[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“In 1965, Intel’s future founder Gordon Moore observed that the
number of components in the average integrated circuit was doubling
every year in relation to cost. Though it originally described a
specific trend in chip manufacturing, ‘Moore’s Law’ proved
remarkably predictive of advances in other high-tech industries.
However, as Moore was aware, exponential growth is unlimited only
in the mathematical sense. Many industries fail to fulfill his
prophecy.“For instance, memory access times are increasing more slowly
than processor speeds, resulting in a processor-memory gap. Today’s
processors typically spend more time waiting for data to be
retrieved than processing it. Consequently, modern computers are
stuffed with software and hardware caches, so that frequently used
data need not be retrieved from memory repeatedly. Mismatched
component performance of this sort limits a system’s capabilities,
but clever design can usually ameliorate the deficiencies…”