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Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead

UC Berkeley EECS

11K subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 8 people: 7 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2025.
  • Presented by Jim Keller, microprocessor engineer
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

77K views7 years ago8 recommendations

HardwareSystems programmingCPUs and computer architecturePerformance and optimizationThe tech industry

Jim Keller argues that Moore's Law continues to thrive through multiple overlapping innovation curves in semiconductor fabrication and computer architecture.

EECS Colloquium Wednesday, September 18, 2019 306 Soda Hall (HP Auditorium) 4-5p Captions available upon request

Why it's here

8 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an insightful perspective from a legendary chip designer on why transistor and performance scaling will continue.

systemvoltageon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Moore's Law, AI, and the pace of progress”

They've been saying Moore's law is dead for 20+ years. Reasons usually quoted for Moore's law's death are quite narrowly focused on a particular technology stack, whereas semiconductor fabrication happens on a complex web of technologies all moving forward with their own S-curves. It is worth watching Jim Keller's lecture at UC Berkeley literally titled "Moore's law is not dead". He talks on a different level alltogether and far more convincing than the pedantic look at the details that enable Moore's law. link to this video
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timschmidton Hacker News • Recommends

On “DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf]”

Someone always crawls out of the woodwork to repeat this supposed "fact" which hasn't been true for the entire half-century it's been repeated. Jim Keller (designer of most of the great CPUs of the last couple decades) gave a convincing presentation several years ago about just how not-true it is: link to this video Everything he says in it still applies today. Intel struggled for a decade, and folks think that means Moore's law died. But TSMC and Samsung just kept iterating. And hopefully Intel's 18a process will see them back in the game.
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agent281on Lobsters • Recommends

Moore’s Law is Not Dead
5View on Lobsters

lliamanderon Hacker News • Recommends

On “AMD Rome – is it for real? Architecture and initial HPC performance”

There's a good talk by him about how Moore's law isn't dead: link to this video . Obviously, people have different ideas about what they mean when they say "Moore's law is/is not dead", but I appreciate Jim's point that even if the current innovation curves we've been riding are slowing down, there are other innovation curves that we can take advantage of, and that the combination these curves mean that there's still plenty of innovation and improvement to be made in processor design. Of course, the question of whether the x86 architecture will be the foundation for that future improvement remains to be seen. ARM and RISC-V are both eating x86 from below, and the fact that both of the processor archite…
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WillPostForFoodon Hacker News • Recommends

On “AMD is having its day”

Jim Keller recently spoke at UC, on the topic of Moore's law not being dead. Very impressive guy. link to this video
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aklascheemaon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Intel’s Manufacturing Roadmap from 2019 to 2029”

There is this interesting talk by Jim Keller. Talks about new approaches (different transistor tech, architecture, etc) to keep moores law going for another decade or so. You should defintely check it out if have time. link to this video
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JB_Devon Hacker News • Recommends

On “ASML and Samsung seal deal on 2nm chips”

I used to agree with you until I saw this presentation by Jim Keller, one of the biggest names in chip architecture. It really illustrates how many more options we have to improve performance. link to this video
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gfodyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Moore on Moore – The past, present and uncertain future of Moore's Law”

Jim Keller gave a talk at Berkeley titled "Moore's Law is not dead" (2019) where he summarized a bunch of up and coming technologies that will enable the continued scaling of transistor density - link to this video
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timschmidton Hacker News • Recommends

On “TSMC to start building four new plants with 1.4nm technology”

> Moore's law is dead People have said this for decades. Jim Keller believes otherwise and brought receipts: link to this video
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soundson Hacker News • Mentions

On “AMD Rome – is it for real? Architecture and initial HPC performance”

Especially the part at link to this video That Sunny Cove architecture slide shows a massive increase in the number of execution units. It may be that Intel's next architecture, combined with memory speed improvements, is competitive with AMD. But AMD also isn't sitting still. AMD's contributions (from what I can tell) include: * Core counts have blown past 6 cores / 12 threads * CPU prices have just been cut by half * PCIe lanes have blown way past 8 * ECC ram is being offered in consumer PCs
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CalChrison Hacker News • Mentions

On “Jim Keller to Depart Intel”

Jim Keller giving a talk on Moore's Law at Berkeley, link to this video And another link And another link DEC, PA Semi, Apple, AMD, Tesla, Intel. He's been everywhere. link The internal announcement memo: link
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Pandabobon Hacker News • Mentions

On “My AI Timelines Have Sped Up”

Here's a random collection of thoughts that I have about the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI): Machine learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) in particular benefit from fast computer chips. The most impressive gains in AI in the 2010s (Computer Vision & Natural Language Processing) were made thanks to DL. There's a famous post by AI researcher Rich Sutton, which summarises this fairly neatly 1. Now, this connection between DL and fast chips would tie the progress of AI pretty tightly to the progress of Moore's Law 2. There's some compelling evidence that Moore's Law is at least slowing down 3. On the other hand, there are industry experts like Jim Keller who pretty strongly disag…
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szatkuson Hacker News • Mentions

On “TSMC confirms 3nm tech for 2022, could enable epic 80B transistor GPUs”

For quite some time these nanometers is only a name. The only limitation right now is imagination of people working in TSMC and other (also money, I guess). Here's a video of Jim Keller presenting Intel's share of tricks for a few future generations: link to this video
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panick21_on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Gordon Moore, Intel Co-Founder, Dies at 94”

Actually Moores law is dead. His prediction was not transistors would get smaller. His prediction was initial that for 10 years was that density would double every year. And then later that it would double every 18 month. And this held longer then even he thought. But it has ended. While things still get denser, its no longer on that same trend. This interview with Moore explains it: link History by Cantrill: link David Patterson perspective: link Opposing point of view Jim Keller: link to this video Patterson response to Keller: link There are talks by David Patterson, Jim Keller and
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epicureanidealon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Is Moore's Law Over, or Not?”

According to Jim Keller, not dead: link to this video This isn’t the best recording on YouTube but it’s late and I couldn’t quickly find the other one.
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ly3xqhl8g9on Hacker News • Mentions

On “ASML EUV Lithography Machine Could Keep Moore’s Law on Track”

…1], and practical 2). For more technical details see Jim Keller: 3 4 5. 1 link 2 The ~12 watts computer inside each living human adult skull (and perhaps each eukaryote cell 6) is still the state-of-the-art, for quite some time. 3 2021, Jim Keller: The Secret to Moore's Law , link 4 2019, Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead , link to this video 5 2023, Change w/ Jim Keller , link 6 Our computers aren't yet able of polycomputation, where the computation topology, data, and functions depend on the observer, instead of computation in a passive implementation, once done forever set in s̶t̶o̶n̶e̶ silicon, 2023, Michael Levin, Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation i…
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