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Are Cheap Laptops a Roadblock for Moore's Law?
Timothy Harrington writes "Cnet.co.uk wonders if the $100 laptop could spell the end of Moore's Law: 'Moore's law is great for making tech faster, and for making slower, existing tech cheaper, but when consumers realize their personal lust for faster hardware makes almost zero financial sense, and hurts the environment with greater demands for power, will they start to demand cheaper, more efficient 'third-world' computers that are just as effective?" Will ridiculously cheap laptops wean consumers off ridiculously fast components?"
I really don't think this is going to make a huge impact. Companies will always want to sell their latest, greatest hardware, and there will always be plenty of people ready to spend their money on the next best thing, that's how the technology industry works!
Microsoft will always be around dragging those fast components down.
Moore's Law dictates that in 18 months, you should be able to get a significantly more powerful laptop for $100. Even with ridiculously cheap computers out there, there will always be a core that wants power.
Besides, if cost were the biggest issue in computing, than Linux would be the ubiquitous desktop.
Because there will always be the Alienware crowd.
short answer: no
long answer: there are always new developments that require access to superior technology both on a professional/business/university level and further down the line as such things as indie music labels/movie producers, programmers, graphic designers, and for many people in such groups they can afford said technology to further it's development. The burden seems more on the designers of the processors than on the consumers.
Cheaper Portables will not change the "Bigger/Faster/Louder" of laptop consumption. The BFL is ingrained into our culture - even if it is as simple as keeping up with The Joneses. The $100.00 laptop, unless it matches or exceeds current functionality will not siphon off demand for portable powerful personal processing.
They'll just become faster at the same price OR the software people want to use simply won't operate. Look at Vista...can you imagine trying to run that on a PII or PIII CPU? You'd want to slit your wrists out of sheer boredom due to having to wait on everything to load.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
Business computing needs will always drive bigger / better / faster computer hardware.
I'm pretty sure Moore's Law will remain intact.
Personally, until encoding video is as fast as encoding audio is now, I for one welcome faster machines.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
I was talking with our head of IT the other day. He is a serious gamer who just purchased a $500 USD video card. He buys the latest and greatest video card about twice a year (selling his old one on on ebay) and upgrades his motherboard once every two years. He has no plans to stop doing this. Ever.
Moore's Law says nothing about speed. It does say something about the density of transistors on an integrated circuit. How your engineers choose to take advantage of that is up to your business drivers.
Here's a thought - maybe those $100 laptops become cheaper, or more capable over time.
People will continue to buy computers far more powerful than they actually require because salesmen are usually pretty good at convincing people that they need it regardless. Also, PC gaming isn't going to let up and the hardware requirements aren't either. Sleep easy, Moore's Law.
Since Vista requires the kind of hardware it does to run *well*, since games are looking better and better every year with Gamebryo, UE3, and so forth, and since the tech industry as a whole still appreciates faster workstations, more memory, etc., there's more than enough of a demand for increasing hardware performance. I don't see that demand going away any time soon.
Honestly, email and web browsing never required much past computers from, say, 1995. Is everyone using 12-year-old computers? No.
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Now, I'm not so sure that the writer of the article actually knows what Moore's Law is. It doesn't have to do with CPU speed; it has to do with how many transistors we can cram onto a silicon wafer. And as that compression increases, the same amount of CPU power gets smaller and more energy-efficient. In other words, we aren't looking at the "end of Moore's Law"... we're looking at that progression being put to use in the way the market wants - that is, making computers cheaper and smaller, since they're already as fast as we need them to be.
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Aren't mutually exclusive. I want them all.
And I get a lot of mileage from old hardware for things like my broadband firewall and NFS server, but I have finally given up trying to use anything less than a Pentium II.
The summary states:" 'Moore's law is great for making tech faster, and for making slower, existing tech cheaper,"
And then asks: but when consumers realize their personal lust for faster hardware makes almost zero financial sense, and hurts the environment with greater demands for power, will they start to demand cheaper, more efficient 'third-world' computers that are just as effective?"
