Why does the Computational Power of Chips grow somewhat formulaic without major Spikes?

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Moore’s Law by the co-founder of Intel stated that the number of transistors on a Chip doubles every two years, which has been roughly true of several decades.

And there have also been somewhat formulaic increases to [Frequency and Cores Count.](https://i.imgur.com/XbMffI8.jpg)

I wonder what the Holdup is preventing power spikes. Like why did they not quadruple the transistors or increase frequency further. When extra Cores were invented and Intel built the Duo, then Quattro Processors, why did they not extrapolate the technology and build the Twelve-Core-CPUs of today or even 48-Core-CPUs of the future right then and there?

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8 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

So … many companies have done this, you’ve just not heard of them. Here’s one: https://www.cerebras.net/product-chip/

It’s possible you’re misunderstanding the nuance of Moore’s Law. It’s not simply that the “number of transistors in a chip double every two years,” it’s that the number of transistors *at the same cost* doubles every two years. Oversimplified: a 4-core smartphone CPU might cost (for example) $50 this year, so the same $50 will afford an 8-core CPU in two years. Meaning you get a higher performance phone, and … the whole phone still costs the same $200 each time. You could jump to a killer 64-core design instead, and … for $550 have a phone with one eighth the battery life, ending up no longer in the smartphone business anymore.

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