[perching_aix]

It's starting to get a bit old that whenever I see Moore's law mentioned, I'll usually also run into a spiel about how people have the wrong idea about what it actually refers to, and that it's holding up just fine. This is despite the gen-on-gen and year-on-year performance improvements of computer hardware very clearly tapering off in recent memory.

Maybe debating what always-somehow-wrong law to cite should not be the focus? Like it's very clear to me that being technically correct about what Moore's law or the Dennard scaling refers to is leaps and bounds less important than the actual, practical computing performance trends that have been observable in the market.

[Kon5ole]

What we see in the market is caused by software bloat. Chips are gaining performance faster than ever in absolute terms.

I think Moore’s law should be avoided altogether when discussing progress in this area, because it’s hard to understand the effects of doubling intuitively. Rice grains on chessboards and all that.

One might think ”Moore’s law is slowing down” means progress was faster before and slower now, when it is in fact completely opposite.

If you consider the 20 years between the intel 286 and the pentium 3, transistor count went from about 150 thousand to 10 million.

Today (using the ryzen 5950 and 7950 as examples), we got 5 Billion more transistors in just 2 years.

So in 2 years we added 500 times more transistors to our cpus than the first 20 years of “prime Moore’s law” did.

This enormous acceleration of progress is increasingly unnoticed due to even faster increases in software bloat, and the fact that most users aren’t doing things with their computers where they can notice any improvements in performance.

[perching_aix]

> Chips are gaining performance faster than ever in absolute terms.

But this is not what I as a consumer end up seeing at all. Consider the RTX 5090. Gen-on-gen (so, compared to the 4090), for 20-30% more money, using 20-30% more power, you get 20-30% more raster performance. Meaning the generational improvement is 0, software nonwithstanding.

> If you consider the 20 years between the intel 286 and the pentium 3, transistor count went from about 150 thousand to 10 million. Today (using the ryzen 5950 and 7950 as examples), we got 5 Billion more transistors in just 2 years.

Why would you bring absolute values into comparison with a relative value? Why compare the 286 and the P3 and span 20 years when you can match the 2 year timespan of your Ryzen comparison, and pit the P2 ('97) against the P3 ('99) instead? Mind you, that would reveal a generational improvement of 7.5M -> 28M transistors, a relative difference of +273%! Those Ryzens went from 8.3B to 13.2B, a +59% difference. But even this is misleading, because we're not considering die area or any other parameter.

[Kon5ole]

>But this is not what I as a consumer end up seeing at all. Consider the RTX 5090. Gen-on-gen (so, compared to the 4090), for 20-30% more money, using 20-30% more power, you get 20-30% more raster performance. Meaning the generational improvement is 0, software nonwithstanding.

The 4090 and 5090 are the same generation in reality, using the same process node. The 5090 is a bit larger but only has about 20% more transistors of the same type compared to the 4090. Which of course explains the modest performance boosts.

Nvidia could have made the 5090 on a more advanced node but they are in a market position where they can keep making the best products on an older (cheaper) node this time.

>Why would you bring absolute values into comparison with a relative value? Why compare the 286 and the P3 and span 20 years when you can match the 2 year timespan of your Ryzen comparison, and pit the P2 ('97) against the P3 ('99) instead? Mind you, that would reveal a generational improvement of 7.5M -> 28M transistors, a relative difference of +273%!

That was my point though, to highlight how relative differences in percentages represent vastly different actual performance jumps. It quickly becomes meaningless since it's not the percentages that matter, it is the actual number of transistors.

To put it another way - If you take the first pentium with about 3 million transistors as a baseline, you can express performance increases in "how many pentiums are we adding" instead of using percentages, and note that we are adding orders of magnitude more "pentiums of performance" per generation now than we did 10 years ago.

[short_sells_poo]

You seem to be completely confused about why absolute vs relative matters. Moore's law literally states: "[Moore's law] is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years".

This is literally a relative measurement. You cannot reason about Moore's Law in absolute changes.

The other poster has laid it out for you in the simplest terms: a 1 billion transistor increase could mean anything. It could be a 1000% improvement - which is absolutely humongous - or a 10% improvement, which is basically irrelevant. If you want to measure how impactful an increase is, you have to look at relative change. 1 billion transistors on it's own means nothing. It is only interesting with respect to the number of transistors in the previous generation - which is a relative change measurement.

Say we are at Generation 1 with 100 billion transistors. By your reasoning, if we add 1 more billion of transistors to this, that's big. 1 billion transistors are a lot. But this is absolutely incorrect! Because we started out with 100 billion transistors, the change is actually irrelevant.

[Kon5ole]

>You seem to be completely confused about why absolute vs relative matters.

[..]

>This is literally a relative measurement. You cannot reason about Moore's Law in absolute changes.

This is exactly my point. I said exactly the same thing as you: "I think Moore’s law should be avoided altogether when discussing progress in this area"!

