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Moore's Law: Chips
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When Moore's Law was extended from processor performance to computing power, its scope was extended by yet another radical step. Despite a common misconception, microprocessors are not single-chip computers. A functional computer needs input and output devices, memory, data to work on, and a program that defines how the data are handled. Microprocessor architectures have constantly been revised to optimize the division of labor between the different computer system components. Indeed, in their 1989 paper on the future evolution of microprocessors, Gelsinger and his colleagues (1989) argued that microprocessors have internalized many of the architectural ideas first developed for mainframe computers.
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Moore's Law has been an important benchmark for developments in microelectronics and information processing for over three decades. During this time, its applications and interpretations have proliferated and expanded, often far beyond the validity of the original assumptions made by Moore. Technical considerations of optimal chip manufacturing costs have been expanded to processor performance, economics of computing, and social development. It is therefore useful to review the various interpretations of Moore's Law and empirical evidence that could support them.
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Moore's Law not only predicts that computing technology will increase in value but at the same time would actually decrease in cost. The price of a transistor in Intel's newest chip family is about 1 millionth the average price of a transistor in 1968. If car prices had fallen at the same rate, a new car today would cost about one cent.
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Computer industry technology "road maps' predict (as of 2001) that Moore's Law will continue for several chip generations. Depending on the doubling time used in the calculations, this could mean up to a hundredfold increase in transistor count per chip within a decade. The semiconductor industry technology roadmap uses a three-year doubling time for microprocessors, leading to a tenfold increase in the next decade. Intel was reported in 2005 as stating that the downsizing of silicon chips with good economics can continue during the next decade.
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Moore's Law has mainly been used to highlight the rapid change in information processing technologies. The growth in chip complexity and fast reduction in manufacturing costs have meant that technological advances have become important factors in economic, organizational, and social change. In fact, during the last decades a good first approximation for long-range planning has often been that information processing capacity is essentially free and technical possibilities are unlimited.
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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 ... increased due to increased clock rates.
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