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Forget Moore's Law?
Roland Piquepaille writes "On a day where CNET News.com releases a story named "Moore's Law to roll on for another decade," it's refreshing to look at another view. Michael S. Malone says we should forget Moore's law, not because it isn't true, but mainly because it has become dangerous. "An extraordinary announcement was made a couple of months ago, one that may mark a turning point in the high-tech story. It was a statement by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. His words were both simple and devastating: when asked how the 64-bit Itanium, the new megaprocessor from Intel and Hewlett-Packard, would affect Google, Mr. Schmidt replied that it wouldn't. Google had no intention of buying the superchip. Rather, he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors." Check this column for other statements by Marc Andreessen or Gordon Moore himself. If you have time, read the long Red Herring article for other interesting thoughts."
Well, it's not much different with 32bit address spaces. It's easy in tasks like speech recognition or video processing to use more than 4Gbytes of memory in a single process. Trying to squeeze that into a 32bit address space is a major hassle. And it's also soon going to be more expensive than getting a 64bit processor.
The Itanium and Opteron are way overpriced in my opinion. But 64bit is going to arrive--it has to.
Reply I've run into similar situations with clients of mine, when trying to figure out for them which the best solution for their new servers/etc would be.
:)
Time and time again, it always comes down to;
Buy them small and cheap, put them all together, and that way if one dies, it's a hell of a lot easier and less expensive to replace/repair/forget.
So Google's got the right idea, they're just confirming it for the rest of us!
I mean the guy was involved in Netscape.
He hit the lottery. He was a lucky stiff. I wish I was that lucky.
But that's all it was. And I don't begrudge him for it. But I don't take his advice.
As for google. Figure it out yourself.
Google isnt' driving the tech market. What's driving it are new applications like video processing that guess what...needs much faster processors than we've got now.
So while Google might not need faster processors, new applications do.
And I say that loving google, but its not cutting edge in terms of hardware. They have some good search algorithms.
The expectation that computing power will (essentially) double every 18 months drives business planning at chip makers, fab makers, software developers, everything in the tech industry. In other words, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I'm not doing it real justice, but Google (ironic, eh?) about the effects of moore's law for a much better explanation.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
*gag* Off Topic, but has *anyone* become as much of a caricture of themselves as Andreessen?
This business is changing fast? Look entirely different? Thanks for the tip Marc.
Cheers,
prat
Google had no intention of buying the superchip. Rather, he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors.
How is this not Moore's law? Maybe not in the strict sense of number of transistors per cpu, but it's exactly that increase in high-end chips that make mid-range chips "smaller, cheaper" and still able to keep up with requirements.
That's the essense of Moore's law. Pretending it isn't is just headline-writing manipulation, and it's stupid.
Naturally there are many more problems which can not be parallelized and are not so easily engineered away. Google's statement is no great turning point in computing. Faster processors will continue to be in demand as they tend to offer better price/performance ratios, eventually, even for server farm situations.
I don't know, but am I the only one who found Malone's writing to be mushy? He wanders around, talking about how Moore's Law applies to the burst Web bubble, that Intel isn't surviving because of an inability to follow it's founder's law, and yet that we shouldn't be enslaved by this "law".
In fact, the whole article is based around Moore's Law still applying, desptie being "unhealthy". Well, duh. I think he had a point to make somewhere, but lost it on the way to the deadline. Personally, I would have appreciated more concrete reasons about why Google's bucking the trend is so interesting (to him).
He did bring up one very interesting point, but didn't explore it enough to my taste. Where is reliability in the equation? What happens if you keep all three factors the same, and use the cost savings in the technology to address failure points?
Google ran into bum hard drives, and yet the solution was simply to change brands? The people who are trying to address that very need would seem to be a perfect fit for a story about why Moore's Law isn't the end-all be-all answer.
Its a prediction that has held pretty true. Its a good benchmark but is not a true Law.
The majority of laws are empirical in nature. Even Newton's laws of motion don't come from the theory, rather they are axioms that underly it.
The problem is that cheaper processors don't make much money -- there isn't the markup on commodity parts that there is on the high end. The big chip companies are used to charging through the nose for their latest and greatest and they use much of that money to pay for the R & D, but the rest is profit.
However profit on the low end stuff is very slight because you are competing with chip fabs that don't spend time and money on R & D; buying the rights to older technology instead. (We are talking commodity margins now, not what the market will bear.) So if the market for the latest and greatest collapses the entire landscape changes.
