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Why We Need a Second Moore's Law
Roland Piquepaille writes "In its April issue, Wired Magazine argues that we need a second Moore's law, this time about overall efficiencies of our computers and other electronic devices. The subtitle of the article summarizes it: "If we don't do something about increasing battery life, we're toast." Michael S. Malone, the author, says that the first Moore's law is endangered, not because the semiconductor industry cannot build new generation of chips, but because we will not be able to provide them with enough power. And he contends that the problem arises from the fact that we are using more and more wireless devices, which obviously are not connected to a plug. This overview contains selected excerpts of this eye-opening article."
Moore's Law? Murphy's Law.
What we really need is a Meta Moore's law, to tell us how long it takes before we need a new Moore's law.
Computers get twice as fast every 18 months!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Well if it's some day proven wrong, why just make another law that someday also might be inaccurate...
What's wrong, are engineers getting too much sex?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The more I hear about power and energy issues and American obesity issues, the more I think we'd be served well by installing some kind of human power generator factory similar to a gym, where maybe people going on lots of exercise bikes could charge up portable batteries or something.
I mean Hell, $50 for a new cellphone battery when yours craps out, or two hours on the bike with a better rechargable...
People with too much energy and electronic devices that need energy. There has to be a way to make it work together.
Ok... I just reread that, and I've officially been awake way too long.
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
What we need is a fourth axis of development - a systematic improvement of overall system efficiency, from the individual silicon gate, through motherboards and displays, all the way up to the Internet itself. How do we do it? Exhaustively.
Exactly. When processor speeds and memory was low the industry did their best to fit what they could in the limited space. Now that we have more room we are being lazy and only concentrating on making things "larger than life" instead of faster and smaller.
We should really start to concentrate on making the software run best under what we currently have. I know that Intel and Kingston wouldn't exactly be happy but our pockets and our grid would.
Moore's law is an observation, not something that the industry is forced to follow. You can't just say "we need more efficiency - let's define a new Moore's law".
Phil
I dont think theres need for new laws, even for Moores law, we just need more technological advancement and new innovations ...
Increase battery life or decrease power consumption, or a combination of the two. The second is largely not consistent with the trend for increasing computing power of mobile devices, which only leaves the first. Not sure what a second Moore's law is supposed to do to help this necessary development.
With the author pointing out subtle technical details like that, wouldn't this article be more appropriate for a more electronics-savvy audience than Slashdot?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This makes sense - and is something Ive been known to have a drunken rant about from time to time.
My laptop is in need of renewal - its a 1Ghz Dell. The replacement will be a 3Ghz-ish of similar style - with more HD, more RAM etc...
I can bet you a pound to a pinch of shit that within a couple of weeks it'll be pissing me off as much as this piece of crap I'm typing on.
Usability is the key - I for one welcome the new Moore's Law
Is the law still working for he amount of power used? I understand that the newest chips do use more power, but shouldn't that be the approach.
... ...
I think current electro-lite batters have been maxed out. The possibility of Fuel cells is out there now but let me hold me breath....
*puuuuhhh* That didn't last
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
The poster is saying that Moore's law is turning into Murphy's law, and that nearly made me spit my cheerios out my nose when I read it.
We've got to have more power! Physicist (on a dying cell phone): W*&&^* it a*&^ she's got sir, but the batteries, they can't take..(call dropped)
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
Which is why my powerbook battery lasts so damn long. One of the many reasons I am using it now more often than any windows-based laptop I have ever owned and/or used.
Don't bother arguing speed, saying that the powerbook is years behind in MHz, etc. The powerbook is just better optimized to use less power and run longer.
This sounds a little dodgy to me. This statement seems to imply that a law is 'needed' to fix a current problem (i.e. batteries not keeping up with processor power). But why would some contrived 'law' do anything to solve this problem? After all, the original Moore's law was a prediction - no more, no less. No one has ever actually been guided by it.
I feel that putting the problem forth in this way is just clouding the issue.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
If people just chilled out, learned to respect nature and loved one another, they could get all the energy they need from the ley lines.
Stick Men
What many people don't realize is that Moore didn't just say the one famous sentence. He wrote a short paper explaining his predictions and they were far more complicated than simply doubling power while maintaining cost. He qualified it by explaining it would only be possible if certain things happen. He was well aware of certain limits which we've now passed with unexpected technologies.
So while many here will complain his prediction was flawed because he didn't consider so many other things, remember he actually had a lot more in mind than just regularly doubling speed.
Developers: We can use your help.
I think the battery power does not have to be solved by only "internal" system efficiency, but also by "external" system efficiency.
What if the places to charge our devices become pervasive, and just like you get can find a gas station almost everywhere you seem to be running out of gas, you should be able to find a place to charge your batteries.
Of course this is easeir said than done. The "external" system is developed well for vehicles running on gas - but it is not well developed for vehicles on electric power. That is why electric cars lag so far behind ....
Anyway, the crux of my post is that the system efficiencies not have to improve internally in the "super"devices, but also externally to the devices. .
