Is the Transistor Count in Processors Still Doubling Every 24 Months?

[2048Megabytes]

In 1965 Gordon Moor stated something which has come to be known as Moore's Law. Moore' law predicts that chips and computers will steadily increase and engineers can double the number of transistors on a processor chip every 24 months. Is the transistor count in central processing units still doubling every 24 months?

 

[Cromewell]

Yes. At every IDF I can remember Intel has dedicated at least 1 slide to Moore's Law.

That's what it's been like with Moore's Law. We thought there were physical limits and we casually speak about going to 10 nanometres. "We have work going on different transistor structures. Silicon has become scaffolding for the rest of the periodic table. We're putting these other structures into the materials. We see no end in sight and we've had 10 years of visibility for the last 30 years.

 

[2048Megabytes]

Wow, that is insane to think about. The current i7 processors have close to 731 million transistors in them. The Phenom II Quad-Core processors have near 758 million transistors in them. That means by October 2011 processors will be being produced with close to 1.4 billion transistors in them!

 

[Cromewell]

Look at how many transistors are on the ATI 5870s (2.15B), or the GTX 285, GTX 275, GTX 260 Core 216 (1.4B each). Now think about what they will do in 2 years time

 

[viper110110]

originally I believe it was 1 year