So Moore's law is good for going smaller/faster/cheaper, but the demand for s/f/c will spell the end of Moore's law?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Given that Moore's Law is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months, no. Even if the gigahertz / number of cores war stops for laptops, there's lots of components that can be put on chip. But apparently it's too much to ask from a rag like CNet to get their basic definitions correct.
With OLPC, there will be more computers out there than ever before. Many of these laptops will be used to create wealth, some of which will be used to buy "normal" laptops that are faster. This, in turn, will push the upper end of chip development towards faster and cheaper.
Put another way: There are BAZILLIONS of cheap, ARM-based CPUs out there running everything from microwaves to kiddie toys. Have they put an end to Moore's law?
What actually MIGHT put an end to Moore's law is the actual quantum limits to computation. And we *will* hit those limits if we don't blow ourselves up first. But that's a ways off, and we may find some way past those limits as well. (EG: using other, N-dimensional space or something exotic that we can't even imagine yet)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
It's not a LAW-law, it was a prediction. It was an observation coupled with smart insight into the nature of the semi-conductor business, and deviations aren't news, the fact that his prediction has so consistently worked over the past decades is the real story.
Will it hold up forever? Probably not, it could speed up or slow down by an order of magnitude as semi-conductor technology is replaced by The Next Big Thing (Optics? Quantum? Duotronics?), and our measurement criteria might have to change with it.
So again, the real story is that Moore's observation has held up so spectacularly so long. Lulls in performance increases are natural. But how does it plot over time?
Directly proportional to silicon usage.
Need to get the low energy magnetic memory spintronic processing train moving.
Or photonics.
People may want to buy more ecologically sound, low powered, cheaper machines, but they are subject to external pressures.
Apart from the small percentage of hackers/enthusiasts who play with computers because they like computers, the majority of people use computers to achieve goals - be it to write their work documents, play games, edit photos etc. They will buy the machines that can run the software to do these jobs.
I can't see the big software players reducing the power requirements of their software as it upgrades. Microsoft Office 2015, Photoshop v.27, and World of Warcraft 2015 are going to need more rather than less power and people will be forced to buy more powerful machines.
Fact is.. people are installing Vista on laptops that really shouldn't be running them..
..curse Dell and Microsoft. And then go to a nicely performing (but more expensive) Mac.
People use their cheap underpowered laptop, get frustrated
If laptop makers didn't tempt consumers with their underpowered crap, maybe they would have a decent reputation. I don't see how Moore's law is affected.
Apple is the only computer manufacturer whose low end PC's actually perform tolerably.
Maybe Ask Yahoo is a better place for this kind of question?
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So presently, laptops are getting radically cheaper. But these laptops are simply using old components (VIAs, Durons and Celerons??!!??) and building a portable that barely keeps up and is horribly outdated.
Given that as of now, I can configure a fairly decent desktop (comparable to a sub-$800 laptop) for under $400 (including a monitor), the craze for cheap laptops might mean a resurgence in desktops for all we know.
And you can never count out the masses who spend $2000 + on their up-to-date PCs (whether it's laptops or desktops). AMD/Intel are still developing chips that sell for $1000 for a couple of months and then drop to reasonable prices within a year.
Too early to make such predictions without any data on consumer reaction to these cheapo laptops... Especially them gamers'...
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Troll? Here are a few good counter arguments to the post: (I'm sure you all can think of more.)
1. High performance server/business hardware will still be in demand.
2. Modern operating systems with all the bells and whistles that we're used to will need expensive hardware to run.
3. The trend is for home users to play video and audio which you just can't do (well) on a $100 computer.
Moore's law is about transistors per area and cost per transistor. Cheap laptops have nothing to do with that.
But for the question that was *meant*, rather than what was asked... still no. There are some applications that can use basically unlimited computing power (and now, unlimited computing power with minimal electrical power), and everyone else benefits from developments geared towards those areas.