Should that occur my prediction is that R & D will change from designing faster chips to getting better yields from the fabs. Because, at commodity margins, it will be all about lowering production costs.
However I think it is still more likely that, Google aside, there will remain a market for the high end large enough to continue to support Intel and AMD as they duke it out on technological edge. At least for a while.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
For their application having clusters of "smaller" machines make sense. Lets compare this to ebay.
The data google deals with is non real time. They churn on some data and produce indices. A request comes in over a server, that server could potentially have it's own copy of the indices and can access a farm of servers that hold the actual data. The fact that the data and indices live on farms is no big deal as there is no synchronization requirement between them. If server A serves up some info but is 15 minutes behind server Z, that's ok. This is a textbook application for distributed non-stateful server farms
Now ebay, ALL their servers (well the non listing ones) HAVE to be going after a single or synchronized data source. Everybody MUST have the same view of an auction and all requests coming in have to be matched up. The "easiest" way to do this is by going against a single data repository (well single in the sense that the data for any given auction must reside in one place, different auctions can live on different servers of course). All this information needs to be kept up on a real time basis. So ebay also has the issue of transactionally updating data in realtime. Thus their computing needs are significantly different than that of google.
I fully expect this to get modded down, but I still think chip manufacturers are deliberately drip-feeding us incremental speeds to maximise profits. There's not much evidence of a paradigm shift on the horizon; Hammer is an important step but it's still a similar manufacturing process. As a (probably flawed) analogy, if processing power became as important to national security as aircraft manufacture in WWII, look how fast progress could be made!
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Wether you use a super chip or several low cost chips, the computing power at your disposal still grows exponentially, I guess. So no refutation of Moore's law.
I think people are missing the point of Moore's law. When he said he thought transistors would double every 2 years, thats what he thought would happen. Thats not a rule set that anyone has to follow (which, as far as I can figure, is the only way it could be "dangerous," because people might be trying to increase the number of transistors to meet it rather than do whatever else might be a better idea..????). It's not something he thought would always be the rule, forever, no matter what. The fact that he's been right for 35 years already means he was more right than he could have imagined.
Whale
Software over the past 20 years has gotten bigger not better. We dont do anything different than what I was able to do in 1993. And it doesnt affect just windows and commercial apps. Linux and It's flotilla of apps are all affected. Gnome and KDE are bigger and not better. They do not do the desktop thing any better than what they did 5 years ago. Sure small features have finally been fixed, but at the cost of adding 100 eye-candy opetions for every fix. Mozilla is almost as big as IE, Open Office is still much larger than it needs to be. X windows hasn't been on a diet for years.
granted it is much MUCH worse on the windows side. Kiplingers TaxCUT is 11 megabytes in size for the executable.. FOR WHAT?? eye candy and other useless features that don't make it better.... only bigger.
Too many apps and projects add things for the sake of adding them... to look "pretty" or just for silly reasons.
I personally still believe that programmers should be forced to run and program on systems that are 1/2 to 1/3rd of what is typically used. this will force the programmers to optimize or find better ways to make that app or feature work.
It sounds like google is tired of getting bigger and badder only to watch it become no faster than what they had only 6 months ago after the software and programmers slow it down.
remember everyone... X windows and a good windows manager in linux RAN VERY GOOD on a 486 with 16 meg of ram and a decent video card.. Today there is no chance in hell you can get anything but blackbox and a really old release of X to run on that hardware (luckily the Linux kernel is scalable and it heppily runs all the way back to the 386.)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Your lead, and the redherring story have for some reason missed the point and are misleading. There is no objection whatsoever to faster, more powerful processors. The problem is the high power bills.
I use a PC of what would have been unimaginable power a few short years ago, and it is still woefully inadequate for many of my purposes. I still spend a lot of my programming time optimizing code that I could leave in its original, elegant but inefficient state if computers were faster. And in the field of artificial intelligence, computers are finally starting to do useful things, but are sorely hampered by insufficient processing power (try a few huge matrix decompositions -- or a backgammon rollout! -- and you'll see what I mean).
Perhaps the most insightful comment in the article is the observation that no one has ever won betting against Moore's Law. I'm betting it'll be around another 10 years with change. Email me if you're taking...
