Originally posted by: dflynchimp
take into account inflation, and you should be more than happy with what you're getting on the dollar. Besides, performance scaling and price gauging versus time has never been in the same graph...
You may not realize it but there is some irony to what you posted, see the first graph (on second page) of Moore's original paper from 1965.
<a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://download.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf">ftp://download.intel.com/re......on/moorespaper.pdf</a>
Moore's law is based on the number of components per integrated circuit which minimizes manufacturing costs. The minimum found in lines from the first graph on page two is the value that goes into the second graph on page three.
Performance is actually not a metric of Moore's law, but the implication that performance increases commensurately with increasing components per integrated circuit is what drives the association of performance doubling every 2 yrs (more or less) to Moore's law.
But the truth of it is, if you read Moore's paper, that we see Moore's law already predicts the end of Moore's law. Again referring to the first graph, what we can expect these lines to look like as we move forward in time is that the spacing between the lines for each successive year will get less and less (the rate of cost reduction is decreasing because production costs are rising faster with each node) and the curvature of the line will get more and more flatter as the fixed costs (R&D for the process tech, mask sets for each device, fab setup costs) of producing an IC in an advanced node are beginning to dwarf the total sales volume generated by the IC itself.
The effect this has on the data point that goes into the second graph on page three (the graph we typically think of when we think of Moore's Law) is that the error bars on the y-axis for the data points get really large to the downside (because we don't have good curvature to easily define the number of components per IC that bring about a minimum in the relative manufacturing cost in the first graph on the second page.
And as you can see the shallow tail on the first graph favors the low-component count side, meaning the y-axis error bars on the second graph will be longer to the downside and shorter to the upside, meaning the line on Moore's graph is expected to bend-over and flatten out horizontally as the x-axis marches onwards from left to right.
It's all there, since 1965, cost basis and all.