A short introduction into the End of moores law

 

Before its possible to explain why the law is dead, let us give a short overview what the original idea was. Until the year 2010, the moores law was an unwritten rule, how much faster a new CPU is. The observation of Gordon Moore (the founder of Intel) was that the transistor count doubles every 18 months which is equal to an exponential growth. If the CPU has twice as much transistor it delivers also twice as much performance.

To verify if this law is valid, we need to determine the Compound Annual Growth Rate value for the Gflops of newly produced CPU over multiple years. Or in more simpler terms, an Excel sheet is created with different processors over the years which are compared to each other. To simplify the task, i've selected the Thinkpad laptop, because precise information about the CPU in this hardware is available which allows to create a precise table.

A CAGR value of 0.59 means, that a new generation of a laptop delivers 59% improvement in performance than the laptop one year ago, which is equal to the moores law ratio (doubling performance every 18 months). According to the figure, until the year 2010 a CAGR value of 0.4 upto 0.6 was available which is close to the moores law. Unfurtunately, the performance improvement has reduced after 2010 drastically to around 0.20.

The possible explanation is, that its much harder to increase the speed anymore, if the level is higher. Improving a 1 gflops CPU by 50% is much easier, than improving a 100 gflop CPU by 50%. This dilemma is called the “End of moores law”.

A realistic growth rate estimation for future Thinkpads and other Laptop models is a CAGR of 0.15 which is equal to 15% speed improvement every year. It will take 5 years, until the performance of a CPU is twice as fast which is much longer than the assumption of 18 months formulated by Moore.

year	Thinkpad	CPU	Gflops	CAGR 5y
2000	T21	Intel M Pentium III Copermine 800 Mhz*	0.4
2001	T23	Intel Pentium III-M Tualatin 1.13 Ghz*	0.6
2002	T30	Intel Pentium IV-M 2 Ghz*	1.5
2003	T41	Intel Pentium M Banias 1.6 Ghz*	2.5
2004	T42	Intel Pentium M Dothan 1.8 Ghz*	3.0
2005	T43	Intel Pentium M750*	3.5	0.54
2006	T60	Intel core 2 duo T5500*	8.0	0.68
2007	T61	Intel core 2 duo T7300*	11.0	0.49
2008	T61 same	Intel core 2 duo T7300*	11.0	0.34
2009	T400	Intel core 2 duo P8600*	19.2	0.45
2010	T410	Intel i7-620M	21.3	0.44
2011	T420	Intel i7-2640M	44.8	0.41
2012	T430	Intel i7-3520M	46.4	0.33
2013	T440	Intel i7-4600U	67.2	0.44
2014	T440 same	Intel i7-4600U	67.2	0.28
2015	T450	Intel i7-5600U	83.2	0.31
2016	T460	Intel i7-6600U	83.2	0.13
2017	T470	Intel i7-7600U	89.6	0.14
2018	T480	Intel i7-8650U	121.6	0.13
2019	T490	Intel i7-8565U	115.2	0.07
2020	T14 Gen1	Intel Core i7-10610U	115.2	0.07
2021	T14 Gen2	Intel i7-1185G7	192.0	0.16
2022	T14 Gen3	Intel i7-1255U	272.0	0.17
2023	T14 Gen4	Intel i7-1365U	288.0	0.20
2024	T14 Gen5	Intel Core Ultra 7 155U*	307.2	0.22
total				0.32

* gflops is an estimation
sources:
thinkwiki.de
thinkwiki.org
wikipedia.org
intel.com Intel APP metrics for Intel Microprocessors
notebookcheck.net