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Performance
Moore's Law
Transistors per chip double on a regular cadence.
The article
If
Moore's observation was economic rather than physical: the component count giving the lowest cost per component doubles about every two years. It held for half a century and quietly underwrote every plan that assumed hardware would rescue it — but single-thread performance stopped following it once Dennard scaling ended around 2005.
Then
“Do not budget for the hardware bailing out a design. If the workload is single-threaded and latency-bound, next year's machine will not save it — you have to parallelise it or do less work.”
Unless
Wirth's Law — the gains get spent rather than banked, and clock speed stopped rising long before transistor counts did
Source
Gordon E. Moore, Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits (Electronics, 19 April 1965).
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