Moore's Law as it applies to PCs has its own "law": Machrone's Law. It's not as strong a "law" as Moore's as it has had to undergo continual adjustment, but there is a definite phenomenon. Also related is the amusing Wirth's Law, also described in that IEEE Spectrum online blurb.
My cellphone is now more powerful than the first computer I used. It supports up to 1GB of removable storage in about the smallest form factor I've ever seen (micro SD). It's built-in camera is as good as the first digital camera that I owned.
In other words, yes, people may start demanding smaller and more powerful devices - but so what? It just means that instead of speed doubling, power use might start decreasing, storage density might increase, who knows what. We're using computers for purposes I never would have dreamed of when ten years ago. I have a computer under my TV that records shows - I never saw that coming until it did.
Computers will continue to evolve. The laptop and desktop might start to fade out, but new devices will take their place.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.
Instead of placing twice as many transistors on a cpu you can instead place twice as many cpus(a few less for the sticklers) of the same transistor count on a single wafer. Even if consumers no longer care about FLOPS they will still be swayed by lower cost, longer battery life, smaller dimensions and passive/quieter cooling.
Cheaper, more environmentally friendly cars exist, and do exactly what we need from cars Does this put a roadblock on high performance cars or SUVs? No, because people always want something "better". Also, you make a lot less profit selling a $100 laptop, so I'm pretty sure high end machines will continue to be "necessary".
As its ~$175 and its goal it is to reduce price while keeping the same or improved performance with every subsequent revision. Technological improvements are needed to make that happen. While they don't have to be "Moore's Law" improvements (# of transistors per unit area) precisely, they are the same general type of improvements. And, frankly, I don't think the XO and similar systems will reduce the demand for high-end computers. If anything, making basic computers (and experience with them) universally available will probably increase demand for high-end computers.
If clockspeed per ounce of gold per year is measured instead of clockspeed per dollar per year, you still get impressive speed increases.
The problem is dollars are losing half their value every 3 years. A thing measured in dollars is going to become worthless faster than a thing measured in units that don't lose value. If you measure clockspeed vs. ounces of gold, you get a better relation between clockspeed and time than if you use dollars.
Unfortunately Moore wasn't an economist. He didn't understand the value of currency in measuring technological improvements.
In much the same way that Americans have given up their SUVs en masse for tiny European two-seaters.
Several comments are stating that Moore's Law is about transistor density not processor speed. This is correct but I feel I should add something very important.
"The number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months"
Weather you keep the original 2 years or drop to 18 months, we're specifically referencing low cost components, which would map directly to the hardware they're trying to put in a $100 laptop.
So in short, no, a cheap laptop just helps to confirm Moore's Law, not derail it.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
25 years ago I had a $100 desktop computer: a Sinclair ZX80.
That did not pose a roadblock for Moore's Law re: desktops, so why would it be the same for something comparable a quarter-century later?
All the price does is establish a bare useful^D^D^Dable minimum; Moore's Law just means that 25 years from now you'll be able to do on a $100 laptop then what you really want to do on it today - which still won't be useful then.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
This isn't an issue... not even a little.
Let's look at another market for contrast... Cell phones:
Here (in the US) I cannot buy 'just' a cell phone. It's a calendar/camera/mp3/FM radio etc. These types of phone are available in other 'poor' countries. Hell, in the US everyone is buying $600 iphones.
So when it comes to laptops are people really going to buy a crank powered, small BW screen that slowly runs apps? Nope, I'm buying that 19" 2500x1600 32-bit Centrino-X2-Core4-Athlon 9Ghz 8GB RAM with Firewire 400,800,1200/USB/USB2/USB Wireless/802.11ABGNXYZ that can play WOW at 200 FPS...
Besides, when you give a customer 3 options, then tend to pick the middle. I'm not going to buy the cheap ($100~300) laptop, but not the expensive one ($2000+), I'm buying the middle one.
