Slashdot Mirror
Understanding Moore's Law
S. Blocher writes "Ars Technica has a great article up, 'Understanding Moore's Law', that I think most geeks should read. The misrepresentation of Moore's Law in the media has always been a real pet peeve of mine, and this article does a great job of looking at the flipside of the 'bigger and faster' thesis to show how the Law isn't really just about doubling computer power."
Fermat's Last Theorem is a theorem. It's been proved. Before Wiles' proof, it could have been called "Fermat's Last Conjecture". But it is now a theorem.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Amdahl's law is more of a "law" than Moore's law is. It's a way of figuring out how much of a speedup is really possible from parallelization. The formula is:
S=N/((B*N)+(1-B))
where S is the speedup, N is the number of processors, and B is the percentage of the program that must be serially. The upshot is that as long as B is greater than 0, you'll never get the N-times speedup you'd hope for from throwing N processors at the problem.
It seems a pretty trivial result, but it's basically Gene Amdahl's way of throwing the "multiprocessing will save us" theory back in the faces of its proponents. Multiprocessing is the obvious way to speed things up, but if it won't work on every problem, we'll have to look elsewhere.
If you're referring to that recent Red Herring article, my article was indeed "inspired" by it in the sense that I thought it was sensationlistic crap and I just couldn't take it anymore. For more info, see the news blurb that announces the article:
h tm l
http://arstechnica.com/archive/news/1045747027.
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
This has been achieved by getting a more and more detailed understanding of the processes and eliminating the fundamental sources of the problems. The costs of doing this are immense, but it works. It's striking to look at micrographs of chips today - everything looks so good. No ragged edges anywhere. Think for a moment about what that means. In some of those pictures, you can see atoms, and they're in the right places. Atoms.
It's not like the bad old days of the "purple plague", ceramics with traces of radioactive minerals, or the HP fab with the 4% yield.
Classical Physics is undisputed within a certain range of energies/time difference, but you cannot explain light causing a measurable pressure with newtons laws nor can you explain doppler shifts exactly.
experience curve. To quote an article from the Harvard Business Review
"Building stategy on the experience curve" (HBR March-April 1985, pg 143):
The author then presents a graph showing that Dynamic RAM costs fell at 30%
per every doubling of cumulated output from 1976 to 1984. Besides semiconductors,
the author gives examples from the chemical industry and also the Model T Ford.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
The most interesting thing about Moore's Law, to me, is that it implies that technology advances at an exponential rate. If that's true, then there are some obvious, serious consequences ahead.
IBM announced recently that they will be producing a computer with roughly the same computing power as the human brain, possibly by 2005. That's a pretty significant milestone, if you think about it. Following through with Moore's Law, we should have a computer that is 1000 times more powerful than the human brain as soon as 2020... and a computer that is a million times more powerful than the human brain by 2035.
A million times more powerful than the human brain! What will we do with a computer that powerful? Or, maybe a better question is: What will a computer that powerful do with us?
Kurzweil has a lot of great articles on this sort of thing.
Yup, we're unlikely to find anything that contradicts them. Like, you know, a century's worth of experimental physics. But ignoring the pesky 20th century, no, you're not going to find anything to contradict them.
Newton's 'Laws' are simply convenient approximations. They tend to work quite reasonably in most circumstances, but they most certainly are not laws. A law is something that will always be true, everywhere; Newton's 'laws' break down as soon as you try to do anything unusual.
They're called laws because of historical prescedent (back in the day people played fast and loose with their terminology), but it's really quite disingenious.
And again, while neo-Darwinian Evolution is an incredibly good and compelling theory, it's going to remain just a theory until someone invents a time machine. While experiments can be performed to demonstrate small phylogenic changes, evolution discusses tremendous change over tremendous time-scales, and while it seems quite reasonable to believe that you can simply generalise observations about butterflies and rabbits out to millions of years (:-)), you can't exactly proove it, which is the point.
Calling something a law when it really isn't does a disservice to science; you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. One of the most important things students can learn about science is that regardless of how strong or weak the evidence is for one theory, there's always the possibility for an alternate explanation, and to be able to judge the relative merits of the theories based on their supporting evidence and their implications.
"Newton's laws are simple, definitive, and we're unlike to find anything that contradicts them.
"Yup, we're unlikely to find anything that contradicts them. Like, you know, a century's worth of experimental physics. But ignoring the pesky 20th century, no, you're not going to find anything to contradict them."
Except, of course, that you're wrong. Planesdragon was correct when he said that nothing had contradicted Newton's laws. The people who claim otherwise simply don't understand Newton's Laws.
(1) A body remains at rest or travels with constant velocity unless acted upon by an outside force.
True. Nothing in either quantum or relativistic physics contradict this. They do expand upon the what a force actually is, but they in no way contradict it.
(2) The force acting on a body is equal to its rate of change of momentum.
Trivially true. This isn't really a law, so much as a definition - in fact, the definition of a force. As a definition it can't disproven.
(3) Every action has an equal but opposite reaction.
True. Much like the first law, the implications of this are complicated by quantum and relativistic effects, but the law itself remains unchanged.
So, having stood for centuries, they certainly look like they deserve being called laws to me.
"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated"