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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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