The Sandy Bridge Preview (Anand)

[saaya]

hah... all that moores law talk...
everybody sees something different in it

i always get a laugh out of presentations that claim moores law is dead, moores law has been surpassed or moores law cant continue because they did something...

depending on how you look at it, moores law has been dead for quite a while, as manufacturing and r&d costs have increased a lot, so you dont "just" get double the transistors every 18 months... if youd spend enough you could probably get 4 times the transistors every 18 months, but thats not the point...

another thing is that intel has been working on a 24months shrink cycle for the past years, and for amd you can add a few weeks on top of that...

anyhow... i think its silly taking this thing so seriously... i mean the original conclusion he made was that transistor density doubles "roughly" every 18 months... "roughly"... i doubt that he meant it to be a serious rule or guideline, and im surprised so many people see it as such and argue over semantics

[terrace215]

another thing is that intel has been working on a 24months shrink cycle for the past years, and for amd you can add a few weeks on top of that...

I think you meant to say, "for amd you can add several months on top of that."

Their 32nm looks like it will ship about ~18 months after Intel's, so they've been building quite a few months up each cycle.

[saaya]

I think you meant to say, "for amd you can add several months on top of that."

Their 32nm looks like it will ship about ~18 months after Intel's, so they've been building quite a few months up each cycle.

well the cycles have slowed down overall... i dont think amd has fallen back even more... im not sure...

when amd went 45nm intel went 32nm...
by the time amd goes 32nm, intel will go 22nm... right?
so the cycles have slowed down cause fabs are getting more expensive, so you have to run them for longer to really get any ROI, 45nm lasted a long time and 32nm will last a while as well...