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."

Comments

64bit matters, for Google, too

[g4dget]

Assume, for a moment, that we had processors with 16bit address spaces. Would it be cost-effective to replace our desktop workstations with tens of thousands of such processors, each with 64k of memory? I don't think so.

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.

Re:64bit matters, for Google, too

[drix]

Right, thank you, glad someone else got that. No one is saying that Google has abandoned Itanium and 64-bit-ness for good. Read that question in the context of the article and what Schmidt is really being asked is how will the arrival of Itanium affect Google. And of course the answer is that it won't, since as we all know Google has chosen the route of 10000 (or whatever) cheap Linux-based Pentium boxes in place of, well, an E10000 (or ten). But that sure doesn't mean Google is swearing off 64-bit for good--just that it has no intention of buying the "superchip." But bet your ass that when Itanium becomes more readily available and cheap, a la the P4 today, when Itanium has turned from "superchip" to "standardchip," Google will be buying them just as voraciously as everyone else. So for me these doomsday prognostications that Malone flings about don't seem that foreboding to me--Itanium will sell well, just not as long as it's considered a high-end niche item. But that never lasts long anyways. One-year-ago's high-end niche processor comes standard on every PC at CompUSA today.

Does anybody take Andreessen seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Andreesen quotes...

[praetorian_x]

"The rules of this business are changing fast," Mr. Andreessen says, vehemently poking at his tuna salad. "When we come out of this downturn, high tech is going to look entirely different."

*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

how is this not moore's law?

[rillian]

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.

Google's decision is economic

[Hays]

They're not saying they don't want faster processors with higher address spaces, who wouldn't. They're simply saying that the price/performance ratio is likely to be poor, and they have engineered a good solution using cheaper hardware.

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.

Mushy writing

[icantblvitsnotbutter]

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.

Cheaper doesn't mean better either

[Jack William Bell]

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.

what moore said..

[qoncept]

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.

Is this the first signs of a turnaround?

[Lumpy]

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.)

I actually read them

[jj_johny]

Here is the real deal about Moore's law and what it means. If you don't take Moore's law into account, it will eventually change the dynamics of your industry and cause great problems for most companies.

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