Except... the number of transistors in a CPU is irrelevant!

No, it's very relevant.

A CPU doesn't have the transistor density that really benefits much from Moore's Law - because the vast majority of the space on a chip is not taken up by transistors, but by wiring. In fact, the wiring density is what's limiting transistor density (a good thing - larger transistors can give you better performance because they can drive the longer wires quicker).

How much wiring happens on doped silicon? None. The vast majority of the chip is covered in transistors, with 6-10 levels of wires on top of them. There are some designs where the I/O count demands so many pins that's what dictates the size of the chip -- so cache is filled in underneath. Heck, if your power budget allows it, you're already blowing the silicon area anyway, might as well increase your cache size! Consider your recent Core derived designs. Take away half the cache. Do you think the die area would go down? Not hardly.

Most of the transistors used in a CPU actually goes towards the cache - when you're talking about 16+ MB of pure L1/L2/L3 cache, implemented as 6T SRAM cells, that's 100M transistors right there (and that doesn't include the cache line tag logic and CAM).

You did the math right, but the cache line tag logic and coupled CAM are negligible. Sure, they may add a few million or so, but not anywhere near 5% of 100M.

The thing with the highest transistor density (and thus the most benefit of Moore's Law) is actually memory structures - caches, DRAM, SRAM, flash memory, etc. This is where each transistor is vital to memory storage and packing them in close means more storage is available, in which case Moore's law states that RAM etc. will double in capacity or halve in cost every 18 months or so.

I realize it's vogue for people to revisit Moore's Law and rewrite it every few years, but he was not speaking specifically about memory arrays. In fact, the chips Moore had access to at the time had very little memory on them.

Smaller transistors do help CPUs consume a little less power, but double the number of transistors doesn't do a whole lot because there's a lot of empty space that the wiring forces to be transistor-free. (Non-memory parts of the CPU are effectively "random logic" where there's no rhyme or reason to the wiring). It's why the caches have the most transistors yet take the smallest areas.

Wiring never forces silicon area to be transistor-free, unless you're thinking of 1980 era chips. Not even late '80s had wiring on doped silicon. Certainly the kinds of chips Moore was talking about has had no significant wiring on doped silicon in 20 years, the exceptions being only when layout designers are getting lazy. I've done layout design, I've done circuit design, I've audited dozens of chip layouts and seen several technology manuals dating back to the 90s.

That random logic, by the way, is the subject of the most innovation in the field of chip layout and arguably in all of chip design. When your chip's entire goal is to funnel data through different units and do different things to it, you're dominated by buses. Automated tools often do split these buses up, but different algorithms can pull them together and make them more efficient. Caches are the smallest because they can be small. There's an entire periphery to them, including senseamps devoted to reading the baby FETs that can't make full rail to rail swings on the bitlines.

May I guess you're a student? Perhaps one who is learning from a professor who hasn't been in the industry since about 1985?

I think most cop shops are afraid of something happening like occurred with the video of Rodney King's beatdown, in which the news snipped off crucial sections in which King repeatedly lunged at police. In addition, they tended not to mention his 100+mph evasion attempt, his prior criminal record or his extensive drug use. We all know how that turned out.

So the beating was justified then? Wow.

The claim is that it uses the same technology as the Power7 chip. It could very well be an overclocked triple core Wii chip made in 45nm SOI with eDRAM. Hint hint.

Or as a quant on Wall St.

According to Wikipedia, it was released on September 24 1993 for Mac and PC. It's easy to think it was a Mac exclusive, reading that article, as it was programmed with Hypercard and Quicktime, on Quadras. I remember playing it at a friend's house (he actually had a CD-ROM drive), while I was a senior in high school (1993-1994) and his was a PC-only house.

Those were the days when Mac was easiest to use to write multimedia software, best for Photoshop and barely used by home users.

It's a problem if your clients are not smart enough to do that. Last week I had a presentation with an "embedded video" and all they brought on their USB drive was SHORTCUT to the video file that lived on their office server. They of course blamed my platform (MacBookPro running Windows 7) and made certain the entire audience knew it was my fault.

As I write this I'm playing a PPT sponsor loop at a fundraiser, and half of the fonts used in the presentation are missing. No one has noticed yet.

...if it means I don't have to fart around with reformatting at teh last minute in Keynote, Page and Numbers on an iPad, or any of the other feeble attempts at Office compatibility to do a presentation, then that's just fine by me.

Just wait until you try to open an Office document that uses a font outside the small subset of fonts included with the Surface. Hell, just opening a PPT on any laptop other than the one it was created on often requires last minute editing to get everything on the screen.

State University systems can own thousands of acres of land not actually being used as campus land. A large portion of the University of Texas's income comes from leases operated on UT-owned land. In fact, there is an entire entity solely dedicated to handing this for UT: University Lands. It's unlikely that Pennsylvania is looking to lease Campus Commons areas. More likely they are simply making it possible for unused land owned by the system to bring in funds for the State University System.

Ads don't support the internet. Users support the internet. Content attracts the users. Ads support SOME of the content.

Of course an advertising organization would twist this.

If you've violated probation, you've shown to the courts that you cannot be trusted. No bond is the correct action here.

The penalty for under-consumption should never be more than the cost of the electricity that one would have to consume to avoid the penalty. There's no point in motivating them to *waste* electricity.

Romney's response to Question 11:

For example, his “Utility MACT” rule is purportedly aimed at reducing mercury pollution, yet the EPA estimates that the rule will cost $10 billion to reduce mercury pollution by only $6 million (with an “m”).

I understand the cost of a reduction being $10 billion. What does it mean to say that the extent of a reduction in mercury pollution is measured in dollars?

Disbelief in evolution is disbelief in antibiotic resistance in contagious and harmful bacteria (MRSA for example). Evolution explains how some bacteria are able to randomly survive exposure to antibiotics and produce offspring with similar resistance. With successive generations and successive random variations, additional resistances can be distilled.

Evolution explains how weeds can become Round-Up resistant. Genetically modified and manipulated plants are about as "intelligently designed" as you get, but there evolution is, randomly guiding plants to do successively better with each generation against this poison. If nothing else, this demonstrates that "intelligent design" and "evolution" have similar outcomes in similar time (I'll grant that intelligent design beat evolution by a decade, but I maintain that isn't a relevant time period).

Disobeying a law via action that can not lead to physical harm is equivalent to sitting at the front of a bus regardless of the colour of your skin.

If I torrent The Big Bang Theory, I am not the moral equivalent of Rosa Parks. Someone who sat at the front of the bus, despite the color of her skin was in fact risking that skin. There was a very large social structure invested in keeping the races segregated and people were beaten and/or killed for violating that.

Deciding that The Big Bang Theory is worth $0.25, not $1, per episode without commercials when the distributor doesn't need to pay distribution costs may be morally right. Stating that using copyright law (according to the U.S. Constitution, for the furthering of art and science) should not apply in the case of sharing King of Thrones because a lot of people would love to throw money at the copyright owners, but are unwilling or unable to pay for cable + HBO may be morally acceptable, but they are not the modern equivalent of Rosa Parks. Although the guy who tirelessly encodes the material and provides it to the group to seed is risking his freedom and financial well-being, he is not risking his life.

"Tyranny of the majority" is when two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for lunch.
(Attribution unknown.)