Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kennywinker 1372 days ago
> The PS5 has about an order of magnitude more processing power than the base PS4 and Moore's law states that computing power doubles every two years, which means it gains an order of magnitude every 6 or 7 years

That's not what moore's law is. Moore's law says that TRANSISTOR COUNT will double every 2 years.

> Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Back to the ps4 and ps5:

> Each of the PS5’s CUs has roughly 60 percent more transistors

- https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/ps4-vs-ps5/

From the same page, the original PS4 had 18 CUs, the PS5 has 36 CUs.

So if the PS4's transistor count is (n x 18), the PS5's transistor count is (n x 38 x 1/0.6) = (n x 63.3333) - which is only 3.5x

If moore's law had held you'd expect a multiple of 8 or 16, not 3.5.

Moore's law is dead, and the new console generation proves it.

1 comments

First off, your calculation is wrong because these chips are not the same size. Secondly, if you actually go with the definition of Moore's law, my argument still holds - and it's trivial to prove. From your linked article:

>Moore's law [states] the number of transistors that could be housed in a dense integrated circuit [doubles every X]

(emphasis mine)

The PS4 GPU was a 28nm chip and PS5's is a 7nm one. A factor four reduction in length between transistor terminals equates to a factor of 16 increase in transistors that could be housed in one unit of area. That's precisely what you'd have expected from your definition of Moore's law. In reality there's a bit more to it, like efficiency and power consumption (Moore included that in his original estimate), which slightly lessen whole deal of increasing compute power. But as stated in my first comment, it still holds as an OOM increase when you look at raw FLOPs in the end, which is what we expected.