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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.
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.