The risk of espionage and the theft of such advances ending up in the hands of a competitor is just far too great.

The likes of the US, France and Israel have parts of their secret police devoted to industrial espionage.

They have billions to invest in a good hiding place. Also Coca Cola manage to keep their recipe secret and that's only a simple soft drink with a handfull of ingredients.

Del2005

Ubbquittious wrote: »

They have billions to invest in a good hiding place. Also Coca Cola manage to keep their recipe secret and that's only a simple soft drink with a handfull of ingredients.

There's not much profit in a can of cola. There's huge profit in IC.

Irish Guitarist

If Intel is that good why do they put the chips on the inside? Why not put them on the outside so everyone can see? They're obviously hiding something. I've never liked the cut of their jib.

Bob Harris

Del2005 wrote: »

There's not much profit in a can of cola. There's huge profit in IC.

Sell a lot of cans of cola and there's a lot of profit.

VinLieger

So intel are the only processor manufacturer according to the OP? hmm better tell that to ati, apple, ibm, nvidia and samsung to name a tiny few that have been keeping pace with intel for years

NIMAN

Ubbquittious wrote: »

They have billions to invest in a good hiding place. Also Coca Cola manage to keep their recipe secret and that's only a simple soft drink with a handfull of ingredients.

Is it really a secret?

Surely its easy to take a few drops of cola, analyse the ingredients and discover the recipe?

No?

Ubbquittious

VinLieger wrote: »

So intel are the only processor manufacturer according to the OP? hmm better tell that to ati, apple, ibm, nvidia and samsung to name a tiny few that have been keeping pace with intel for years

No, perhaps if it wasn't for the other manufacturers they'd still be selling Pentium 4s pretending they're the latest and greatest

VinLieger

Ubbquittious wrote: »

No, perhaps if it wasn't for the other manufacturers they'd still be selling Pentium 4s pretending they're the latest and greatest

What a bizarrely stupid hypothetical world you are trying to live in

TallGlass

NIMAN wrote: »

Is it really a secret?

Surely its easy to take a few drops of cola, analyse the ingredients and discover the recipe?

No?

Is it not the ratio that is more important than the ingredients and maybe the source of the ingredients would be more important than the ingredients themselves.

NIMAN

TallGlass wrote: »

Is it not the ratio that is more important than the ingredients and maybe the source of the ingredients would be more important than the ingredients themselves.

Surely ratio could be discovered from analysing a bottle of Coke.

And some other cola drinks have got very close to matching the taste of Coke, so I'm not so sure it would be that hard to make a fairly good copy of it.

Is it something special anyway? I never thought it was nicer than other colas.

kneemos

Coke have the ingredients on the can in order of quantity.
Wouldn't take a genius to copy that.

silverharp

they have competition from AMD who would just leap frog them if they could. Its funny there is a Star Trek Next Gen episode where they mention computer speeds in their current time, these have already been beaten now. Hats off to the engineers at Intel

NIMAN

What about the shampoo manufacturers, or the whitening toothpaste makers?

They have been saying their products have been improving for years now, and I bet they are probably the same.

Bob Harris

NIMAN wrote: »

What about the shampoo manufacturers, or the whitening toothpaste makers?

They have been saying their products have been improving for years now, and I bet they are probably the same.

New and improved etc ..a bit like admitting their previous version was crap.

circadian

I see the conspiracy theory forum is leaking.

NIMAN

Bob Harris wrote: »

New and improved etc ..a bit like admitting their previous version was crap.

... and they show how much better their new version is by showing a graph, with no scales or markings, simply 1 bar with 'old version' and a 2nd bar, twice the height, with 'new version' written on it.

Real scientific like.

ohnonotgmail

circadian wrote: »

I see the conspiracy theory forum is leaking.

I've seen dirty nappies leak more interesting stuff.

Anthracite

Coke's 'secret recipe' is a very old marketing trick. It's basically nonsense.

dublinbuster

What the hell are you people using your computers for?
You will read about posters building a new PC, and looking for advice
"32gb RAM, might upgradeable to 64gb
10TB storage internal and 20TB on a network storage device
latest intel i9 overclocked to 5ghz
latest Gforce 9999 overclocked
all will be water cooled
i will mostly be using it for Netflix, Facebook and Farmville
do i have enough "horsepower"
can you recommend any improvements to my build?"

