Chapter 24 Section 1 Moore's Law

One of the many stories about Bill Gates circulating in the tech industry is a conversation between him and the boss of General Motors.Gates said that if the automobile industry can develop like the computer field, then today, it only costs 25 dollars to buy a car, and a liter of gasoline can run 400 kilometers.Leaving aside the rebuttal of the boss of General Motors against Gates, this story at least shows that the development of the computer and the entire IT industry is much faster than that of traditional industries. The first person to see this phenomenon was Dr. Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel Corporation.As early as 1965, he proposed that the integration level of integrated circuits would double every two years for at least ten years.Later, we shortened this period to eighteen months.Now, every 18 months, the performance of computers and other IT products will double; or in other words, the price of computers and other IT products with the same performance will drop by half every 18 months.Although this rate of development is unbelievable, the development of the IT industry for decades has always followed the speed predicted by Moore's theorem.

In 1945, the speed of ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer, was able to complete 5,000 fixed-point addition and subtraction operations in one second.This 30-meter-long, two-meter-high behemoth weighs 27 tons and consumes 150,000 watts of electricity.Today, the computing speed of a personal computer using Intel Core is 50 billion floating-point operations per second, which is at least 10 million times that of ENIAC, not to mention the volume and power consumption.Today (June 2007) the fastest computer in the world, IBM's Blue Gene (BlueGene/L), has a speed of 367 trillion floating-point operations per second, which is 734 times that of ENIAC. Billion times, exactly doubling every 20 months, roughly the same as predicted by Moore's Theorem.Despite the speed of computers, storage capacity has grown even faster, doubling about every fifteen months. In 1976, the floppy disk drive of the Apple computer had a capacity of 160KB, which could store about 80 pages of Chinese books.Today, the hard disk capacity of a desktop personal computer with the same price can reach 500GB, which is three million times that of an Apple computer at that time, and can store all the text parts of the library collection of Peking University.Not only that, but in the past ten years, the propagation speed of the Internet has almost grown at the speed predicted by Moore's theorem.Thirteen years ago, I was fortunate to be among the first batch of Internet users in China. At that time, I was still connected to the Internet through a dedicated line from the Institute of High Energy Physics to the Linear Acceleration Laboratory of Stanford University. At that time, the speed of the telephone modem was 2.4K. It takes eight hours to download Google Pinyin Input Method.Now, commercial ADSL can achieve a transmission rate of 10M through the same telephone line, which is 4,000 times that of 13 years ago, almost doubling every year, and it only takes about ten seconds to download Google Pinyin.Among the top five industries in the world economy, namely finance, information technology (IT), medical and pharmaceuticals, energy and consumer goods, only IT can continue to double the speed of progress.

People have repeatedly doubted how many years Moore's theorem can be applied. Even Moore himself only believed that the IT field could develop at such a high speed for ten years at the beginning.In fact, since World War II, technological progress in the IT field has been doubling every one to two years, and there is no sign of stopping.In the history of human civilization, no other industry has achieved this.Therefore, the IT industry must have its particularity. Compared with any other commodity, the manufacturing of IT products requires very few raw materials, and the cost is almost zero.Taking the semiconductor industry as an example, an Intel Core Duo processor integrates 290 million transistors, while the Intel 8086 processor 30 years ago only had 30,000 transistors.Although the degree of integration between the two is nearly 10,000 times different, the raw materials consumed are not much different. The manufacturing cost of hardware in the IT industry is mainly the cost of manufacturing equipment.According to the introduction of semiconductor equipment manufacturer Applied Materials, the total investment to build a production line capable of producing Core Duo chips with a 65nm process is between US$2 billion and US$4 billion.Last year, Intel spent $6 billion on research and development.Of course, we can't count it all on Core, but Intel may not be able to develop a product like Core in an average year, so its research and development expenses should be equivalent to Intel's annual budget.If we divide these two costs into the first 100 million Core processors, the average cost will be nearly $100 per chip.In this way, when Intel recovers the two main costs of production line and research and development, the price of Core processors can be greatly reduced.Intel sold about 200 million processors last year, so it won't take more than a year and a half for a new processor to pay for itself.Usually, users can see that after a year and a half of the release of a new processor, the price will start to drop sharply.Of course, Intel's new products are already under development at this time.

Moore's Law dominates the development of the IT industry.First of all, in order to make Moore's theorem valid, IT companies must complete the development of next-generation products in a relatively short period of time.This requires that IT companies must invest a lot of money in research and development, which makes the market for each product not have too many competitors.In the United States, most major IT markets have only two main competitors, one big and one small.For example, in terms of computer processor chips, there are only Intel and AMD; in terms of high-end systems and services, there are only IBM and Sun; in terms of personal computers, there are HP and Dell (Dell is a bit strange, does it invest heavily in R&D?).Secondly, due to the strong hardware support, applications that were unimaginable before will continue to emerge.For example, twenty years ago, the amount of calculation required to digitize high-definition movies (1920x1080 resolution) could not even be handled by IBM's mainframe; now, a Sony game console the size of a notebook can do it.This creates conditions for the birth of some new companies.For example, ten years ago, no one would think of starting a company like YouTube, because the speed of the Internet at that time could not meet the requirements of watching videos online; now YouTube has been integrated into the lives of ordinary people.Likewise, R&D now must target the market many years from now.We might as well look back ten years. If I now propose that the speed of Internet access in every household will increase by a thousand times in ten years, some people may think I am crazy.In fact, this is a perfectly achievable goal.If this is done, each of our families can order three high-definition, surround sound movies at the same time and watch them on three different TV sets.You can also fast forward and jump to the next chapter at any time, and you can continue to read it next time after stopping at any time.While watching three movies, we can store our own photos, videos, files and other information on an online server, and accessing it from home is as fast as storing it on our own machine.This is not a fantasy I invented, but an IPTV plan implemented by companies such as Cisco and Microsoft.Third, existing IT companies must have a way to eliminate the unfavorable factors brought about by Moore's Law, that is, the price will be halved every eighteen months.We discuss this in the next two sections.