Why is moores law related to the speed of processors

That physical reality has manufacturers scrambling to develop new chip architectures that can allow computing power to continue its unchecked growth. For example, new chemical processes are making it possible to form patterns of ultra-thin wires on to a semiconductor wafer.

Other advances include a form of the metal tin that is just one molecule in thickness. These structures can conduct electricity with percent efficiency at room temperature, a property that could allow the construction of materials that conduct electricity along their edges but are insulated on the interior.

The importance of Moore's Law isn't just that computers get bigger and faster over time; it's that engineers can predict how much bigger and faster, which helps them plan the software and hardware development projects to start today, for use five years from now. For transistor counts to keep growing, the size of a transistor must keep getting smaller. But chip density and processor speed have run up against an important limit: denser chips and faster signal processing both generate increased heat.

Current technology is right at the edge of generating enough heat to melt the chips, destroying the computer. This is why processor chips are surrounded by metal heat sinks one shown right , which conduct heat away from the chip and into the air. Because of the heat problem, chip manufacturers have, at least temporarily, given up on making processors faster.

Instead, they are putting more than one processor on a chip. If a computation can carry out the same algorithm on different parts of the data at the same time in parallel—sort of like sprite clones all running the same script at the same time , then these multicore chips can have an effective speed much greater than the speed of a single processor. A computer you buy today is likely to have two or four processors on one chip.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Privacy Policy MemeBridge. To prove his theory, clearly something that could be easily measured was needed as the yardstick.

Newer materials such as graphene blow silicon out of the water in terms of transistor switching speed, but we have yet to master the manufacturing process.

Be patient, more speed will come, probably sooner than later. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Has CPU speed already broken Moore's law? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 10 months ago.

Active 5 years, 9 months ago. Viewed 15k times. Then a couple of years later around having one that was MHz. Now almost 8 years later they are still maxed at 3 GHz. Is this because of Moore's Law? Improve this question. Beyond the name, it is understood what you mean, and you are just right, every exponential bullshit, is coming to an end.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Rich Homolka Rich Homolka Very important to note that a 3GHz i7, say, is orders of magnitude faster than a 3GHz P4 - and that clock speeds could go much faster, they just generate a lot more heat and there's more of a difference in adding extra cores. In physics the word is just used a lot more strongly tending to mean: inviolable.

Look up the Megahertz Myth. The clock speed hasn't gotten faster, but how much a processor 'processes' in each clock cycle has risen, and some processors - such as the i7 - are quite happy with raising their clock speed They'll also speed up if a single thread is demanding a lot more than anything else. Raising clock speed isn't cost effective any more, simply due to the heat output.

Moore actually didn't say anything about transistor size or density in his original paper. He was making an observation about yield percentage of transistors that are good versus packaging cost.