NVidia’s Bill Dally has an article in Forbes where he discusses the impact of Moore’s law, the theoretical doubling of transistor counts every 18 months that would lead to the doubling of performance in CPU’s every 18 months. In recent years, this exponential growth has dropped as higher transistor counts have lead to higher power requirements and heat problems. While companies like Intel have attempted to compensate by introducting quad core, hex-core, and octal-core processors, they still find themselves constantly battling heat and power requirements. This leads Bill to say:
But in a development that’s been largely overlooked, this power scaling has ended. And as a result, the CPU scaling predicted by Moore’s Law is now dead.
This is being erroneously quoted out of context by some sites as NVidia saying “Moore’s Law is Dead”, when it’s actually the opposite.
The good news is that there is a way out of this crisis. Parallel computing can resurrect Moore’s Law and provide a platform for future economic growth and commercial innovation. The challenge is for the computing industry to drop practices that have been in use for decades and adapt to this new platform.
His suggested new platform, no surprises here, is streamline problem-specific processors like GPU’s. Massive core counts directed at specific problems rather than general purpose scenarios.
