UC Berkeley EECS
7 HN recommenders · recommended in 15 months, 2019–2025
1:04:53 · 77K views · Sep 19, 2019
Jim Keller gives a UC Berkeley EECS colloquium arguing that Moore's Law is not dead. He surveys upcoming technologies and the multiple innovation curves that can keep transistor density and performance scaling.
The go-to citation in Moore's Law threads, a convincing counterargument from a top CPU designer.
17 comments from Hacker News
Someone always crawls out of the woodwork to repeat this supposed "fact" which hasn't been true for the entire half-century it's been repeated. Jim Keller (designer of most of the great CPUs of the last couple decades) gave a convincing presentation several years ago about just how not-true it is: this video Everything he says in it still applies today. Intel struggled for a decade, and folks think that means Moore's law died. But TSMC and Samsung just kept iterating. And hopefully Intel's 18a process will see them back in the game.
They've been saying Moore's law is dead for 20+ years. Reasons usually quoted for Moore's law's death are quite narrowly focused on a particular technology stack, whereas semiconductor fabrication happens on a complex web of technologies all moving forward with their own S-curves. It is worth watching Jim Keller's lecture at UC Berkeley literally titled "Moore's law is not dead". He talks on a different level alltogether and far more convincing than the pedantic look at the details that enable Moore's law. this video
There's a good talk by him about how Moore's law isn't dead: this video . Obviously, people have different ideas about what they mean when they say "Moore's law is/is not dead", but I appreciate Jim's point that even if the current innovation curves we've been riding are slowing down, there are other innovation curves that we can take advantage of, and that the combination these curves mean that there's still plenty of innovation and improvement to be made in processor design. Of course, the question of whether the x86 architecture will be the foundation for that future improvement remains to be seen. ARM and RISC-V are both eating x86 from below, and the fact that both of the processor architectures allow for greater competition among processor implementations suggests to me that one (or both) may catch up with x86 at some point in the future.
There is this interesting talk by Jim Keller. Talks about new approaches (different transistor tech, architecture, etc) to keep moores law going for another decade or so. You should defintely check it out if have time. this video
Jim Keller gave a talk at Berkeley titled "Moore's Law is not dead" (2019) where he summarized a bunch of up and coming technologies that will enable the continued scaling of transistor density - this video