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Marshmallows taste better than silicon chips when squished between chocolate bars and graham crackers. The improvement in taste of marshmallow s'mores is immediately and at least 1.5x noticeably better with every silicon-based s'more eaten.
really, springs, clocksprings to be exact. I brought this up in another discussion last week. I have two radios (baygen/freeplay)that make quite good use of windup to tighten a spring to run a microgenerator technology in lieu of batteries. I have another radio that has built in solar and a crank on the side that is a direct generator to on board rechargeable battery, plus it has another compartment that holds disposable batteries, or you can plug in a voltage adapter. It's an inexpensive radio, but it has 4 way power and works quite well. I understand now that grundig has an even higher quality radio with a similar crank to microgenerator scheme. This sort of technology makes use of extremely efficient energy conversion and energy storage, ie, biochemical from the human body, that beats heck out of any battery out there. How about at least starting with a PDA to see if the windup style concepts have merit and can be adapted up the useage scale then? I see a lot of these PDAs use AA or AAA batteries, the same as these small radios, seems a natural to me. Even just a power adapter that is the spring, crank and battery bank, and that plugs into existing PDAs if they have a DC jack in. something along those lines. It's just not that hard to run a tiny crank for 30 to 60 seconds.
And the fact that software keeps getting more and more bloated, eating those newly available CPU cycles.
Wired Magazine argues that we need a second Moore's law, this time about overall efficiencies of our computers and other electronic devices.
We need less laws not moore! Let the industry regulate itself.
I can't believe that anyone would think moore gubmint regulation and red tape would make computers more efficient!!
Unbelievabe!
If I was to reveal my bitchy side, I'd say, 'who cares? Let's move on.'
Slashdot carries an article on Moore's Law at least bi-weekly. It is a prescient topic in today's CS community, so I'll let that be.
What really troubles me is this: Moore's Law is something like Newtonian mechanics. It's very much relevant for the majority of activity, but with respect to the really cool stuff, it's totally passe.
Relativity and other theories have put Newton's material in the books of Uni freshmen. In the same way, I feel we should progress beyond Moore's Law - it's on-target, but can be superceded with enough human thought/effort.
n its April issue, Wired Magazine argues that we need a second Moore's law, this time about overall efficiencies of our computers and other electronic devices. The subtitle of the article summarizes it: "If we don't do something about increasing battery life, we're toast."
I can imagine the board room at Intel where the chairman is yelling, "The 3rd quarter numbers suggest we aren't going to make Moore's law this year! I want people to double their efforts -- cancel lunch until further notice!"
I can guarantee that if wired magazine invents a new moore's law, it is going to have zero effect on technology. Anyways, Moore's law is based on an observation, maybe we should look at the growth of power requirements and fit it to that.
I suggest we call the wired law: Moron's Law
"The more I hear about power and energy issues and American obesity issues, the more I think we'd be served well by installing some kind of human power generator factory similar to a gym, where maybe people going on lots of exercise bikes could charge up portable batteries or something."
Can anyone say Matrix.
Evolution or ID?
I don't even know what fuel cell batteries are, but old sci-fi fans always bring them up whenever power is mentioned at conventions. I haven't seen anyone with a UNIX beard post "fuel cells!" yet, so I can only surmise that they're sleeping off their Big Mac benders. That's got to be rough, having to order three meals instead of two, ever since Micky D dropped the super sizing.
Am I the only one who thinks he still should be?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
From Sunday.
Sig for GotSpider threatens to invade. France Surrenders.
Moore's first law is a two-edged sword - more transistors for the same price is great for computers, but it's hell on batteries: As the processor power doubles, the power consumption also rises.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but: Malone, the author, is exaggerating by implying that the size of a transistor is remainaining constant while the number of transistors doubles. As I understand it, the smaller the processor, the less power it requires. Is this right?
Sure the chip industry needs to work on energy usage (perhaps through either fuel-cell batteries for lap-tops). Also, Malone is merely following the wagon with Intel's recent processor naming change. They've already figured out, that cycles are losing their prior applicability.
We need a new Moore's law! Well Gordon Moore had better to get to work formulating it. What the hell is the matter with that guy? Does he only make one law a century or something. Has the bastard not noticed the old law is crapping out?!
Seriously though, I hate when proper nouns are misused to form new pronouns.
Watergate is called Watergate because the break-in was at the Watergate Hotel. So where exactly is the Lewinsky-gate hotel? The travel-gate sounds nice: how many stars does it have? Urgh!
Similarly if it isn't a law by Moore, it isn't a new Moore's law. It is a new law, that replaces Moore's law.
For batteries to get better at a Moore's law rate, we need some different physical laws. But we can, as other posters mention, improve on efficiency of other parts. Cooler-running processors and low-power wireless - a la BlueTooth or 802.11[whatever-letter-means-low-power] will help.
To build a better battery has been a goal for longer than computers have been in around.
OK, when on the move, how many people who are doing word processing need more than the features of WordPerfect 5, the early versions of Excel for Windows and that kind of thing?