Performance is an absolute thing, not a relative thing. Amount of work per second, not percentage-over-previous!

Doubling means that each step encompasses the sum of all previous steps. Every step gives vastly more performance than any preceding step.

If a generation gives 60% more performance and all previous generations gave 100%, the latest jump will still be the one that added the most performance.

I think this is often overlooked and worth mentioning. People are actually complaining about performance jumps that are the biggest performance jumps ever seen because they are thinking in percentages. It makes no sense.

[short_sells_poo]

I disagree on this: "Performance is an absolute thing"

I think the core misunderstanding is what is being discussed. You say "Performance is an absolute thing, not a relative thing. Amount of work per second, not percentage-over-previous!"

But nobody here is concerned with the absolute performance number. Absolute performance is only about what we can do right now with what we have. The discussion is about the performance improvements and how they evolve over time.

Performance improvements are inherently a relative metric. The entire industry, society and economy - everything is built on geometric growth expectations. You cannot then go back to the root metric and say "ah but what really matters is that we can now do X TFlops more", when that number is a mere 10% improvement, nobody will care.

Built into everything around computing is the potential for geometric growth. Startups, AI, video games - it's all predicated on the expectation that our capabilities will grow in geometric fashion. The only way to benchmark geometric growth is by using % improvements. Again, it is wholly irrelevant to everyone that the 5090 can do 20 tflops more than the 4090. 20 TFlops is some number, but whether it is a big improvement or not - ie is it expanding our capabilities at the expected geometric rate or not - is not possible to divine from this number.

And when we look it up, it turns up that we went from 80 tflops to 100 tflops, which is a paltry 25% increase, well short of the expectations of performance growth from Nvidia which was in the 50% region.

20 tflops might or might not be a lot. The only way to judge is to compare how much of an improvement it is relative to what we could have before.

[perching_aix]

> That was my point though, to highlight how relative differences in percentages represent vastly different actual performance jumps. It quickly becomes meaningless since it's not the percentages that matter, it is the actual number of transistors.

But it is the percentage that matters? If I have 10B transistors and I add 1B to it, the speedup I can expect is 10%. If I have 1B transistors and add 1B to it, the speedup I can expect is 100%. Tremendous difference. Why would I ever care about the absolute number of transistors added?

[Kon5ole]

>But it is the percentage that matters? If I have 10B transistors and I add 1B to it, the speedup I can expect is 10%. If I have 1B transistors and add 1B to it, the speedup I can expect is 100%. Tremendous difference. Why would I ever care about the absolute number of transistors added?

Because it's the transistors that actually matter for performance.

If a unit of work (number of files compiled, number of triangles generated or whatever else) takes 1 billion transistors to complete in 1 second, you have gained the same amount of work per second by adding 10% to the latter as you gained by adding 100% to the former.

How much performance you need to feel a difference in a given workload is a separate point, and note that usually the workload changes with the hardware. Compiling the linux kernel in 2025 is a different workload than it was in 2005, for example, and running quake 3 is a different workload than cyberpunk 2077.

If you play a modern game, you don't notice a difference between a 10 year old GPU and a 12 year old GPU - even though one might be twice as fast, they might both be in the single digits of FPS wich feels equally useless.

So we gain more from the hardware than we used to, but since the software is doing more work we're not noticing it as much.

[perching_aix]

I legitimately just do not see the utility of framing the topic this way.

Benchmarking efforts usually involve taking the same amount or type of work, and comparing the runtime durations or throughputs in turn for different hardware.

Rasterization performance benchmarks for the 5090 revealed exactly the same +20% difference we see in transistor count. This is why I do not see the utility in remarking that in absolute terms we're adding more transistors than ever, because this is basically never what matters in practice. I have a set workload and I want it to go some amount faster.

Software sprawl is an issue no doubt, but that on its own is a separate discussion. It bears light relation with the absolute vs. relative differences discussion we're having here.

> How much performance you need to feel a difference in a given workload is a separate point

It was exactly the point I said at the start should be the point of focus. Maybe we're talking past one another, I don't know.

[relaxing]

Moore’s law never mentioned die area, and not because Gordon thought die sizes would never grow.

[Ekaros]

Take density per mm^2 going from 122.9 to 125.3 that is 2% increase in little over 2 years. Which does not bode well for needing to double in same period.

[_0ffh]

> This enormous acceleration of progress is increasingly unnoticed due to even faster increases in software bloat

Can't resist to throw in this quote (from one of Wirth's students I think):

"Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."

[brookst]

The spirit of Moore’s law is alive and well. It’s just that it doesn’t cover the whole story; it ignores efficiency, because that wasn’t a huge concern back then.

Sure, it’s not literally true of literal transistor density, but it feels arrogant to invent new names for the overall phenomenon that Moore observed. Like the way we still talk about Newton’s laws despite very valid “actually technically” incompleteness.

[sitkack]

It is ultimately a market effect, the technical specifics are not really important and are even conflated by industry insiders. See my sibling comment.