Talk:Moore's law/Archive 1

message: Had anyone actually heard or read this stated by Moore firsthand?
If yes, would you provide the reference please?
I've read that Moore vigorously objected the attempts to attribute this nonscience nonsence "law" to him. Unfortunately I have no reference either (otherwise I'd intervened into the article). Does anyone remember anything about this? I mean documented, rather than anecdotal.
mikkalai 21 Nov 2003
: Thanks to Wernher for providing the reference. After reading the paper, I strongly suspect that nearly nobody who wrote about the Moore's law bothered to read the original paper. Besides the "law", it is interesting in itself. As for the "law", I can see now why Moore could object to assuming the authorship: the degree of twistedness of various popular formulations of Moore's law doubles every 18 months :-). Even wikipedia's previous text was pretty much senseless, if you think about it carefully for a minute: "the number of components on lowest-cost semiconductor chips doubles roughly every 12 months". No wonder G.Moore was pissed off.
:mikkalai 21 Nov 2003
: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4449711.stm  A BBC news article from April 2005, complete with some words from an interview they conducted with him about the 40th anniversary of the original article.  He seems to be backing it now, and the original magazine article authored by him is quite real (since Intel just paid 10,000 for an original copy of it).--Wingsandsword 23:56, 11 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Opening comments

message: Comment about using the analogy in the opening paragraph. "... If Moore's Law were applicable to the airline industry, a flight from New York to Paris in 1978 that cost $900 and took seven hours, would now cost about $0.01 and take less than one second."   This sentence is nonsensical.  The comparison is baseless.  The two subjects have no foundation for this type of comparison and are completely different.  Worse, this comparison provides absolutely no information to the reader or gives insight into Moore's law.  Note that applying Moore's law to human evolution and the number of digits on our right hand, in 1978 human babies had 5, in 2006 human babies would have 81,920 fingers.  Or perhaps compare this to the speed of light in 1978 and the speed of light now.  These are almost as useless as the original comparison.  A better analogy would be to apply this to something that is actually increasing or decreasing each year.
Also, the term 'now' should probably be replaced by some date, unless you want to keep updating this every day.
: I removed this sentence. 88.73.211.151 13:31, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Opening comments, another issue

message: 66.167.137.70 08:05, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  There are images and lots of info about Moore's law here 

message: I put up a request for picture of transistor counts plotted against the doubling rate. Cburnett 16:15, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)
:Is this kind of thing of use? I'm not sure how to label it. If you were thinking of something else please let me know. -- Wgsimon 04:08, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good enough for me......and added. Thanks! Cburnett 04:18, Apr 19, 2005 (UTC)
Could the intercepts of the trend lines be changed slightly?  Is there any reason why the lines must both go through that one point (4004) and miss every other point?  Moore made this statement in 1965, but the 4004 point is 1971.  Maybe do a least-squares fit of the lines to the all the data (adjusting the intercept, but maintaining the two slopes), or even just the early portion of the data. --kris 20:33, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

text: That is a good idea. I will update the image. - Wgsimon 20:46, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

text: Theres probably now theoretical maximum about how many calculations per second (well apart from something absurd like needing all the atoms in the universe or something), only limits on the size of the internal transistors, and who knows an entirely new method of doing operations may be developed. Rob.derosa 00:00, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

text: Although the article seems fine to me, the template does ask for a photo rather than a graphic. I wonder if a photo of Moore would be good, especially lecturing, or perhaps a photo of the original magazine. - Wgsimon (talk) 17:29, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Request for picture 

message: Would someone be able to create a Wikipedia entry for Sematech? -- Corvus 15:34, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sematech 

message: The quote says
:The complexity for minimum component costs has increased...
What does "for minimum component costs" mean? Does he look at the chip whose cost per transistor is minimal, and counts the number of transistors on the chip? Or does he look at the chip whose total cost is minimal, and counts the number of transistors on the chip? Or does he count the number of transistors per square millimetre rather than per chip? So basically I have four variants of the law, and the only one that I believe has any hope of being true is
* Take the chip whose cost per transistor is minimal, then count the number of transistors per square millimetre.
Is that the intended interpretation? Thanks, AxelBoldt 19:13, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Meaning? 

message: At the head of the article we've got a very scientific looking graph that says transistor count doubles every 24 months, and as 194.202.76.66 noted above, scientific-looking graphs are the sine qua non of scientific proof. Meanwhile, the "most common" formulation of the law is that it doubles every 18 months, and the original formulation is that it doubles every 12 months. Despite this, a whole bunch of credulous, unquestioning fools contributing to this article have managed to maintain the tone and the idea that Moore's law is a true fact as opposed to a disproved urban legend at best and, less diplomatically, a lying piece of crap. User:Anon 08:22, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The figures I used to produce the graph were from here. I would be very interested in adding some more processors to the graph. Does anyone have any good sources? -- Wgsimon 16:02, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moore's Law Debunked 