What we need is a really low electrical power CPU - optimized to take as little electricity as possible, but which is capable of running these kinds of applications acceptably quickly. It probably doesn't need to be more than 50MHz. Put this in a ultra-lightweight laptop style case, using solid state storage for disk (you can get USB memory sticks with 512MB which is more than sufficient for this class of computing) and have the battery go a day or two between charges.
My mobile phone is a case in point. Although it's not a word processor, I've got an organizer, email client, lightweight web browser, camera, SSH client, IRC client and pager all rolled into one, and it'll go ten days without a charge on standby, and can be used for 7 hours on one charge with a tiny battery. I can even make phone calls on it. Make essentially a notebook with mobile phone technology, and you've got an excellent portable internet terminal that you can write documents, make spreadsheets, compile small programs etc. on.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
We know already the answer, do we?
...Human body is the best source of cheap energy. I don't habe the Matrix ( sic!) DVD around, because i can cite from Morpheus...
now seriosly, can this be made? Electronics that use our internal energy? like a running battery, and think of a peaceful coexistence: we give energy to the device, which gives us the comnodity we need.
hmm..
Some very bad things have happened in software, some of which were the 8080 instruction set, BASIC, MS-DOS and Object Pascal. The biggest problem however was the lack of early adoption of networking technology including wireless. Early adoption of wireless networking technology would have allowed an early replacement of the symbolist/CPU approach to software by a statistical/distributed approach to software. Common sense and perception itself is founded on, not language, but statistical observations of the environment. It is language that is founded on common sense and perception.
Seastead this.
I second that. It makes me sad when people say that it doesn't matter the software is inefficient, because computers will get faster, which will solve the problem. What this means is that, because the developers were sloppy, the users have to pay more (they need faster and typically more power-hungry machines).
Making more efficient software benefits users _now_, instead of in 5 years when computers have gotten faster and new power sources have been invented, and new software will have been invented that needs even faster computers. Having a lot of CPU power is no excuse for wasting it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
...we'd need a law applying to the quality of software running on hardware (which is part of Moore's law).
Every time advances are made in hardware WRT speed|efficiency, the inevitable poor quality of software eats away at the hardware gains, preventing a lot of the hardware gains from being realized.
Considering "programmers don't have to be good, just good enough" and any code which runs, regardless of how well, is correct ("if it runs, it's right") we'll have people who have no business writing code for a living - this is probably on the order of 95%-98% of those earning a living writing code, regardless of what level.
"I'm thinking more of a way to utilize kinetic energy and translate it into stored power."
The problem is not with the abiliuty to generate the power but a way to efficiently store it with something that is at a reasonable size. Batteries/Power Cells are not moving at a very fast pace compared to the rest of the industry. We can generate all the power in the world but we don't have a small cost effective way to store it yet.
Evolution or ID?
I guess we'll get to see if metamoderation works, because this post is right on topic, although moderated offtopic? pffft. fucking moderaters *gripe* *gripe*
/.???
Poetry is not good enough for
As a whole, we're generally a pretty environmentally-conscious bunch. That said, we geeks find ourselves dependent on more and more powerful, long-lasting batteries that do horiffic damage to the environment when not properly disposed of.
How then do we balance our concern for the environment against our ever-increasing portable power needs? For the time being, these seem to be conflicting goals.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
... but what are batteries made of? What is out there of their components that can be improved or replaced so they will last longer?
... "green" batteries?
And also forgive my ignorance of biology (I was an average and disinterested student in high school),
but some plants use the sun, and store energy in fruits, right? Isn't there some model we can use to make, I don't know
And why not use this technology?! Duh!
All the author is saying is we need to reapply Moore's law to another aspect of electronic manufacturing. Specifically to the creation of better, more efficient, power supplies for our wireless devices.
This is hardly ground breaking. Companies like to permutate Moore's laws all of the time. I've even heard marketing guys try to use it as a model for deciding a schedule to promote the next product.
Focusing on more efficient power supplies is indeed a worthy cause. And there are already attempts out there to use things such as fuel cell technology to help rectify this problem. So the author of the article shouldn't feel as if the issue is being ignored.
Seppuku: Your solution to my problems!
What is the energy:information equivalence ratio? We've got E=mc^2 for mass:energy (speed of light in a higher-dimensional vacuum), even E=hf (Planck's constant) for frequency:energy. In E=ki, what is the value of k? That's the exact number of joules per bit in a signal with 0% noise. It's more akin to Planck's E=hf, energy carried, than to Einstein's E=mc^2, energy converted, so Shannon's info theory probably speaks to this equation. Recapitulating the German experience with matter and energy at the turn of the last century, we can then move to an Einsteinian "energy:information conversion" ratio.
--
make install -not war
I really don't know. Is it the processor, the screen and video card/widget, or the various drives? I DO know the power supply with it's voltage changes, etc dumps heat like a big dog, there's got to be some efficiency to be gained there by designing the whole system from the git-go to use all the same voltage somehow.. Inverting and transforming seems like such a waste...
If it's the drives, I think making laptops work from a more efficient and well designed RAM image/cache might be the way to go, but I'm not any sort of engineer either. Getting the hard drive to not have to work much past first boot might go a long way to increasing battery life methinks, but I dunno.... Using an embedded OS on a chip rather than keeping it on the hard drive?