Moores law being about transistors aside, I see prices as having reached a relative plateau, where we will see the same prices with just faster, greener, smaller computers. There will always be exception, but tech pushes some hardware off the market before it's time, other hardware items can't keep up, it averages out.
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
Shouldn't we be talking about something that matters rather than debating an imaginary law? the whole discussion is fruitless...
(im not a troll. mod me -1 goblin)
If you can get a full computer for $100, you can probably get a 16 or 32 core computer for around $1000. So, no, I don't think this is going to stop Moore's law.
Furthermore, there's always the gamers...
The answer to this question and all other hypotheticals you come up with is "We shall see".
Maybe, partially. Cheap hardware won't put an end to Moore's Law; Moore's Law is what's made cheap hardware possible in the first place. If Moore's Law continues unabated, cheap hardware will merely become more capable or even cheaper. If Moore's Law hits a funadamental limit, it will stop of course, unless some workaround can be found. If we ever get to a point where we feel like we have "enough" power, we won't care whether Moore's Law continues, and so R&D budget will probably shift into other areas besides processing speed performance. I think that Moore's Law becomes a lot less important if we can stop software bloat from taking away nearly all the gains that Moore's Law yields.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
It's not really the consumer market that drives new hardware development. I mean, yes, we would all like to believe that in some way, our own geeky little world has a greater impact than Step number 5: Profit but it doesn't. Look at the latest and greatest technology out there. It is insanely fast but also insanely expensive and often, financially out of reach of the average consumer.
So who buys that new hardware? Well, no one specifically buys individual processors or memory chips or graphics cards or what have you. Alot of the new technology gets integrated into large scale computer systems at giant corporations that have IT budgets the rival most 3rd world GDP's. They can afford the technology and often times, they are working with cutting edge equipment because the computing demands they have are much greater than that of your average gamer.
Another place that faster, bigger, badder technology gets employed is by the companies that make those large scale computer systems. Many companies now are getting into the clustered server and blade server markets and driving technology there. Then there are the companies offering specific solutions like Sun Microsystems that build their own hardware to a certain extend and they are driving development also. Everybody jokes about Beowulf clusters, mainframes and so on. You know what though? At several hundred grand for a Beowulf cluster with only 250 nodes but technology out the wazoo, there is a market driven aspect there that dwarfs what Joe Blow in his basement LAN-party server has. Many companies are utilizing these new, managed and multi-threaded ideas to make mainframes that are faster and more capable than anyone could have imagined back in the days of Big Blue and WANG.
Yeah, a $100 laptop is not going kill Moore's Law, it's going to fuel the fire behind it. The laptops may be barely adequate but they will fuel progress in those 3rd world countries. It won't be long before someone figures out how cluster a pile of those laptops and build themselves a pretty bad-ass computer system.
(As others have said, Moore's Law has nothing to do with processor power)
Cheap laptops are leveraging advancement in computer technology in reverse. Think of it this way: A fast, high-end computer costs about $2000. A fast, high-end computer five years ago also cost about $2000.
So figure the new computer is 10x faster than the old one (I pulled that out of my ass). The idea is that something equivalent to the five year old machine can be built, today, for 10% of the cost of a new one using modern tech.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
affected by cheap hardware
Let's consider the above phrase. There are many opposing forces to Moore's Law if we draw a free-body diagram. Some people don't want better computers as we hear "I just use it for e-mail", as there are those with little time of their own to be ambitious with a computer though they may use fairly powerful software at work. Then, there's competition from the third world, who before couldn't afford anything good may be able to buy a computer that has a built in UPS and wireless networking. It's a revolutionary business tool that may raise the economic power of billions of people.
Moore's Law may be a self-perpetuating phrophecy.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
I would bet that, outside of the enterprise/gaming groups, tech 'upgrades' only happen because generally speaking with computers, only the latest and greatest are available.
I can't tell you the number of people I know who have purchased entirely new computers because they've become glutted with spyware, viruses, or have experienced a relatively simple hardware failure like an HDD spin-out or a dead RAM stick. Instead of dropping money on a replacement part and possibly installation services, they just buy a new computer.
