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De - Pt| English Dictionary: Moore's Law | by the DICT Development Group |
| 2 results for Moore's Law | |
| From Jargon File (4.2.0, 31 JAN 2000) [jargon]: | |
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Moore's Law /morz law/ prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^(t - 1962) where t is time in years; that is, the amount of information storable on a given amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was invented. This relation, first uttered in 1964 by semiconductor engineer Gordon Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later) held until the late 1970s, at which point the doubling period slowed to 18 months. The doubling period remained at that value through time of writing (late 1999). Moore's Law is apparently self-fulfilling. The implication is that somebody, somewhere is going to be able to build a better chip then you if you rest on your laurels, so you'd better start pushing hard on the problem. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data}. | |
| From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]: | |
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Moore's Law {Intel} co-founder {Gordon Moore} while preparing a speech, that each new memory {integrated circuit} contained roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, and each chip was released within 18-24 months of the previous chip. If this trend continued, he reasoned, computing power would rise exponentially with time. Moore's observation still holds in 1997 and is the basis for many performance forecasts. In 24 years the number of {transistors} on processor chips has increased by a factor of almost 2400, from 2300 on the {Intel 4004} in 1971 to 5.5 million on the {Pentium Pro} in 1995 (doubling roughly every two years). Date Chip Transistors MIPS clock/MHz ----------------------------------------------- Nov 1971 4004 2300 0.06 0.108 Apr 1974 8080 6000 0.64 2 Jun 1978 8086 29000 0.75 10 Feb 1982 80286 134000 2.66 12 Oct 1985 386DX 275000 5 16 Apr 1989 80486 1200000 20 25 Mar 1993 Pentium 3100000 112 66 Nov 1995 Pentium Pro 5500000 428 200 ----------------------------------------------- Moore's Law has been (mis)interpreted to mean many things over the years. In particular, {microprocessor} performance has increased faster than the number of transistors per chip. The number of {MIPS} has, on average, doubled every 1.8 years for the past 25 years, or every 1.6 years for the last 10 years. While more recent processors have had wider {data paths}, which would correspond to an increase in transistor count, their performance has also increased due to increased {clock rates}. Chip density in transistors per unit area has increased less quickly - a factor of only 146 between the 4004 (12 mm^2) and the Pentium Pro (196 mm^2) (doubling every 3.3 years). {Feature size} has decreased from 10 to 0.35 microns which would give over 800 times as many transistors per unit. However, the automatic layout required to cope with the increased complexity is less efficient than the hand layout used for early processors. {(http://www.intel.com/intel/museum/25anniv/html/hof/moore.htm)}. {Intel Microprocessor Quick Reference Guide (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/no_frame/quickref.htm)}. {"Birth of a Chip", Linley Gwennap, Byte, Dec 1996 (http://www.byte.com/art/9612/sec6/art2.htm)}. See also March 1997 "inbox". {Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers (http://www.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/comphist.htm)}, Ken Polsson. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data}. [{Jargon File}] (1997-03-04) | |
