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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 Lawthe 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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See also