message: When we will find the genes that affect intelligency, it is possible that will will start genetically engineer ourselves to more intelligent. It is reasonable that these new more intelligent people will be able to even more improve the intelligency of their descendents, simply because they will be more intelligent. That closed loop of self-reengineering and self-improvement, which is likely to be exponential because of two factors improving each other - just like the computing power makes designing computing power exponential, the brain power would make improving brain power exponential.
------------
^ What the hell is this hogwash? Why is it here?
Darren
:What do you find to be hogwash about it? If genes have something to do with intelligence (which seems a plausible conjecture, although by no means entirely proven, given that human genes differ from chimpanzee genes, and the two species also differ in average intelligence), if such genes are susceptible to genetic engineering, then it seems quite reasonable to wonder if a feedback loop will occur, in which scientists make themselves increasingly smarter, enabling the augmented scientists to invent ways to make themselves smarter still. This seems directly analogous to a process which helps drive Moore's Law: engineers using the current generation of computers to design the next generation of still-faster chips. The whole mental phenomenon of invention has been only vaguely understood. Throughout history, humans have depended on the random appearance of rare people who somehow happen to have inventive skill (and not all cultures have been equally hospitable to inventive types). This is similar to the way hunters depend on the happenstance appearance of wild game, in contrast to farmers, who alter the environment to make it more productive for human use. If human intelligence can be engineered, it might trigger a cultural change comparable to the switch from hunting to agriculture. Anyway, the relation to Moore's Law is that genetic engineering technology relies heavily on computers; as computers get better, they drive progress in fields that depend on computers. --Teratornis 01:38, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moore's law for IQ when people will be genetically engineered 

message: "Moore's Law" is Phenomenology.  This is a scientific word meaning
"I drew a curve through the points by eye" :-).   No baggage about
"validity", no claims other than "you can see that the curve goes more or less near the points".   Then, as a separate second act, there is Extrapolation.  This is widely recognized as involving Implicit Assumptions, and if you want even minimal credibility, you are obliged to make the assumptions explicit; and because the assumptions are not data, what you are doing at this point is Speculation not Science.  Of course, in a country where science is a spectator sport, all of this is easily overlooked.
Why does this article get the basic facts wrong in its opening statement?
Moore's "Law" is not about computing power. It's about the number of features (e.g., transistors) that can be placed on an area of silicon.
* http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.ars/1
* http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/M/Moores_Law.html
* http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci212591,00.html
* http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/EDN/2002/09/26/241741
* http://www.maximumpc.com/2005/04/the_myths_of_mo.html
What's the easiest way to permanently correct this article?
:Press the edit button and then get going with your keyboard. If you make mistakes others will correct you, SqueakBox 17:34, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The error was introduced in November 2005 by User:24.200.176.92. There is no way to permenently correct the article. Mirror Vax 17:46, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phenomenology 

message: I edited the paragraph on Kryder's Law to reflect the discussion going on there (namely, it is not better but equal to Moore's, as well as it hasn't been doing to well lately). David Souther
Get ready to edit it again.  Kryder's Law is on AfD, and undergoing heavy edits.  How would you feel about a merge of Kryder's Law into a section of this article dealing with laws affecting other computing parts.  Maybe move the Wirth's Law reference into that section to, as well as the few sentences about other parts in the same section Kryder's Law is now?  --ZachPruckowski 08:42, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Kryder's Law

message: Moore's law is not ambiguous at all. It was stated that the number of components on microprocessors doubles every two years, not 18 months. There is confusion with the doubling of performance, which is indeed supposed to double every 18 months (but really does every 20 months or so).
See this transcript of a conversation with Gordon Moore, more specifically paragraph 3:
ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Video-Transcripts/Excepts_A_Conversation_with_Gordon_Moore.pdf
QcRef87 19:12, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yep that makes sense. Everyone who usually speaks of 18month also says performance. Be bold include the source and edit it yourself.Slicky 06:18, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a source already there, but people that don't bother to read change the number to 18 on occasion.  Fixed again. — Aluvus t/c 06:28, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

text: I made some fixes, including a comment in the lede warning people not to change it back to 18 ... richi 21:12, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  18 or 24 months? 

message: I would like to suggest the removal of Moore's Law being quoted as a self-fulfilling prophecy in the Industry Driver section. It clearly cannot be considered an sfp due to the fact that it is an ongoing condition, one in which it may today hold true but tomorrow become false. A prophecy by its very nature is absolute and not something which is constantly ongoing. Enigmatical 04:20, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removal of reference to "Self-Fulfilling Prophecy" 

message: This sentence: However, Moore had heard Douglas Engelbart's similar observation, possibly in 1965. and the next sentence, have been in most versions of the article since April 17, 2005. The "similar observation" attributed a date of "possibly 1960" by its original editor, which was evidently changed to 1965 to conform better with the fact that ICs were not invented until 1959. What source can be given to substantiate this entry?  --Blainster 22:47, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, did the search myself.  The Engelbart entry was prompted by this NYTimes article of April 17, 2005. It is interesting, but it merely says that Engelbart gave some talks in 1960 that expressed the conviction that ICs would become smaller. He suggested no development rate, which is what Moore's law is about. I think the Engelbart entry should be removed from the intro, and if kept at all, be moved to the history section.  --Blainster 23:01, 10 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Engelbart reference

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thread_title:  To get to A-Class, this may be helpful 

message: I've just read about the less known "Moore's Second Law".   I don't know whether this Second Law deserves a new article or it should be explained in this one. Any thoughs? --surueña 18:57, 31 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moore's Second Law