Mon, July 28, 2008, 01:40 AM under
ParallelComputing
When most people's brains first light up on why parallelism is the next BigThing, some jump to the conclusion that Moore's law is over. Let's clear that up below.
All of you know Gordon
Moore's law which boils down to the prediction of
"the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years"
In the last 30-40 years the previous prediction has manifested itself in
clock speed increases and that is what has tricked most of us to associate Moore's law with CPU speed.
So, now that chip manufacturers cannot make single CPUs any faster (well, they can, but they can't cool them down enough to make them useful), they are resorting to having chips with multiple cores, which we are terming the
manycore shift. The manycore shift has a profound impact on developers (especially those programming for the desktop client) in that their software now has to learn how to take advantage of parallelism.
So if you followed the logical flow so far, you'll conclude that Moore's law is still alive: we are still getting more silicon, but it does not translate to increased
linear speed, but rather to parallel "engines" that your software must learn to utilise.
I am glad we cleared that up :)