News Intel admits to Moore's Law hiccough

Then make larger chips, problem solved.

 

Larger chip = less chip per slice of silicon = higher price per die.

 

Imagine the heatsink to cool that bugger though.

 

It had to come to an end one day, or at least slow down.
Physics starts getting in the way when things get small, the brains need to work their magic and come up with new ways to do things.

 

That's when it starts to become interesting . Return of the co-processors ? I see more and more co-processors being released / tested (Xeon PHY, Caustic R2500, etc.). It's probably time to offload some calculus to specialized chips / cards and let the CPU do the basic stuff (dispatch the workload, do the single threaded computing, etc.).

 

Or perhaps pretty stagnant!

 

I mean't Interesting on the "chipset designer side". They have to find innovative stuff instead of just shrinking the size and throwing more transistors at it.

 

Does Moore's Law really matter? As long as progress is still being made, who cares?

I'm sure quantum computing will blow Moore's Law out of the water when it's tamed.

 

I don't believe MS for one minute that "it's getting really hard". The reason they are not pushing harder is that AMD IS finding it really hard and MS don't have to try anymore.

 

I'm sure its difficult but I still feel intel are being lazy because they don't have any real competition anymore (not in the mid-high end x86 market anyway).

 

By MS don't you mean Intel? MS don't make chips...

 

That is a subjective feeling, not an informed opinion (unless you are a chip designer, in which case I take it all back).

There are other technologies coming our way: optical computing, quantum computing, new substrates. They'll find a way around it. But just as the leap from valve to transistor, and then transistor to silicon took time and effort, so will the leap to the next technology.

 

lol well spotted, for some reason i get those two mixed up from time to time.

@ Nexxo, yes that it just my gut feeling. When intel first came out with core 2 I was reading stuff saying they were predicting they would have over 16 cores on a chip in the next few years - that must have been over five years ago now and I'm pretty sure they are still shoveling out dual core parts at the lower end and (I may be wrong) quad and hex core parts at the top end. So my gut feeling does have a reason for the mistrust.

 

8 core/16 thread xeons are out there.

 

I stand corrected, but it's still nowhere near what they said to expect. I guess I just have a deep trust issues towards big corporations !

 

Intel may be doing well in the desktop/laptop market, but ARM is already encroaching on the server market and handing Intel its ass in the fast-growing mobile market. Intel rightly perceives that more powerful chips are not the priority --current products comfortably meet most people's needs. Low consumption chips is where it's at. Their focus lies there for the moment.