Serious question, what do you use your PC for, and do you even need the latest and greatest components to do what ever the hell you do?

kneemos

Anthracite wrote: »

Coke's 'secret recipe' is a very old marketing trick. It's basically nonsense.

It's different in most countries for a start.

srsly78

I spend all day running angstrom scale simulations to help reduce critical dimensions, am pretty gutted to hear that this was all invented in the 70s and we are just wasting our time

BTW: Samsung are ahead of Intel today.

jiltloop

dublinbuster wrote: »

What the hell are you people using your computers for?
You will read about posters building a new PC, and looking for advice
"32gb RAM, might upgradeable to 64gb
10TB storage internal and 20TB on a network storage device
latest intel i9 overclocked to 5ghz
latest Gforce 9999 overclocked
all will be water cooled
i will mostly be using it for Netflix, Facebook and Farmville
do i have enough "horsepower"
can you recommend any improvements to my build?"

Serious question, what do you use your PC for, and do you even need the latest and greatest components to do what ever the hell you do?

Gaming would be a big reason and then there's audio and video production!

Princess Consuela Bananahammock

Elliot Carver : Mr. Jones, are we ready to release our new software?

Jones : Yes, sir. As requested, it's full of bugs, which means people will be forced to upgrade for years.

Elliot Carver : Outstanding.

Dempsey

Moores Law was been maintained by Intel for many decades because it was an ego trip for Gordon Moore. They werent hiding any advancements but maximising profits from the process before moving onto the next process and bullying their market position so that market demand was in line with their roadmap.

The demand for low power processors allowed the likes of ARM & AMD to derail their stupid GHz race.

the physical limitations of manufacturing silicon transistors getting harder and moores law will not hold true, because its just a good piece of marketing by intel, as they will have to switch from silicon transistors causing a plateau in transistor count for several years

JohnnyFlash

I’d presume manufacturing chips and processors is an industry where if you stood still for a second then your competitors would have you for lunch. Didn’t intel take their eye off mobile for 6 months and ARM destroyed them by licensing out their designs and architectures.

El Tarangu

Anthracite wrote: »

Coke's 'secret recipe' is a very old marketing trick. It's basically nonsense.

Coke's disastrous 'New Coke' campaign came directly as a result of consumers preferring Pepsi over Coke in blind taste tests (Coke's own tests, I should add). Coke is more popular because of the iconic packaging, the 'holidays are coming' ads at Christmas, etc., more so than the taste.

ED E

CISC followed Moores for ages, now we're hitting up against a wall with 10 and 7nm.

Meanwhile NAND has taken off in its place, it'll do so until we max that out too. Then quantum computing can have its go.

Lose the tinfoil OP.

sbsquarepants

The first transistor was invented roughly 70 years ago, it was approximately the size of your hand. Intel now squeeze 100 million of them into a square millimetre, but you reckon they are dragging their feet?

huskerdu

srsly78 wrote: »

I spend all day running angstrom scale simulations to help reduce critical dimensions, am pretty gutted to hear that this was all invented in the 70s and we are just wasting our time

BTW: Samsung are ahead of Intel today.

I feel your pain. 20 years working in IC Design and some sneeering randomer on the internet knows more about it than we do. We've been found out.


The very fact that the OP is under the illusion that Intel are the world leaders in IC manufacturing is laughable.

Franz Von Peppercorn

El Tarangu wrote: »

Coke's disastrous 'New Coke' campaign came directly as a result of consumers preferring Pepsi over Coke in blind taste tests (Coke's own tests, I should add). Coke is more popular because of the iconic packaging, the 'holidays are coming' ads at Christmas, etc., more so than the taste.

Naw I like the taste although I stay off sugary drinks these days for the most part. Coke has a very definitive aftertaste which isn’t replicated anywhere else.

0lddog

The real villans here are the likes of Applied Materials Inc

( http://www.appliedmaterials.com/semiconductor )

EdEd

NIMAN wrote: »

Is it really a secret?

