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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.'"
I suppose it does both.
The drum beat of progress pushes development to it's limits, but at the same time hinders some forms of research or real world tests of computation theory, for all save the few chip makers dominating the market currently.
If only because it keeps us tied to the x86 instruction set. If we didn't have the luxury of increasing the transistor count by an order of magnitude every few years, we'd have to rely on better processor design.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
It's not a law, it's an observation.
"Moore's Law" is not a real law. In reality, it is not relevant at all. It's kind of a cute thing to mention, but when it gets down to the real world engineering, it has no significances.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If Moore's law is helping or hindering the PC industry? I don't think it could hinder it... Do you think we'd have even more powerful computers without it? Or higher transistor density, if you like?
It certainly seems to have had an effect on peoples attention to writing efficient code. Mind you, it is more expensive to write code than throw more processor at things ...
is more important to nerds than Moore's law anyway. Where's the /. article about it?
Murphy tells us that more bugs will be found on release day than any day previous. That your laptop will work fine until the very minute your presentation is scheduled to begin. And that backup generators are unnecessary unless you don't have them.
Who cares about Moore's law... it's just prophecy from some Nostradamus wannabe.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I always viewed this as an observation or rule of thumb, not a law.
Moore (or Mead for that matter) didn't get up one day and declare that the amount of transistors on a square centimeter of space will double every 18 to 24 months. Nor did he prove in anyway that it has always been this way and will always be this way.
He made observations and these observations happen to have held true for a relatively long time in the world of computers. Does that make them a law? Definitely not! At some point, the duality that small particles suffer will either stop us dead in our tracks or (in the case of quantum computers) propel us forward much faster than ever thought.
Why debate if a well made observation hurts or hinders the industry when it's the industry doing it to itself?!
My work here is dung.
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.
Does Cole's law help or hinder picnics?
Discuss.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The real story is that Moore's law describes the basic goal of the semiconductor industry. Perhaps there are better goals, but they tend to get swallowed up in the quest for smaller transistors. The other real story is Gate's law: I will use up those extra transistors faster than you can create them. My hardware OEMs need a bloated OS that will drive new HW replacement cycles. I also seem to remember Moore's law was often quoted as a doubling every year, now I see some saying 18-24 months, so I think in fact the rule is slowing down. We are pushing into the area where it takes a lot of effort and innovation to get a small increase in density. Even still, Moore's law has always been a favorite of mine! Tom
Why do computers in general need to get any faster these days?
Ten years ago I wouldn't believe I would ever ask such a question but I have been asking it recently as my retired parents are looking to buy a computer for the web, writing letters and emails. I've told them specifically "DO NOT BUY VISTA" (why on earth would anyone want that ugly memory-hog?), so I just can't think of a single reason why they need even one of the medium-spec machines.
Personally, I like my games, so "the faster the better" will probably always be key. But for the vast majority of people what is the point of a high-spec machine?
Surely a decent anti-spyware program is a much better choice.
I've heard that companies plan, design, and release new processors based on Moore's Law. In other words, if it doesn't keep up with Moore's Law it's discarded, if it goes faster than Moore's Law its release is delayed (giving them more time to fine-tune it and get their manufacturing lines ready). If this is the case, then it could be hindering developement in new ways of processing (that have a payoff that takes more than 3 years to develop) and we might even be able to beat Moore's Law rather than follow it. Of course, Moore's Law is awesome enough as it is, I don't feel the need to complain about how it takes two whole years to double the effectiveness of my hardware.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
...Like GHz or lines of code.
Take the Itanic for example, or the P4, or WindowsME/Vista.
What we do with the transistors? Run software of course. Enter Wirth's Law:
"Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating."
More Twoson than Cupertino