Chapter 6. How Itanium Architecture Upholds Moore's First Law While Suspending Moore's Second Law
“Moore's Law is important because it is the only stable ruler we have today...It's a sort of technological barometer. It very clearly tells you that if you take the information processing power you have today and multiply by two, that will be what your competition will be doing 18 months from now. And that is where you too will have to be.”
—Michael Malone, “Chips Triumphant,” Forbes ASAP, February 1996.
In this Chapter:
Determining Factors for the Second Law: Manufacturing Capability and Costs
Gordon Moore, the former Director of the R&D Laboratories at Fairchild Semiconductor and co-founder of Intel®[18], once said that “there is no room left to squeeze anything out by being clever. Going forward from here we have to depend on the two size factors—bigger dice and finer dimensions.” He was referring to an impending limitation on the number of transistors one can place on a microchip. Up to this point, there had been an exponential growth in the density and number of transistors placed on the chip.
[18] Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks or trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
Increasing the number of transistors on a chip allows you to create more powerful machines. However, increasing the number of transistors on what is essentially the same amount of chip 'real estate' requires manufacturers to continue shrinking the size of the transistors. In turn, this steady reduction in size will increase the cost of building such microprocessors. Moore's pronouncement was a warning that the continued growth of computing power and the reduction of its cost could soon be in for a significant slowdown.