Surely its easy to take a few drops of cola, analyse the ingredients and discover the recipe?

No?

A big secret like the Abrakebabra taco sauce. Nobody will ever know.

dublinbuster

dublinbuster wrote: »

What the hell are you people using your computers for?
You will read about posters building a new PC, and looking for advice
"32gb RAM, might upgradeable to 64gb
10TB storage internal and 20TB on a network storage device
latest intel i9 overclocked to 5ghz
latest Gforce 9999 overclocked
all will be water cooled
i will mostly be using it for Netflix, Facebook and Farmville
do i have enough "horsepower"
can you recommend any improvements to my build?"

Serious question, what do you use your PC for, and do you even need the latest and greatest components to do what ever the hell you do?

Well, you need the extra grunt to run the PC after all the updates have been installed

astrofool

JohnnyFlash wrote: »

I’d presume manufacturing chips and processors is an industry where if you stood still for a second then your competitors would have you for lunch. Didn’t intel take their eye off mobile for 6 months and ARM destroyed them by licensing out their designs and architectures.

Not just that, you need to be planning 5-10 years in advance to have the billion dollar fab ready for when the technology is commercially viable to make the smaller chips, one mis-step can give your competitors an advantage, Global Foundries (used to be part of AMD) are actually ahead right now with their most advanced Fab, and Intel are playing catch-up due to a few mis-steps in their latest die shrink. Beyond smaller transistors, vertical stacking is now very popular, enabling transistors to be stacked upwards as well as outwards, and allowing Moore's law to continue for a while yet.

touts

Readingthis thread I suddenly feel like Joe Duffy must every day of the week (except without the pay to go with it)

Dempsey

huskerdu wrote: »

I feel your pain. 20 years working in IC Design and some sneeering randomer on the internet knows more about it than we do. We've been found out.


The very fact that the OP is under the illusion that Intel are the world leaders in IC manufacturing is laughable.

While their ic designs are not best in market, their fabrication processes certainly are the market leader and have been for a long time

10000maniacs

If Moores law continued on after 1998, the processor speeds would be up in the terra hertz. But it has remained at 4 Giga Hertz for 20 years. Ok we have multi core and multi pipeline architectures to give more performance. but the bottom line is there is no real estate on silicon left, and there has not been since 1998.

Franz Von Peppercorn

10000maniacs wrote: »

If Moores law continued on after 1998, the processor speeds would be up in the terra hertz. But it has remained at 4 Giga Hertz for 20 years. Ok we have multi core and multi pipeline architectures to give more performance. but the bottom line is there is no real estate on silicon left, and there has not been since 1998.

That’s not true. Moore’s law is number of transistors not speed and the multi cores indicate more transistors.

Are Am Eye

But sure Moore himself is in on the whole thing.

Are Am Eye

You're just pushing the bottle neck further out.
Unless everything is going to run at light speed.

Bacchus

Are Am Eye wrote: »

You're just pushing the bottle neck further out.
Unless everything is going to run at light speed.

Well photonics is one of the areas being researched for quantum computing... so you're not far from the truth there

Snickers Man

People have known that Moore's Law is a self fulfilling prophecy and has been exploited as such for decades. And not just by Intel; by everyone who manufactures silicon ICs for a living.

Also, i think Moore himself predicted very early on that it would cease to be relevant sometime between 2015 and 2020, (ie now) as the incremental improvements in process technology (which is essentially what the Law is concerned with) would have reached their physical limits by then.

So complaining about Moore's Law now is like having a theological discussion about the merits of Thor or Zeus.

Mind you, I'm just waiting for jmcc to jump on here and tell us none of us has any clue and he's the only person in the country with any credibility at all to be passing comment on this topic.

whiskeyman

Speaking of Moore's Law, have you heard of Coles Law?













It's thinly sliced cabbage, carrots and green onion, seasoned with mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar dressing.
Goes nice with chips!

Antar Bolaeisk

It's not even a law, it's more of an observation but I guess Moore's Observation doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

AllForIt

This is all a bit high brow tech for AH.

And how come no one has mentioned Qualcomm?

Arciphel

I guess you are all just talking about Moore’s First Law, ye better get Googling about Moore’s Second Law...