There's got to be some better laptop design criteria out there other than trying to cram an energy hog desktop design (basically) inside a small folding case.... And maybe live with the limitations rather than expecting near identical performance and features.
I don't think there is a problem with power usage here. Cellphones have the power to be full fledged telephones, electronic organizers and even office computers (mail, word processing, web browsing, etc.) all in one. Yet, one cellphone battery charge lasts a lot longer than a few years ago. And I think noone would argue cellphones aren't wireless.
If cellphones can do it in such small form factors, why wouldn't larger devices like notebooks be able to do the same? I know that most pc-compatible notebooks are engineered for speed, not battery life, but look at Apple's, for example. They live for more than 5 hours (and they really do) on one charge, which I think is quite respectable.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Moore's first law is a two-edged sword - more transistors for the same price is great for computers, but it's hell on batteries: As the processor power doubles, the power consumption also rises.
The amount of computation done per watt also rises with each generation - an AMD Opteron at 500MHz would use under 10 watts, or an amount similar to an original Pentium.
But that alone won't do it. We need to improve system layouts and cooling techniques.
Better cooling won't reduce power - it means you can burn MORE power without getting hotter. It doesn't help your battery life.
We must create better interconnects, reduce sloppy software code, eschew processors that are faster than necessary, and, of course, build better batteries.
What is wrong with things like AMD's PowerNow!, AMD's Cool'n'Quiet, or Intel's SpeedStep? They all reduce the power consumption of a processor when it isn't heavily loaded.
My server
Has anyone contacted Moore about this? Obviously he's the one who has to make it, else it wouldn't be Moore's law 2. Perhaps a corallary would be more appropriate?
How about this idea for a 3rd Moore's law;
"The time between any deadline and rescue of Moore's law increasinly approaches zero over time."
Seems everytime people start screaming we've reached the end of Moore's law some researchers kick back the deadline; although we always seem closer to the deadline than the previous time the law always seems to uphold at the last minute.
I can't count how many times I heard a professor say "don't optimize", "memory is cheap".
When everyone is more worried about making thier code pretty instead of efficient, well we get what we've got. Feh.Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
Hasn't it been pretty well proven that too much manual optimisation doesn't pay off? The time taken to optimise delays entry to the market, causing the optimised product to be obsoleted by newer (unoptimised) technology.
Isn't this pointing to a requirement for better automated design software, able to do optimisation in essentialy zero time. Any optimisation between manufacturers will require their design tools to automatically exchange data. I can't see too many manufacturers being prepared to swap such detailed design information (unless they are 'open source').
any more than the law of gravity keeps us stuck to Earth.
To come up with a "moore's law for batteries" would be an exercise in historical analysis and stochastics, not engineering. It won't make better batteries come faster.
I don't think there will ever be any sort of power crisis, because of that monolithic flaming reactor bathing us and our moon in energy, that we largely ignore as far as direct conversion or storage goes, from 93 million miles away.
We can, actually, do better. Not long ago, there was this article. It spoke of a cluster of 12 mini-ITX motherboards that, collectively, consumed only 200W, while exhibiting the collective computational power of a 4- to 6-way cluster of 2.4GHZ machines, which, I would estimate, would consume two to three times as much energy.
This is actually the reason I would like to build such a cluster. I like power, but I like to be able to pay my energy bill, too.
If we can do this in that environment, can we make this sort of advance in laptops? Why not?
Lastly, does your laptop really need to be 2.4GHZ or faster? Why?
www.wavefront-av.com
Due to the overuse of the Rule of Thumb it is obivious that we need another appendage to name a rule after. I suggest one of the following,
[ ] Rule of Pinky(the Pinky Rule)
[ ] Rule of the Middle Finger(the FU Rule)
[ ] Rule of the Pointy Finger(the Blame someone else Rule)
[ ] Belly Button Rule(the Lint Rule)
[ ] The Little Piggy Rules
[ ] Rule of Nose(The "Smelt it, Dealt it" Rule)
Be sure to only pick one.
Yes, wireless devices are becoming more prevelant, but they will never fully replace wired fixed workstations. While we can always work towards wireless devices that use less power, better batteries, and better wireless connectivity, it will not match the speed and power of a desktop. The idea that battery life is going to limit the semiconductor industry is foolish.
DeviantArt Page
NSFWI disagree with the terms of this article. He's right if you're talking about putting the fastest possible technology in portable devices -- but we've NEVER been able to do that. If you want a "Moore's Law" for portable devices, it's that when you drop the clock frequency of a processor its power requirements drop still faster. The processors in current cell phones put the original IBM PC to shame, and in ten years they'll be approaching the speeds of current desktop machines, and even though those desktops will be light years ahead, the portables will be plenty nice.
The real problem is not that we won't be able to provide enough power, it is that the power density is rising. That is fundamentaly different. If we continue scaling this way, we will have to decrease the frequency, not because of the transistor limit, but because of the heat dissipation limit. 2015 is the end of the actual CMOS, probably.
