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"Moore's Law used to increase 10-fold every 5 years and 100-fold every 10 years," published by the editorial department of big data Digest. Now, Moore's Law can only grow by a few percentage points a year, maybe only twice every 10 years. So Moore's Law is over. " In January, Huang Renxun, CEO of Nvidia, predicted the future of Moore's Law at CES 2019.

Moore's Law is a word familiar to all computer people. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore came up with the idea that the number of components that could be contained on integrated circuits would double and their performance would double every 18 to 24 months. For half a century, this law has accurately predicted the development trend of the semiconductor industry, has become the criterion of computer processor manufacturing, and has become a "self-fulfilling" prophecy to promote the development of the technology industry. In recent years, however, there have been more and more voices about the slowdown or failure of Moore's Law. An organization called datagraph recently produced a video that hopes to explore the development of Moore's Law vs. CPU/GPU. The less than five-minute video began with the introduction of Moore's Law in 1965 and spanned half a century. You can get a glimpse of the early days of microprocessors, the dominance of Intel, and the rise of Nvidia and GPU in recent years.

Let's watch the video first.

Https://v.qq.com/x/page/c09212v402k.html

On the 35th anniversary of the Electronic Magazine published on April 19, 1965, Moore, then director of Fairchild Semiconductor research and development, published an article "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits (putting more components on Integrated Circuits)", formally proposing Moore's Law.

The pink bar in the video refers to the number of transistors and resistors that are theoretically integrated on a semiconductor chip according to Moore's Law. The blue bar refers to CPU and the green bar refers to GPU. At first, the number was only 72.

The early days of microprocessors

In 1974, Texas Instruments launched its first high-performance commercial microprocessor, TI TMS 1000, which exceeded the prediction of Moore's Law for the first time. This is a company that should have a name in the history of chip development. today, Texas Instruments has been gradually forgotten by most people, but when Texas Instruments was booming, there was no Intel and Qualcomm in the world. In an era when ios and Android systems were not yet popular, Texas Instruments dominated almost all mobile phone processor markets. Nokia, the most popular mobile phone brand at that time, was a loyal user of Texas Instruments processors. In 1975, Moore himself updated Moore's Law, increasing the development cycle of the semiconductor industry from 12 months to 24 months. Over the next 30 years, the development of chips followed Moore's Law by reducing the size of the components on the chip.

It is worth mentioning that Motorola used to be the leader of CPU. In the early days, Motorola could be said to have been a giant in the semiconductor industry, representing products such as MC6800,68K, etc., and IBM, Apple cooperated with the PowerPC series of chips (Motorola Semiconductor is responsible for manufacturing the chip), which still has a great influence in the military field. Among them, the Motorola 68000 series in 1979 is basically the best processor that can be steadily purchased in the 8-bit era, and it is still in use 40 years after its birth. In 1982, Intel introduced the 80286 processor, which was widely used in the pc/ at era and lasted until the 1990s. In 1987, Texas Instruments browser released Lisp chip, which is also the first chip based on Lisp language for AI computing.

In the 1990s, the number of transistors predicted by Moore's Law once led the industry, and the fifth generation of Intel microprocessors was born in 1993. After that, Intel, as a chip leader, once monopolized the market, and even led to the slow development of the chip industry throughout the 1990s, until the emergence of Nvidia and GPU.

GPU appears and Moore's Law enters a new stage

In 1997, GPU chip was born, like a catfish jumping into the market, bringing Moore's Law and the semiconductor world to a new stage. GPU, or Graphic Processing Unit, was first proposed in 1999 when Nvidia released the GeForce 256GPU chip. After the birth of GPU, the whole chip world also entered a flying period, Nvidia, AMD and Intel several bigwigs compete.

AMD is very aggressive at this stage, extending the x86 instruction set to x86-64 in 2003. It was a major success worth remembering, a development that forced Intel to abandon Itanium and copy AMD's instruction set and revive its x86 series. To this day, x86-64 is still called AMD64.

Then, with the rapid development of the entire chip industry, the number of transistors grew exponentially, leaving Moore's Law behind. In 2005, Moore even issued his own statement, "Moore's Law is dead, and within 10 to 20 years, we will reach a limit." The AMD Radeon HD 7000 series GPU chip manufactured by TSMC, which was released on January 16, 2012, uses the 28nm process, and the display core adopts the "next generation graphics core" (Graphics Core Next) architecture.

Moore's Law is dead?

The timeline finally extends to 2019, when most producers, including Moore himself, predict that Moore's law will expire in 2025. But not everyone is pessimistic about whether Moore's Law will continue to be effective in the future. At the Hotchips held in the United States a few days ago, Dr. Phillip Wong, head of research and development of TSMC and deputy general manager of technical research, made a speech entitled "What will the next node offer us". He put forward his own views on the future of Moore's Law.

"Moore's Law is still valid and in good condition," he said. "it doesn't die, it doesn't slow down, it doesn't get sick." Today, TSMC's 7nmFinFet chip has been commercially available. Huang Hansen also said that 5nm chip is also under intense development and has been put into trial production, and TSMC's next step is 3nm chip.

Some people are pessimistic and some are optimistic about Moore's Law. What is the future? It's like the last line in the video-"We shall see".

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