Sunday, March 6, 2011

Moore's Law in HPC


Moore's Law - his original statement in 1965 paper states:

Moore's original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his publication "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.[7]

Moore slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, in retrospect bolstering the perceived accuracy of his law .[16] Most notably, in 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years.[17]


Applied to HPC - as processing power increases for smaller die sizes, increasing the number of cores will boost the computation power of smaller devices equaling that of current desktop servers. See figure from

http://www.linux-mag.com/wp-content/uploads/more_and_moore_cores-600x3601.png


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