Comments on: Moore’s Law

By: My Exponential Function Unit « Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere

Mon, 04 May 2009 03:10:25 +0000

[...] could also have done an activity for exponential growth, using real data — population growth, Moore’s Law, or something to do with the Supreme Court. It would have been nice to finish off with a nice 2 day [...]

By: samjshah

samjshah — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:43:01 +0000

@jonathan: I’m not sure… But looking at that picture, it seems like a great question to ask! The article I read — and this could be wrong — says that the constraint at the moment doesn’t seem to be the ability to increase the # of transistors, but how to effectively power them (so that the silicon doesn’t melt).

The article was saying that one option for companies like Intel is to create multiple chips that work in parallel (multiple cores, I think they called it), because currently the chips are designed to work linearly. However programming in parallel is tough, because we tend to need step 1 done in order to do step 2 (add these two numbers, then multiply the result by 2).

But then they said the Play Station 3 was designed around this multi-core concept (see http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/playstation-three.htm). Which is cool! (Not that I have ever played a PS3…)

By: jd2718

jd2718 — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:21:33 +0000

I haven’t done the work, but when do we reach physical constraints (ie, width of a molecule or two)?

Jonathan