Oracle President predicts end of Moore's Law

September 8, 2005

In this article we see Oracle Corporation President Charles Phillips predict the end of Moore’s Law:

http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid41_gci1114656,00.html?track=NL-94&ad=525054

"Moore's Law is coming to an end … we are not seeing the same price performance improvement we have seen in the past," Phillips said.

The 18-month rule where chip performance would double and prices would drop no longer applies as strictly as it once did, Phillips continued.

Moore’s Law states that computer processors will continually fall while speed improves, but some note that Moore’s law only applies to CPU, not disk and RAM. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel corporation, has published details on his law for the period up to 2005:

The article concludes:

However, King noted that the company's MegaGrid project (announced last December in conjunction with Dell and others) seemed to be closer to a conventional cluster than an actual grid.

"It's probably a matter of perspective, but I think the folks supporting and/or extending tools and apps developed via grid standards have the upper hand here," King said. "IBM's Grid and Grow [offering] leverages the company's BladeCenter solutions, offers Xeon, Opteron and Power servers, and supports Red Hat/SuSE Linux, Windows and AIX.

There is a debate in the Oracle community about whether the future is with networked grid servers or with large monolithic servers. Proponents of the mainframe approach say that performance might be faster when processors can be shared within the same server, facilitating faster parallel processing.

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