And that comes with good reason too. Look at places like Dell. A $499 desktop isn't too bad at all. And I can promise that system will do everything that 85% of computer users will use it for. Most people don't play hardcore games. Most people don't use applications more processor intensive than productivity suites. Heck, for most people, the computer will be used only for email, Web, watching streaming video and maybe ripping their own CDs to put them on the iDevice of choice.
But that's the rub. At Best Buy or Dell or any of the retailers, even on their cheapest PCs, you're getting a pretty damn fast machine. You can't get an older/slower/cheaper desktop unless you're willing to buy old parts on Ebay and piece something together yourself.
For the big retailers, they can't even afford to keep the old hardware in stock, as storing it costs more than the retail value of the computer.
It really doesn't cost that much more to get a better computer with the current pricing structure. I wonder what would happen if all-of-a-sudden people could get a $150 laptop capable of Web, word processing, basic networking and email?
Remember how wildly successful Wal Mart was with the $35 DVD player a bunch of years back? It worked because it was so cheap that people either didn't demand top quality, or realized that they didn't need the $1,000 Sony 5-disc DVD changer with DTS surround and optical outputs.
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My motherboard blew up this past weekend when I lost the voltage regulator on it. I am looking for another new motherboard and found it is next to impossible to find a new SocketA motherboard anymore. Ok, fine. The technology is outdated and it's time to move on. I have a problem with the fact that if I want to add a new video card to a Socket 775 motherboard, the power requirements go up dramaticaly.
Anybody out there know of a good motherboard and processor package that I can plug my 2 ATA133 drives into (don't want to migrate my data or spend money on SATA yet)and still get away with only using a 350 watt power supply?
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
The $100 laptop is not geared toward anyone that is reading slashdot. It is for poor countries, or even poor inner city areas, with people that have no access to computers or the internet. Demand for cutting edge speed and technology won't subside at all. Not to mention, even the poor kids in third world countries will outgrow their $100 laptop in a month anyway and will want the coolest gadget out there... FUD. Pure FUD.
We need to know what happens when computers pass the $100 event horizon.
... or could it? Maybe the human interfaces become disposable and ubiquitous to our music players, which are storage and multimedia display devices? Is it far fetched to see the laptop keyboard, case and display becoming an iPhone accessory?
Actually we have some evidence of what might happen from the PDA market. Equivalents to the first or second generation Palms should exist at well under the $50 mark, but they don't. Instead, PDAs have become more complex in an effort to keep most of them up at $200 mark, with the Palm Zire holding out as an overpriced bargain at $99.
This is what I think is behind convergence. Convergence isn't really all that wonderful, but the marginal costs of adding PDA functions to a phone becomes negligible, the justification to drop $200 or more on a separate PDA isn't there. If the Zire was $50 and could dial your phone using bluetooth, then convergence wouldn't be such a hot thing.
The interesting difference will be that the only difference between a $100 laptop and a PDA is form factor. A laptop cannot be glommed onto a different product
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"The number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months"
"Except where the added performance will have no impact on the usage"
For situations where the end user REALLY wants or needs the speed, like PC gamers, dedicated game consoles, science, engineering and other applications where the increase in speed will have an impact. I think Moore will continue to apply for the processors used in those systems.
However, in situations where the added speed will have no real impact on the application then I think people will want cheap functional systems.
We are already at the point where the biggest bottle neck to working with a computer is how fast the end user can get the data entered, a faster system won't make you type any faster, or read any quicker. What most common end users want is a system that will let them browse the web, send/read email, IM their friends, view the media (images,.mpeg, mp3,documents) that they get in the emails and play some card games or suduku. My mom has celeron 400Mz based system that she is quite happy with, it does everything she wants it to do and its the same stuff all her friends do with their computers. A faster internet connection, not a faster computer, would have a bigger impact on her computing experience.
If people generally aren't concerned about the fuel efficiency of their cars, which leads to significant expenses, why would they suddenly be concerned about the energy efficiency of their computers when electricity is relatively cheap?