Why bother? Mains power is ubiquitous. Already they have managed to make switch-mode PSUs that can handle a wide enough range of voltages and frequencies to work pretty much anywhere in the world, and they even have interchangeable connectors to handle the different sockets encountered by cosmopolitan travellers.
For the amount of time I personally ever spend away from a power point, all appliances have a more than adequate battery life. Ditch the obsession with wireless and come to terms with power leads.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I think this is a good point, but it's a subset of something I've been thinking for a year or two now:Computers are pretty much fast enough for most people.
Now I know the Slashdot crowd will think this is crazy, but when I think about it, most people I know just use apps like MS Word, Chat, Web Browser, E-mail, some MP3 player, and maybe enough of a image editor to import pictures from thier digital camera and print it out. Can any of these people tell the difference in power between a top of-the-line computer from today and a top-of-the-line computer from a year or two ago? Not really.
From this sort of viewpoint, manufacturers really need to do one of two things:
Computer manufacturers aren't generally superb at B, but they're better at B than A, and I'm glad to see that some manufacturers are catching on to the fact that, since they can't sell loads of new computers right now by pumping up power, they are focusing on making computer use more transparent.
After Sean Connery, each succesive actor who plays James Bond will get worse by a factor of 1.5.
Current day CPUs like the Pentium march to an internal clock that at this moment runs at around 2 Ghz. This is both difficult to design and very inefficient.
There is research going on that changes the clock based design for much more energy efficient clockless design. Mind you this is nothing new, just not applied yet to every day computers.
One interesting chip design is/was the Amulet which is compatible with the very popular ARM design in a clockless version.
Net sa best, mar it koe minder
--just looked at their page. Yes it does seem to be what they are doing and how they are thinking. Crusoe chip, solid state storage, etc seems the way to go in laptop/mobile design. So is it just marketing now? Who's got the laptops that use this chip, and are they any more energy efficient than your mainstream IBM's and Dells and Sonys, etc?
damn right....what is funny is that we would be running DOS 1.0 all in L1 cache on the CPU.....
how frigen rediculous is that!!!!
if we had a better optimized OS, then fewer disk fetches would need to be made, fewer memory swaps, and much faster operations would be achieved.
but then....I don't think you can get down to 64K again, but I am sure you could drop an OS down to say 500 MBs and still keep all teh eye candy we have..
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Is the law still working for he amount of power used? I understand that the newest chips do use more power, but shouldn't that be the approach.
Good point, but there are other factors at work. What the article ignores is that the current law is still working fine. The amount of power used by an x-MHz chips has been steadily declining. I remember when a machine with a 16 MHz processor needed a 200W power supply -- now we have machines that are orders of magnitude faster and still use a 200W power supply.
What has changed is that people insist on having desktop power in a laptop form factor. Another change has been a move to architectures that do more per clock cycle -- old processors often took 4 or more cycles per instruction. New processors, using pipelined and superscalar architectures, dispatch and retire multiple instructions per clock cycle. Technologies like hyperthreading boosts utilization of the CPU's logical units and thus increase power. Modern CPUs draw more power because they do more per cycle.
Moore's Law is fine. That mobile devices lag desktop devices in performance (or suffer from poor battery life) has nothing to do with Moore. The computing power of a 1 watt processor continues its steayd rise.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
NOW I know why the panels explode onboard the Enterprise when they get hit.
IMHO, One of the biggest need is a standardized charging interface!
I once considered to run my own server. Then calculated power consumption of a PC left 24/7. Dropped the idea immediately. For you Yankees, power is cheap. But here in the ol' countries, that is quite some euro's out of the window. I don't do that much more with a PC then 8 years ago. Why does it have to use 3 times as much power?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Am I the only one who thinks this is funny? This is like physicists saying we need a new law of entropy so we can make devices that are 110% efficient.
Such devices have been available for decades, litterally. This one is way fancier than the one that was at home during my childhood, but for 59.90 (VAT incl.) that's just a steal.
The author is just completely and totally wrong... There's no better way to put it, I'm afraid.
Let's start off with an example... My good old 33MHz 486 notebook had a fairly large battery that would only last about 2 hours. Now, I've got a 1.2GHz notebook, with a far larger screen, smaller/lighter battery, and the battery life is much BETTER, not worse. What's more, there are notebooks much faster than mine, with 5+ hour battery life, and are still lighter.
The main reason is that ALL the components are getting more effecient. The hard drive is a significant drain on your batteries, but they are getting quite a bit more effecient every day. Things like the LCD backlight are becomming much more effecient (and brighter) at the same time. But that's just to start...
Power supplies are getting MUCH more effecient, and batteries are improving quite a bit as well (not quite doubling every 18 months, more like every 24 months).
Although the author seems to think otherwise, processors are becomming more effecient as well. My notebook only uses 30watts at MAX CPU/HDD utilization, and averages about 15 watts. Desktop processors are becomming more effecient quite quickly, just not as quickly as the speed is ramped up. While a 500MHz AMD processor used 42W, a similar 1,000MHz processor used 65W. That's right, effeciency IS improving quickly.
