“If anyone from Intel reads this, and wishes to explain to me how it would be unbelievably difficult to do their jobs using computers from ten years earlier, so that Moore’s Law would slow to a crawl—then I stand ready to be corrected. But relative to my present state of partial knowledge, I would say that this does not look like a strong feedback loop, compared to what happens to a compound interest investor when we bound their coupon income at 1998 levels for a while.”
This is simple to disprove whether being part of intel or not. The issue is that since current processors with multiple cores and millions-now billions of transistors are getting so complex that the actual design has to be done on computer. What is more before fabrication the design needs to be simulate to check for logic errors and to ensure good performance. It would be impossible to simulate a Tera-scale research chip on 1998 hardware. The issue is that simulating a computers design require a lot of computational power. The advances made in going from 65nm to 45nm now moving to 32nm were enabled by computers that could better simulate the designs without todays computers it would be hard to design the fabrication systems or run the fabrication system for the future processors. Since you admit partial knowledge I won’t bore you with the details of all this, suffices to say that your claim as state is incorrect.
I would however like to point out a misconception about Moores law, the law never says speed increases merely the number of transistors double every 18 months. There are a lot of facts apart from the number of transistors that play into computer speed. While more transistors are useful one has to match them with an architecture to take advantage of them otherwise you would not get the speed increase necessarily.
“If anyone from Intel reads this, and wishes to explain to me how it would be unbelievably difficult to do their jobs using computers from ten years earlier, so that Moore’s Law would slow to a crawl—then I stand ready to be corrected. But relative to my present state of partial knowledge, I would say that this does not look like a strong feedback loop, compared to what happens to a compound interest investor when we bound their coupon income at 1998 levels for a while.”
This is simple to disprove whether being part of intel or not. The issue is that since current processors with multiple cores and millions-now billions of transistors are getting so complex that the actual design has to be done on computer. What is more before fabrication the design needs to be simulate to check for logic errors and to ensure good performance. It would be impossible to simulate a Tera-scale research chip on 1998 hardware. The issue is that simulating a computers design require a lot of computational power. The advances made in going from 65nm to 45nm now moving to 32nm were enabled by computers that could better simulate the designs without todays computers it would be hard to design the fabrication systems or run the fabrication system for the future processors. Since you admit partial knowledge I won’t bore you with the details of all this, suffices to say that your claim as state is incorrect.
I would however like to point out a misconception about Moores law, the law never says speed increases merely the number of transistors double every 18 months. There are a lot of facts apart from the number of transistors that play into computer speed. While more transistors are useful one has to match them with an architecture to take advantage of them otherwise you would not get the speed increase necessarily.