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There's a good talk by him about how Moore's law isn't dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc.

Obviously, people have different ideas about what they mean when they say "Moore's law is/is not dead", but I appreciate Jim's point that even if the current innovation curves we've been riding are slowing down, there are other innovation curves that we can take advantage of, and that the combination these curves mean that there's still plenty of innovation and improvement to be made in processor design.

Of course, the question of whether the x86 architecture will be the foundation for that future improvement remains to be seen. ARM and RISC-V are both eating x86 from below, and the fact that both of the processor architectures allow for greater competition among processor implementations suggests to me that one (or both) may catch up with x86 at some point in the future.




Especially the part at https://youtu.be/oIG9ztQw2Gc?t=1917

That Sunny Cove architecture slide shows a massive increase in the number of execution units.

It may be that Intel's next architecture, combined with memory speed improvements, is competitive with AMD.

But AMD also isn't sitting still. AMD's contributions (from what I can tell) include:

* Core counts have blown past 6 cores / 12 threads

* CPU prices have just been cut by half

* PCIe lanes have blown way past 8

* ECC ram is being offered in consumer PCs


I've also heard rumors of things like 4-way SMT. Of course, that's still a ways off (if it ever materializes).


I wouldn't put much stock in that particular rumor unless AMD is going all in on servers to the detriment of consumer chips. Or maybe they're developing two cores but they've been working hard to re-use engineering effort until now. They don't have the number of silicon engineers that Intel has and not even Intel is developing separate server and consumer cores.


4 and 8 way SMT exists on IBM POWER8/9.


Please don't. Or rather, please just give me enough cores at a reasonable price so I can disable inevitably leaky SMT.




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