But that's only on the desktop front. If you look at notebooks, you will see that effeciency is even closer to matching performance improvements. It's just a matter that Intel/AMD are willing to spend the extra money on making notebook chips more effecient, while they aren't willing to spend much money on making desktop chips use less power. (which is why I'd personally like to have an ATX mobo that accepts a mobile Intel/AMD processors).
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Human body could power small fuel cells
Power from blood could lead to 'human batteries'
The only problem would be when your laptop would get low on power, so would you!
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I, for one, need at least a couple extra spacial dimensions. Then I might have a chance at organizing all my crap.
Trouble is, you can't just invent that kind of thing. And that goes for things like Moore's Law, too... Moore didn't invent Moore's law, he simply noticed it and put it into words. (It should be noted, however, that Moore was arguably a driving force behind the causes of Moore's Law.)
We might "need" a stated law that describes exponential increases in computational efficiency. But unless and until it actually starts happening on a regular basis, nobody is going to be able to observe it.
The battery obviously ran out on the author of this article, because it is all fluff and no meat. Yes, we all know about the fact that battery technology hasn't advanced at a rate to keep up with wireless devices. So why can't this author talk about the current state of battery and storage technology research? Are there any new ways to juice up batteries? Is there a science barrier to increasing battery life.
I know that Wired prefers flash over substance, but I give this paper a C-.
Someone should make a laptop:
Runs DOS
WordPerfect 5
email
All in RAM
Flashdrive for storage
168 hour battery life
indestructable or 2 pounds (pick either)
t
Don't forget about all the energy needed to make the food to feed the people on the bikes...
Jon Bardin
just enforce the ones on the books! Moore's law is about doubling the number of transitors on the chip. Why bother doing that when (in the future) light processors and quantum computers eliminate the need to put transistors so close together?
I think they're forgetting about software, which becomes more and more demanding, rendering hardware performance's increase nearly useless.
:-(
;-)
For most of the software I use, I'd love to have a trimmed down version providing only that 20% of the features that 80% of the users exclusively use. Yes, Pareto's Law !!.
Only it is not in the market anymore
Or is it a plot between hardware and software vendors?
No, I really didn't want to talk about Windows
That article came of as one huge "power users" insane rant. I can only imagine Michael screaming at his batteries "I want more life, f***ers" (and you thought the Nexus 6's in Bladerunner had it though).
"An inability to run the next generation of chips at their full capability will play havoc with the semiconductor business, consumer electronics, telecommunications, the PC industry, and ultimately the world's economy."
Correct me if I am wrong, but hasn't the human race survived for thousands of years without these devices? Not to meation that some parts of the world today doesn't even have access to the current technology, or any technology at all.
"... should band together to make this the great joint endeavor of this century."
And somehow "tiny" issues like; war, hunger, poverty, oppresion and lack of human rights, are just unimportant? Gee Mr. Malone, you are one nice guy...
end rant...
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Hurry up! Somebody dig up Gordie and have him spew off something memorable for a demanding posterity!
C'mon! Hop to it!
This is almost as stupid as asking for a "a new "All Your Base" meme virus".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Amen. I learned so much from working on small, underpowered systems. Having to think about where your CPU cycles and disk space are going forces you to pick up much more of a feel for how things really work. (e.g. I'm running out of space in /var - let's see what all those files are *really* for. What packages can I lose? What can I turn off or tweak? Is there a better way of doing this?)
Eventually you acquire a low-level "feel" for what the machine's doing, and that's how you're able to fix problems later along the line. I know it doesn't matter in the long run, but I *hate* seeing inefficient use of resources. Even things like scripts using awk when they could use cut piss me off. It's lazy. Understand your craft.
Over the last ten years my computers have got faster and faster. (Also hotter and hotter and louder and louder.) Have I got more and more productive? No. I can't write a letter any more quickly with Word on a 2+GHz XP machine than I could with Wordworth on my 30MHz Amiga in 1992.
I haven't replaced my personal machine in about five years, and I've got no plans to do so any time soon. Even 20GHz won't make me write quicker, read quicker or think quicker. I'm more interested in machines running cooler, quieter and cheaper.
This guy doesn't strike me as being that well informed. Most embedded processors are already designed to shut down functions that aren't needed, and conserve power...
In cell phones it's really not the CPU, but the RF amplifier that limits battery life. I know mine gets noticably warm from talking for a while. Also, how about that nice back-lit color screen? That sucks power, but I don't see people going back to monochrome to make it last longer....
Laptops may be a different story, but we're already seeing a sperate market develop for laptop processors... So, what exactly does this guy want?
I've often wondered why hardware reviewers can't provide us a simple computational-power/watt value for every CPU, motherboard, or graphics card they review. This would be especially useful for laptops, cell phones, and palm devices. I know that they often give battery life values, but that is subject to too many variables to be useful. These values might actually cause some positive Darwinian effects in the marketplace.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Seems pretty accurate to me...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
..lol..
http://www.contextmag.com/archives/200110/cataly st2batteriesincl.asp
http://www.meansbusiness.com/ideas_010902.asp#3
Fuel cells, maybe. Ultracapacitors, maybe. Batteries are probably within a factor of two of their ultimate limits.
