[antiRepublicrat]

Isn’t this the whole reason they went to multi core CPUs? They know they cant keep up moore’s law forever so they are hedging their bets and providing themselves a way to increase computing power without needing a die shrink every 20 month

Moore's Law is what's letting them put multiple CPUs on the same chip.

[mamelukesabre]

My understanding is that they were at the edge of moore’s law. They knew this because the “yield” of CPUs that passed the performance check was so low that it was almost not worth making them anymore.

Then along comes this idea of multiple “cores”. If I get it right, the purpose of the multiple cores was to increase the yield of functional CPUs. You see, if you have a quad core chip, and one or two of the cores don’t meet performance specs, you simply disable the bad cores and then sell it as a “two core” CPU. You don’t get as much money selling it as a double core, but it’s way better than zip.

Essentially, they hit the wall already. Moore’s law has already broke down. Multi core chips is a neat little trick to improve beyond the death of moore’s law.

That’s my understanding anyway.