As many posters have so commented, it is clear that the use of the term Moore's Law was not appropriate. What the article seems to be attempting to purport was that the drive for low-end, inexpensive hardware is going to have a negative effect on the high-end market, and therefor lead to a decline in innovation and technological progression.
The former clause above may be true, but that is still up for debate. As stated, there still exists a very thriving market in the enterprise, media production, and gaming areas for high-end PCs.
The latter derivation is silly to the point of rediculousness. The technology and computer industries will always innovate. Low-end hardware will inovate along with it as the industry must flex to fit whatever the consumer demands.
In the end, if consumers finally realize that they do not NEED a $1000 system to accomplish day-to-day work with their PC, reasonable hardware at low prices will become more ubiquitous, power consumption will fall, better computers will become available for lower income families, and the market will continue to thrive as it responds to this new demand.
Alienware = DELL or did you miss that?
I suspect the $100 computer is the beginning of the "long tail". Zillions will be sold, but little profit can be milked from each sale. Such a market will attract those companies that can squeeze quality and performance down to the barest of thread-bare acceptability.
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You know, if we made the C=64 today it would probably cost bout 3.50 and retail for about 10 bucks. I remember when they were over 300 USD. Why don't modern PCs cost 10 bucks? Because we keep demanding more and more out of them. People will want more out of their laptops. This is going to require faster processors.
Sure, there are still guys pounding away on an old C=64 because it's what works for them. Notice that there aren't too many of them tho.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Faster, cheaper, better. Pick two. If you are lucky.
As one example among many:
From typical office-application user experience, today's computers are 3-4x cheaper than in 1987, a whole lot better in that they do things like real-time spell-checking and print high-resolution color on your desktop, but not a whole lot "faster" for things like boot-up, word processing, and other office productivity applications.
Some things have gotten faster, better and cheaper. Single-form page-size black-and-white printing for example. In 1987, a typical laser printer was slow, costs well over $500, did 300x300dpi, and the small memory limited the complexity of the documents. Now you can get a mid-range printer for well under $400 that has plenty of memory and prints far faster than anything 20 years old.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Like the $100 laptop is the first project that encompasses low-end CPUs.
Smear campaign?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
It sounds trite but any 10 year old PC worth $100 today will run but it wont run Windows, at least not a current version.
And, in ensuing 10 years, that old clunky desktop could EASILY be miniaturized down to a laptop size or smaller. Doesn't anyone remember that the Timex Sinclair digital watch had more compute power than early System 360 mainframes, the Apollo onboard computers etc etc???
Maybe I'm an extreme case but until a few years ago I had an old IBM PC750 desktop I had upgraded all the way up to a whopping 114MB RAM and an Evergreen Pentium (1)400. I still have a P-3 450 with 324MB RAM supporting my digital scanner and drawing tablet on Win95 and yes I had an even older (circa 1991) DX4-100 32MB RAM, 2x540MB Disk, ISA mobo minitower running Win95 for a specialised app as well. I junked it oh maybe 6 years ago?
My work machine is an 'old' Thinkpad t40 with a Centrino 1.5Ghz, 512MB RAM and an 80GB drive. How much is this machine worth? $300?
The point is, bloat costs a LOT of money. Even Redmond estimates that Vista will obsolete more than 85% of the PC's out there. To do what, exactly? The OLPC project relies on compact software to fit on a small machine and Marvell Xscale class processors are specifically designed to take advantage of embedded OS's like the OLPC. So all the pieces are there - all we need do is leverage a lightweight OS and Applications model to exploit it.
stuffing AST SixPacks with 64k dram and using a hex editor and prom burner to change the head and cylinder setting for 10mb hard drives. Let me just say that yes maybe but I'm not sure :-)I mean we were doing that to sell machines and because software was growing into Everyone likes bright shinny objects and newer computers are just one example. That being said if a new shinny computer was cheap but did everything I needed to do then I may by it.