Peer Pressure
Example 1 - Intel - This company continues to pump out faster and faster processors. They can't stop making new processors or AMD or someone else will. The costs of making each processor goes up but the premium for new, faster processors continues to drop as fewer people need the absolute high end. So if you look at Intel's business 5 years ago, they always had a healthy margin for the high end. That is no longer the case and if you exprapolate out a few years, it is tough to imagine that Intel will be the same company it is today.
Example 2 - Sun - These guys always did a great job of providing tools to companies that needed the absolute fastest machines to make it work. Unfortunately, Moore's law caught up and made their systems a luxury compared to lots of other manufacturers.
The basic problem that all these companies have is that Moore's Law eventually changes every business into a low end commodity business.
You can't stop the future. You can only simulate it by stopping progress
Seriously at this point most people don't need 1Thz CPU's. What most people need is cheaper, smaller, more energy effecient, cooler CPU's. You can buy 1Ghz CPU's now for the cost of going to dinner. If you could get THOSE down to $1 each so they could be used in embedded apps from clothing to toasters you would be giving engineers, designers, and inventors a lot to work with. You'd see a lot more innovation in the business at that price point. Once powerful computing had spread into every device we use THEN new demand for high end processors would grow. The desktop has penetrated modern life - so it's dead - time to adjust to the embedded world.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
In any case the article shows a fundamental misuderstanding of the industry and its driving forces. The principle driving force is to lower costs and this is the chief effect of Moore's law. The focus is not on building supercomputers but super-cheap computers. Of course this has the effect of lowering the costs of supercomputers as well. The anecdote from Google is a perfect example of the benefits of Moore's law, not a sign of it becoming redundant or dangerous.
Some of the biggest changes are seen in the embedded world - e.g mobile phones. Intel's vision is of putting radios on every chip.
'His words were both simple and devastating: when asked how the 64-bit Itanium, the new megaprocessor from Intel and Hewlett-Packard, would affect Google, Mr. Schmidt replied that it wouldn't. Google had no intention of buying the superchip. Rather, he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors." '
The parent comment is correct, but the entire issue is confused. In a few years, the Itanium will be the cheapest processor available, and Google will be using it.
Why do people even give ink to "Will Moores Law Hold Up?" debates? I always thought of it as a neat novelty to open powerpoint presentations with. I somehow doubt that Intel has as a mandate to "keep up with Moores Law" or anything. It's really only a "Law" when applied in retrospect anyway.
I've read most of the comments so far and they don't seem to get the point of the article.
The point is that except for a limited class of applications (multimedia, games), most of the things you can do on tommorow's computers you can do on today's. And that it's becoming incresingly expensive to follow Moore's law while it's less and less necessary.
Much more important will probably become the price and maybe other factors (versatility? miniaturisation? power consumption?). Imagine dirt-cheap wireless chips and p-3 like microprocessors. Think about the applications for a moment.
With the right protocols in place it could mean unlimited bandwith anytime anywhere, just for starters.
When the world will be 100% computerized it won't be because of supercomputers. It'll be because of cheap small chips and smart software.
But when computers are used for crunching numbers we still want machines to be as fast as possible. Supercomputers still exist today. Countries and companies are still spending millions to build parallel machines thousands of times faster than home PCs. They're doing this because the current crop of processors is not fast enough for what they want to calculate.
Current computational modeling of the weather, a nuclear explosion, the way a protein folds, a chemical reaction, or any of a large number of other important real-world phenomena is limited by current computational speed. Faster computers will aid these fields tremendously. More power is almost always better in mathematical modeling- I don't expect we'll ever get to the point where we have as much computational power as we want.
Moore's law not quite what most people think. If I'm not mistaken, it isn't that processor power will double every eighteen months, but that transsistor density will double. Processsor speed doubling is a side effect of this.
I think there will always be a market for the fastest chips possible. However, there are other ways for this trend to take us rather than powerful CPU chips. These would include lower power, lower size, higher system integration, and lower cost.
The EPIA series mini-ITX boards are an example of this. Once the VIA processors get powerful enough to decode DVDs well, it is very likely that they won't need to get more powerful for most consumer applications. However, if you look at the board itself (e.g. here),
you'll see that component count is stil pretty high; power consumption, while small, still requires a substantial power supply in the case or a large brick.
When something like this can be put together, capable of DVD decoding, having no external parts other than memory (and maybe not even that), and the whole thing runs on two AAA batteries, then you'd really have something. Stir bluetooth (or more likely its sucessors) into the mix and you have ubiquitous computing, capable of adapting to their environement and adapting the environment to suit human needs.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's not to say that every complex problem needs a supercomputer. That's why Cray also sells Intel clusters. Right tool for the right job and all of that.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
The mainframes basically stopped at 32 bits. There were models that went to 128 bits, and CDC liked 60 bits, but the workhorse (IBM 360, etc.) never went beyond 32 bits.