Robert
Beamed power is the way to go. Why just beam data, if you can beam power as well?
My favorite part is the wild misconception people have that moore's law has anything to do with speed. His real observation was basically "We're gonna have more space on a chip to cram stuff on there than we know what to do with."
I agree completely that this is a misconception people have. But when you think about it, the idea that if you double the amount of transistors in 18 months, you might very well be doubling speed makes sense. With twice the transistors on today's technology, you could make two chips that, when working on two seperate halves of the same task, could do the full task in half the time. With the right software, a dual processor system can run nearly twice as fast. And isn't that really (beyond megahertz improvements) how computers have gotten faster? More transistors in the same chip doing the same things the core parts do, just in advance.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
the joke was "what keeps a plane going but hot air" and of course the Congressional record is full of hot air.
These people aren't thinking of our future reality.
Within 10 years we'll all be wearing flak-vests to go out in public.
So we might as well use batteries as the armor panels.
For the 8-page, Scientific American introduction go here:3 5-759A-1CDD-B4A8809EC588EEDF&pageNumber=1&catI D=2
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0007A7
they will then use more power.
Look at laptops A long time ago they lasted 8 hours on Nicads. Now 2-3 on Li-Ion.
The Palm 1 month on 2 AAAs. Now less than 1 week.
The Phone CPU will be limited by the batteries.
... the 4 way power radio, is basically shirt pocket/PDA sized and doesn't use a spring, it's just direct crank/genny/into the recharageables. It is identical in size to normal "couple of AAs only" shirt pocket radios, basically, just a fold out crank on the side.
I agre the current crop of clockwork spring driven baygen/freeplays are big, but they were designed to be table top portables for use in third world countries where many people could sit around and listen to them with the big speaker inside, there aren't any provisions for batteries in them at all (earlier models like I own anyway). the newer ones have recharagables and built in LED small reading light.. Most of the case if you open it up is hollow, BTW, it's just a platform to house the large speaker. The radio itself is just a small normal card, (analog tuning however), and the crank/spring assembly is not that large removed, and it could be made lots smaller if it only had to power earbuds. Springs are just correctly tempered steel after all, size is just normal engineering, nothing exotic to it.
My other thoughts on the laptop "battery don't last long enough!" so called dilemma is.. really.. are people such weenies they couldn't carry one extra lb? I have 3 laptops, all older and a few lbs heavier than current models, but really, people carried them around. I just think there would be a market still for a laptop that carried multiple batteries on board to give it the range peole need, a lot of folks want ultra small light weight, but a lot of people could "struggle by" with an additional 1-2 lbs weight if it doubled or tripled their running time. some wouldn't, my guess is a lot of actual power users just might.
The weight would be exactly what they were carrying just a few years ago, and no one got hernias then. Same weight, better computer, much longer running time then just a few years ago, by the simple addition of one or two exisiting batteries. Why is this such a dilemma? I'm sorry but as a blue collar worker I do NOT have mucvh sympathy for climate controlled indoor workers who make serious folding money and can't carry an extra lb or two occassionaly as they step from AC office to AC office. None. Zero sympathy. Weenies.
And the multiple batteries have to be onboard, parallel wired and hot swappable. There's the obvious solution. ONE battery onboard and having to carry loose spares is nuts, IMO. You want to turn on your machine and not have to dick with it for a long workday, that's the bottom line. It's like cellphones now, sure they are teeny tiny, etc, but sheesh, I can NOT even hardly see the screens or use those ridiculous lilliputian contraptions that pass as the keyboards. Sucks. I will hold on to my older larger cell phone as long as possible because of this, and I'm not gonna pop 2 to 500 clams for a cell phone, no matter what it does, ain't happening.
grumble, rant, kvetch....
Sometimes little is cool, sometimes you just got to go with the mass needed to do the job.
Now I go outside to buck up some whopper big oak branches the tree service just dropped before lunch. Will I use my small dinky homelite xl because it's lighter, or will I fire up the 18 inch bar husky 55?
Sometimes the right tool for the job is just bigger than "any" similar tool on the market. People have to figure out what their job is, to get the bosses work done, or to look cool and trendy.
Back in dee-troit when I was a kid, there was all the usual fanboy ragging on each other over cars and engines, etc, but there was one cosmic truth that EVERYONE agreed on. You can have all your fancy turbos and whatnots, but where the rubber meets the road, day in and day out for power --> "there's no replacement for displacement"
Same deal with laptops, the solutions are there for long battery life if people weren't such weenies about it. They are designing for wimps it appears. Get the "fab five" out of the design room and stick a couple of good ole boys in there, they'll tell the engineers how to design
Self-moderation: -1 Flaimbait, Offtopic, True.
...you don't make a law and suddenly the world is governed by it. The "law" is simply an observation.
//more correct statement...
Saying we need a second moore's law is like saying "We need scientists to come up with a law that says I can shoot lazers out of my eyes!"