Do I need a nice fancy car when a little econo box will go the same legal speeds and moderate comfort? No but I want one! And just like that many people base their choices on the levels of availability, why have the skim if you can find a way to afford the cream?
Also the gaming industry and other software drive up the need for more power, even your Office suites need much more power today then even just a few years ago. So I think there will always be people wanting more power, needing more power and there will be people satisfied with low end.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Moore's Law is the empirical observation made in 1965 that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months. (from Wikipedia)
Since 1965, the tech world has obsessed about keeping pace with Moore's Law -- an empirical observation that computing performance will double every 24 months. (TFA)
So how will one want to even consider what the scribbling concludes?
Besides, the Bugatti Veyron was developed in face of speed limits almost everywhere.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
We just need a tipping point for robots or something up ahead. Imagine vacuum bots becoming truely feasable. Or eBook readers becoming more feasable than books (not very far away anymore). The need for OCR scanners, Elisa-like telemarketer bots and whatnot. Boom! Moores law will be to slow for that.
Just as moores law just recently made JavaScipt driven browser based productivity software a feasable alternative. What would've you said if someone told you that 5 years ago? You'd've called him a nutcase and so would have I.
Bottom line:
No folks. We're in for a full-blow Neal Stephenson SnowCrash / William Gibson 'Neuromancer' Cyberpunk ride with stuff up ahead and just around the corner we all haven't even dreamt of yet. No need to worry about Moores law losing its lure or not being applicable anymore.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
But I will answer the question anyway. Moore's law is not a law, it's just an observation of a set of economic principles. Namely that there is enough financial reward for developing faster chips and the technology is easy enough to advance that speeds will increase rapidly. $100 laptops aren't going to take away the financial reward for high end chips, because there are limitless uses for fast computers.
On a separate point, to say that a computer is "ridiculously fast" is incredibly small minded. Todays fast computers will seem insanely, ridiculously slow in a decade. Also, no one cares about the power consumption of their CPU!
Half the posts here are just bickering with the headline. The article doesn't even mention Moore's law. It's a guy who is trying to spread OLPC FUD because, surprise surprise, he is the CEO of a company that competes directly with OLPC.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
We'll have computers each that use the mass of a sun to power and calculate with at the same time. Given that there are a few billion stars in the Milky Way by itself, that ought to make for one awesome frag fest, assuming that a 2 million year ping time doesn't hold anyone back.
This is my sig.
Moore's law is that the number a transistor that can be fit on a particular area will double every 18 months.
The fact that this makes faster chips is a by product of this 'law'
This means that you can have smaller and more economical chips.
When you also take into account that previous generation chips are still very powerful, and cheaper to make it is a boon to cheap laptop; which, by the way, is why we can have cheap laptops in the first place.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Moore's Law is driven (in part) by the market. As long as there are large companies or government agencies or organizations willing to buy the latest and the greatest, then there will always be money for R&D to provide that.
Also, if you ask someone right now if what they have is all they will ever need, most people would probably say, "Yes, more or less." That's because they don't know what's coming down the line and they can't imagine what they potentially won't be able to do. If six months from now they aren't able to watch, say, Youtube v2.0 or run Microsoft Office Schwarzenegger Edition, suddenly they will want that $100 laptop to do more.
Besides, this hasn't happened in other industries. The available of cheap shoes doesn't stop Nike from spending millions of dollars to get athletes to endorse their lousy product. Nor has the availability of cheap, store-brand foods and drinks caused Heinz or Minutemaid to dynamically change their business model. I'd imagine (based, he says, freely on no information at all) that what (relatively high-priced) Coke does has much more of an impact on Pepsi's marketing strategy than what the makers of Mountain Lightning do...
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
this may be the stupidest question ever asked on Ask Slashdot. and I've been around for a while and seen some real bad ones.
Remember the "RAID CD-ROM" question?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
OLPC needs the cheapest components possible. As such, they need more transistors packed into a smaller area. Moore's Law makes cheaper equipment possible.
