NVIDIA VP Declares Moore's Law Dead, GPUs Are Computing's Only Hope

Daily Tech ^ | May 3, 2010 10:33 AM | Jason Mick (Blog)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

In NVIDIA's eye the parallelism of the GPU is the only future for computing

NVIDIA has struggled this time around in the GPU war.  Its first DirectX 11 products were delivered a full seven months after AMD's.  While its new units are at last trickling onto the market and are very powerful, they're also hot, loud, and power hogs.  However, NVIDIA is staking much on the prediction that the computer industry will be ditching traditional architectures and moving towards parallel designs; a movement which it sees its CUDA GPU computing as an ideal solution for.

Intel and NVIDIA have long traded jabs, and Intel's recent failed GPU bid, Larrabee, does little to warm to the ice.  In a recent op-ed entitled "Life After Moore's Law", published in Forbes, NVIDIA VP Bill Dally attacks the very foundation of Intel's business -- Moore's Law -- declaring it dead.

Moore's Law stemmed from a paper [PDF] published by Gordon Moore 45 years ago this month.  Moore, co-founder of Intel, predicted in the paper that the number of transistors per area on a circuit would double every 2 years (later revised to 18 months).  This prediction was later extend to predict that computing power would roughly double every 18 months, a prediction that became known as Moore's Law.

Now with die shrinks becoming more problematic, NVIDIA is convinced the end is nigh for Moore's Law (and Intel).

[phil_t]

Yesterday I built a system for my daughter in a Cooler Master ATCS 840 case.. it’s a huge black case, with three 230mm cooling fans and one 120mm cooling fan (has locations for three more 120mm fans). Has six 5.25” front panel spaces, plus seven hard drive spaces inside (no screws required to hold any of the drives in-place). I’d never seen cooling fans that large in a tower case, yet they’re the quietest fans I’ve experienced— you have to listen closely to be sure its running. Motherboard is installed outside the case on a tray, and the tray then rolls in on ball-bearing rollers. She wanted serious cooling, and she got it. (And did I say it’s huge??)

[rarestia]

CM makes decent cases. I have access to sheet metal fabrication equipment, so I’ve made my cases for the last few years. Our CAD software is chock full of tower schemas, and they work out quite nicely.

I just looked up that case, and it is truly huge. Reminds me of the pre-AT case days where 5.25” was standard and 3.5” was just coming into play. Those were the days!