You have the whole process backwards... it's a wonder you can wipe your own ass.
"Computers need to be designed to run more efficiently such that they consume less power, or energy sources need to be able to store larger amounts of power."
We don't need a bloody law... we need a solution.
... pricey, but cool.
Ok, I know complaining about unoptimized software is the popular thing to do on /., but honestly, why both optimizing software for fast processing?
Think of it, these days at least 99% of the biggest bottleneck in a computer system by a LONG margin is situated on the far side of the keyboard. You can optimize Word all to hell, make it process all my commands blazingly fast and yet it probably still won't manage to shave even 1 second off the amount of time it takes me to write a technical report.
Really what we need is software with GOOD functionality, not heavily optimized software. Programs with very efficient and usuable UIs will beat out software heavily optimized for fast executation but with a poor UI any day.
Of course, the best solution of all is both...so spend a half hour in front of the PC, working on your arms, shoulders, back and chest, then take a nice half hour jog.
Or just get StepMania, a Dance Dance Revolution simulator for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.
Portability a problem? Wireless dumb terminal communicates with water cooled superbox pluged into the 220 clothes dryer outlet in the basement. Battery no problem. Duh.
We do not need better batteries, we need smarter journalists. Fuck sakes, I wish these people would use the three grey cells they have.
Moore's First Law doesn't seem like such a miracle or an unbelievable thing to me... It's what I grew up with and expect. In fact, if things ever slow down in this industry, I might panic!
Roland may be a nice guy, but all his blog does is post excerpts from stories without any new information or ideas added. What's the point? Thousands of people do this everyday -- Roland is no different.
/. with a link to his blog is just redundant. If I wanted a summary with a link to the article, isn't that what /. is for?
Posting an article on
Please cut out the non-authoritative links.
The funny thing about Moore's law is it works regardless of restrictions like minimum size for working wires, the speed of light, or battery power. Every few years a well thought out arguement of a real restriction to the law comes around. X is going to bottleneck progress. And a year or so before X is going to matter Y technology comes out solving X or making it generally no longer a problem.
We don't need a second Moore's Law. The one works perfectly fine for computer speed. If you want a trend law for battery life (which don't get me wrong thanks to the cellphone and labtop industry has been increasing very nicely) you can make up your own law, and don't tag it onto Moore's for the added oomf, to make it catch on.
I also question the chicken-egg Moore's law-Computer Speed connection. As if Moore's law makes computers faster. No, superscalar, pipelining, better fab, these make computers faster. Moore's law is a law of trends.
Moore's Law is like the Anti-Murphey's Law. It seems like there is always something ready to pimpslap poor chip designer's dream of 1.5x a year, but somehow they always think themselves out of danger.
"Anything that can go wrong, won't stand in the way of progress." - Moore's law as stated by a pessimist.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
_Coarsely_ shredded green cabbage
A small amount of coarsely shredded red cabbage, for color
A small amount of shredded carrot, for color
A _tiny_ amount of caraway seed (it has a strong flavor)
Mayonaise or miracle whip
Mustard to taste
Sugar to taste
Thin mixture with milk
Since when is criticizing the language of the article off topic? This comment is specifically discussing why the headline is "wrong." It is a response to the story. How on-topic can you be?
It doesn't do anything but piss people off.
Developers aren't lazy. They're just working within the constraints of a problem.
There's a cost to development that is measured in engineering time. The more optimized the code is, the more engineering time you need to put into it.
The tradeoff is - faster time to market vs. tighter/faster code. The cost of Memory/CPU/Hardware resources decays exponentially every year. The cost of engineering time has not fallen nearly as much. In many cases the tradeoff becomes easy.
Taking the "efficient code" philosophy to the extreme, programmers would write their own operating systems that were specifically optimized to their application. That ONLY happens in embedded spaces or perhaps some enterprise applications where performance actually has some material value the exceeds a shorter/lazier development time.
On the other hand, writing bloated code and/or bloated software _has_ to take more developer time than simpler code or software.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
you rock
It seems to me the short-term answer is to start putting batteries into the peripherals rather than running everything on the laptop's battery. The printer, scanner, even external storage, could all have their own batteries, and maybe a way to recharge them all at once via the single charger on the laptop.
--- Donal, SysAdmin of The Brewers' Witch BBS
There needs to be more emphasis on a laptop as a true portable device, rather than a desktop replacement. Very low watt passive cooled only chip, perhaps just a solid state drive(s), lower power but still decent CPU, and etc. Basically PDA with screen and ability to accept USB, firewire stuff easily. No surround sound dvd players in other words. Maybe even running embedded OS . Nothing that takes lotsa juice. I'm sure it's doable, too. Built from the ground up somehow with low electrical needs as the primary engineering aspect, so that dual batteries+ crank/spring + built in somewhat relocatable solar panel will be more than adequate for a full 8+ hour workday.. Something along those lines. Niche market now, might be the solution to the "short batt life" syndrome, that OR the "manly man" laptop I outlined, triple batteries, heck with the weight, a 8 lb beast like we used to have.
I like it! Maybe something with cold fusion?
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!