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Like many things, Moore’s law is garbled when adopted by analogy outside its domain.

What does “more transistors” mean? To you, it means just what Gordon Moore means when he said it: opportunity for more function in same space/cost.

The laypersons, marketing grabbed the term and said it would imply “faster”. Which then was absurdly conflated with CPU clock speed (itself an important input, though hardly the only one, determining the actual speed of A system).

The use here is of the “garbled analogy” sort which surely is the dominant use today.



Yes but that aspect of Moore's law for CPUs expired over a decade ago. It's the whole reason we got multicore in the first place.


Even with multi-core, a CPU today is only 6x faster than a 10-year old CPU.


The difference might be even less. 4 Sandy Bridge cores (excluding memory controller and graphics) were not much bigger than the current 8 core Zen 2 die.

Certainly the peak performance you can put in a socket is much higher, but it's got more silicon in it than it used to.




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