What happened to Moore's Law?

[YoyoBoy]

It's been 3½ years since I bought my $3,000 laptop. It has a dual quad-core 3.33 GHz i7 975 processor in it. It has a CPU benchmark rating of 6.264. I believe -if Moore's Law were in effect- that I should be able to get a new computer for roughly the same price that has a benchmark rating of around 30, but the highest rating currently on that board is 14.586.

Are the numbers on that chart exponential, like a Richter scale, or are Intel and AMD slacking?

[vlado]

Things have certainly slowed down. Clock speeds can't go much higher and you can only fit in so many cores in a single CPU. The next time they shrink the transistor size, things will probably improve again slightly.

Best regards,
Vlado

[zoranm]

I'm waiting for new "quantum" computers and than I'll upgrade
I'll render all my jobs "Brute force" 1000 subdivisions

[duke2]

There's an interesting story with hard drives as well. They can only fit so many plates in a disk, and they've managed to cram in 4TB, but they're pretty much at the limit of the current tech. Conversely, SSD's suffer performance loss the larger they are, so theres not a lot of reason to make them bigger - only to push the performance and stability of the current sizes. IMO hardware is about where i'd expect it, but software (present company excepted, of course) long ago stopped going to the gym...

A perfect example is Acdsee. Does anyone remember when it was an image viewer? Then they turned it into a all-purpose toolbox and it became a bloated mess. Another example is C# - it was only recently that C# 5 came out and they fixed the major issues they had with garbage collection (memory management stuff) and large garbage collection on the 64bit platform. This is one of those behind the scene things that has huge implications further down the chain to end users. The third example is partly the result of hardware vendors not getting their shit together with regards to their API's. Consider GPU computing. We had OpenCL, then we had CUDA, then we got compute shaders with DX11 and OGL 4? AMD has, or used to have serious OpenCL driver issues, CUDA is Nvidia only, and compute shaders are solidly aimed at the games market. Consider also Embree. It seems to me it's still very much a work in progress, that only works on Intel CPU's, even though it builds on AVX which is available on both Intel and AMD cpus (2011+). As much as developers would like to choose the right hardware for the job and accelerate certain things on the GPU, a unified approach is still practically non-existent.

Ok i'm done.

edit: Oh and then you have inappropriate synchronous code and inappropriate asynchronous code, which both make for a laggy experience for the user (either because everything is being done linearly, or because your system is spending more time synchronizing between threads than doing the actual multi-threaded work).