Perhaps the next step instead of being towards larger computers will be towards smaller ones. Moore's law remains just as important, but the application changes. Instead of building faster computers, you build smaller, cheaper ones. The desktops will remain important for decades as the repository of printers, large hard disks, etc. And the palmtops/wristtops/fingernailTops/embedded will communicate with them for archiving, etc.
This means that networking is becoming more important. This means that clusters need to be more integrated. I conceive of future powerful computers as a net of nets, and at the bottom of each net is a tightly integrated cluser of cpus, each more powerful than the current crop. These are going to need a lot of on-chip ram, and ram attached caches, because their access to large ram will be slow, and mediated through gatekeepers. There will probably be multiported ram whiteboards, where multiple cpus can share their current thoughts, etc.
For this scenario to work, computers will need to be able to take their programs in a sort of pseudo-code, and re-write it into a parallelized form. There will, of course, be frequent bottle necks, etc. So there will be lots of wasted cycles, but some of them can be used on other processes with lower priority. And at least each cluster will have one cpu that spends most of it's time scheduling. etc.
Consider the ratio between gray matter and white matter. I've been told that most of the computation is done in the gray matter, and the white matter acts as a communications link. This may not be true (it was an old source), but it is a good model of the problem. So to make this work, the individual processors need to get smaller and cheaper. But that's one of the choices that Moore's law offers!
So this is, in fact, an encouraging trend. But it does mean that the high end cpus will tend to be short-term solutions to problems, faster at any particular scale of the technology, but too expensive for most problems, and not developing fast enough to stay ahead of their smaller brethern. Because they are too expensive to be used in a wasteful manner.
Perhaps the "final" generation will implement these longer word length cpus, at least in places. And it would clearly use specialized hardware for the signal switchers, just as the video cards use specialized hardware, though they didn't at first. But the first versions will be built with cheap components, and the specialized hardware will only come along later, after the designs have stabilized.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This article is full of overblown rhetoric. It goofily applies Moore's Law to too many other things, like Dot-coms. Note that at no point in the article is Moore's Law clearly stated -- it would spoil too many of the article's conclusions.
That said, I remember the first time I noticed that technology was 'good enough,' and didn't need to double ever again: with the introduction of CDs, and later, CD-quality sound cards. Most people are not physically capable of hearing improvements if the sampling rate of CDs is increased, so we don't need to bother. Certainly, people tried, and the home theatre style multi-channel stuff is an improvement over plain stereo CDs, but it is an insignificant improvement when compared to CDs over older mono formats. Similarily, the latest SoundBlaster cards represent an insignificant improvement over the early beeps of computers and video games. (Dogs and dolphins might wish that audio reproduction was improved, but they don't have credit cards.)
Back in the early 80s, when most bulletin board access was by 300 baud modem, paging of long messages was optional, since most people can read that fast. Of course, we need faster modems for longer files and applications, but as soon as say, HD-quality video and sound can be streamed at real-time speeds, then bandwidth will be 'enough.'
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
I dream of the day when motherboard manufacturors sell cheap 4 cpu boards and AMD/Intel sell low powered/low heat processors (something akin to transmeta). Yeah the Quad Xeon exists but Intel wants you to pay through the nose for those (and they don't run cool). I would love to have 4 (900 mhz "Barton's") Athlon MP cpus in a box that ran cool and reliably. It may not even run as fast as even one Intel P4 3.06 ghz HT for many applications but from what I have seen of smp machines is that they run much SMOOTHER. When smp machines are dished out a lot of work, it does not effect the responsiveness of the whole system. Instead of having one servant who is on supersteriods and is the best at everything but can really only do one thing at a time, I would rather have four servants (which even get in the way of each other at times) who can't do as much but they all can be doing different things at once.
I miss the Karma Whores.
If Google screws up 1 in 1000 requests, I wouldn't even notice. Refresh and on my way.
Citibank trades roughly $1 Trillion in currency a day. If they had 5 9's accuracy, they would be misplacing $10,000,000 a day. In that environment, commodity machines are unacceptable.
And it scales down: paychecks? billing records? The video check-out at Blockbuster?
"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke