Does Moore's Law Help or Hinder the PC Industry?

An anonymous reader writes to mention two analysts recently examined Moore's Law and its effect on the computer industry. "One of the things both men did agree on was that Moore's Law is, and has been, an undeniable driving force in the computer industry for close to four decades now. They also agreed that it is plagued by misunderstanding. 'Moore's Law is frequently misquoted, and frequently misrepresented,' noted Gammage. While most people believe it means that you double the speed and the power of processors every 18 to 24 months, that notion is in fact wrong, Gammage said. 'Moore's Law is all about the density...the density of those transistors, and not what we choose to do with it.'"

Comments

Better Summary

[Palmyst]

The core of their argument is that instead of actually delivering same performance at lower prices, Moore's law delivers more performance at same prices. i.e. you can buy Cray-1 level performance for $50, but you can't buy Apple I level performance for $0.001. The second level of their argument is that this march of performance forces users to keep spending money to upgrade to the latest hardware, just to keep up with the software.

Re:Instruction set != architecture

[$RANDOMLUSER]

The miniscule number of registers everyone complains about is irrelevant

Were it not for the opcode fetches to register-dance (because only certain registers can do certain things), or having to use memory to store intermediate results (because there aren't enough registers), or stack-based parameter passing, (not enough registers) or, again, the single accumulator (more opcode fetches and more register dancing) you might have a point. But what you're suggesting (in the rest of your post) is that having 1000 horsepower on bicycle tires is the same as having 500 horsepower on real tires - and I can't agree.

...30-year old software unmodified...

Can you name any 30-year old software that is worth running unmodified? Hell, I'll give you a break. Can you name any 10-year old software that is worth running unmodified?

But can we?

[Rix]

30 year old software won't run on new operating systems, and 30 year old software won't support modern hardware. You won't be getting USB support, and parallel/serial ports are quickly disappearing. Where would you find a modem with drivers for your old OS? Where would you find a dial up ISP, let alone one that would support 1200 baud or whatever you'd be limited to.

You're going to be *far* better off running 30 year old software under emulation, where these things can be faked.