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

BBC Article

[BinaryCodedDecimal]

BBC Article on the same story here.

clustering

[mirko]

he said, the company intends to build its future servers with smaller, cheaper processors

I guess this is better to use interconnected devices in an interconnected world.

where I work, we recently traded our Sun E10k for several E450 between which we load balance request.
It surprisingly works very well.

I guess Google's approach is then an efficient one.

Re:clustering

[beh]

The question is always, what you're doing.

Google's approach is good for google. If Google would want to make good use of significantly faster CPUs, they would also need significantly more RAM in their machines (a CPU faster by a factor of 10 can't yield a speed-up factor of ten, if the network can't deliver the data fast enough).

For Google it's fine, if a request can be done in say half-a-second on a slower machine, that is a lot cheaper then a 10* as fast machine doing each request in .05 seconds, but the machine costs 50* more than the slower machine.
On the other hand, if you have a job that can only be done sequentially (or can't be parallelized all to well), then having 100s of computers won't help you very much... ...on the other hand - there is one question left: Is it really worth while having 100s or 1000s of PC class servers working your requests as opposed to a handful really fast servers?

The more expensive servers will definitely be more expensive when you buy them - on the other hand the more expensive faster machines might save you a lot of money in turns of less rent for the offices (lower space requirements) or - perhaps even more important - save on energy...

The company where I'm working switched all their work PCs to TFTs relatively early, when TFTs were still expensive. The company said, that this step was done on the expected cost saving in power bills and also saving on air conditioning in rooms with lots of CRTs...

Re:clustering

[e8johan]

Google supports thousands of user request sessions, not one huge straight-line serial command sequence. This means that a huge bunch of smaller servers will do the jobb quicker than a big super-server. Not only because of the raw computing power, but due to the parallellalism that is extracted by doing so and the loss of overhead introduced by running too many tasks on one server.

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.

well now...

[stinky wizzleteats]

This makes me feel a lot less like a cantankerous, cheap old fart for not replacing my Athlon 650.

Transistors? BAH!

[The Night Watchman]

I'm waiting for DNA Computers! Shove a hamburger into where the floppy drive used to be, run gMetabolize for Linux (GNUtrients?), in a few hours my machine isn't obsolete anymore.

Either that, or it mutates into an evil Steve Wozniak and strangles me in my sleep.

/* Steve */

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.

Eh?

[Mr_Silver]

Michael S. Malone says we should forget Moore's law, not because it isn't true, but mainly because it has become dangerous.

How can Moore's law become dangerious?

If you break it, will you explode into billions of particles?

It's in the gospel

[datadictator]

And that day the spirits of Turing and Von Neumann spoke unto Moore of Intel granting him insight and wisdomn to understand the future. And Moore was with chip and he brought forth the chip and named it 4004. And Moore did bless the chip saying: "Thou art a breakthrough, with my own corporation have I fabricated thee. Thou art yet as small as a dust mote, yet shall thou grow and replicate unto the size of a mountain and conquer all before thee. This blessing I give unto thee: Every eighteen months shall thou double in capacity, until the end of the age." This is Moores law, which endures to this day.

Do not mess with our religion :-)

Untill the end of the epoch, Amen.

PS. With thanks to a source which I hope is obvious.

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

Future of Supercomputing

[jaaron]

Clustering has definitely won out in the United States mostly due to the appeal of cheap processing power, but that doesn't mean that clustering is always best. Like another poster mentioned, it depends on what you're doing. For Google, clustering is probably a good solution, but for high end supercomputing, it doesn't always work.

Check out who's on top of the TOP 500 supercomputers. US? Nope. Cluster? Nope. The top computer in the world is the Earth Simulator in Japan. It's not a cluster of lower end processors. It was built from the ground up with one idea -- speed. Unsurprisingly it uses traditional vector processing techniques developed by Cray to achieve this power. And how does it compare with the next in line? It blows them away. Absolutely blows them away.

I recently read a very interesting article about this (I can't remember where - I tried googling) which basically stated that the US has lost it's edge in supercomputing. The reason was two fold: (1) less government and private funding for supercomputing projects and (2) a reliance on clustering. There is communication overhead in clustering that dwarfs similar problems in traditional supercomputers. Clusters can scale, but the max speed is limited.

Before you start thinking that it doesn't matter and that the beowulf in your bedroom can compare to any Cray, recognize that there are still problems within science that would take ages to complete. These are very different problems from those facing Google, but they are nonetheless real and important.

Re:Future of Supercomputing

[Troy Baer]

Check out who's on top of the TOP 500 supercomputers. US? Nope. Cluster? Nope. The top computer in the world is the Earth Simulator in Japan. It's not a cluster of lower end processors. It was built from the ground up with one idea -- speed. Unsurprisingly it uses traditional vector processing techniques developed by Cray to achieve this power. And how does it compare with the next in line? It blows them away. Absolutely blows them away.

It's worth noting that the Earth Simulator is actually a cluster of vector mainframes (NEC SX-6s) using a custom interconnect. You could do something similar with the Cray X-1 if you had US$400M or so to spend.

I recently read a very interesting article about this (I can't remember where - I tried googling) which basically stated that the US has lost it's edge in supercomputing. The reason was two fold: (1) less government and private funding for supercomputing projects and (2) a reliance on clustering.

If you're referring to the article I think you are, it was specifically talking in the context of weather simulation -- an application area where vector systems are known to excel (hence why the Earth Simulator does so well at it). The problem is that vector systems aren't always as cost-effective as clusters for a highly heterogeneous workload. With vector systems, a good deal of the cost is in the memory subsystem (often capable of several 10s of GB/s in memory bandwidth), but not every application needs heavy-duty memory bandwidth. Where I work, we've got benchmarks that show a cluster of Itanium-2 systems wiping the walls with a vector machine for some applications (specifically structural dynamics and some types of quantum chemistry calcuations), and others where a bunch of cheap AMDs beat everything in sight (on some bioinformatics stuff). It all depends on what your workload is.

--Troy

Re:What is an example that can't run in parallel?

[pclminion]

Can someone please give an example of a computing task that CANNOT be subdivided into smaller tasks and run in parallel on many processing elements? The kind of task that requires an ever faster single processor.

Computing the MD5 sum of 1TB of data. :-) MD5 depends on (among other things) being non-parallelizable for its security.