The point of this posting is to ask the question: Are western computer shoppers content with slower technology than what is cutting edge?
The answer to that is resoudly: sometimes. For the last several years, most users haven't had a really good reason to upgrade their computers, because a 1 ghz computer can do everything most people need. Gamers, of course, are an exception, but they make up a very small part of the marketplace. In big-box retailers you'll often find that shoppers are looking for features more than they are concerned about performance. One of those features is often greater and greater portability. People would rather have their computer (or smartphone, more often than not) with them more of the time, rather than have a faster computer. Some day a new killer-app may come along that forces people to upgrade to faster components, and windows vista is doing that in a very artificial way, but the trend is still present. Ubiquity trumps performance, for most buyers.
The development of high end hardware is driven by scientific computing, not the consumer market, and there's no end of computing-intensive projects in sight (the LHC at CERN to name just one).
The point about multi-core chips is that it is (now) much cheaper to add cores to a chip than to add
speed/cache/bandwidth to the chip. Which is why a 4 core chip is not 4X the price of a 1 core chip.
If someone had in mind to build a multi-core OLPC, you'd probably see an 8 core system for $250.
Same clock speed, slightly more power consumption, maybe more memory bandwidth.
In fact, this would probably be a better way of making the OLPC more powerful, instead of just revving
up the cpu speed. Maybe next year there will be a dual core $100 laptop.
Speaking of gamers, wouldn't if be fun to have an 8 core CPU where some of those cores are actually
GPUs? Hm....
I recently read an article in a well respected professional journal that highlighted that the reliability of 45nm microprocessors and the cost of building the fabs to manufacture then are the two biggest factors that will kill Moore's Law. The problem is that it has been proven already that 65nm microprocessors have a MTBF in the region of a few years, while it is currently looking like the 45nm IC will struggle with a MTBF of just 12 months. There is already discussion that the software on these microprocessors will have to take into account that portions of the substrate may fail, which means that the software will effectively become less efficient, thus removing any advantage of 45nm technology.
Admittedly nano technology may help here in improving the design and construction of transistor gates. But until the technology is ready, which may be a few years off yet, the only way processors are likely to get more powerful is for the size of the silicon to get physically bigger.
However, I think where the OLPC will have an effect is in the bottom end of the Laptop and PDA market. These computers will probably work really well when being used akin to a Citrix terminal connecting to a traditional desktop PC. Microsoft might even make a bit of money out of selling Vista Ultimate to home network users as a result.
...GPU, Chipset and Memory. All those componets obey Moore's Law, and Hard Drives actually exceed Moore's law.
The thing is that there are other component's in the Laptop that do not obey More's law. The Screen and Keyboard come to mind. Their prices get lower over time, but that owes more to process improvements and economies of scale, and is nowhere near a exponential redution. Screws, connectors, capacitors, speakers, touchpads, discrete transistors, outter plastic shell, manufacturing costs, storage and distribution costs, all those costs add up.
The reason those computers use "outdated" processors is to squeeze as much savings from "Moore law obeying components" as possible, so there is money left to pay for the less glamorous components.
Even in chip design, at some point Moore's law has had so much time to work that the dominant cost for some ICs is the plastic package they are on.
think on thay guys
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Moore's law is currently threatened by the huge capital investments it takes to go to smaller lithographic techniques. We're talking billions of dollars (actually, the equivalent in Yuan) to gamble that a new fab will produce.
Currently, only the price demanded by high-end processors, RAM, etc. can justify that kind of expenditure.
When you go down to the store and spend $400 on RAM, $100 on a high-end keychain drive, or $350 on a processor, you are funding the R&D.
There just is not as much of a business case for building newer fabs to produce $10 processors with intergrated everything for $100 laptops.
So, will the $100 laptop craze kill off the next generation of fabs? Answer: Only if it kills off the desire to buy newer & faster PCs. With SSDs becoming standard, I see a market for flash memory for quite a while. With people throwing around claims of double-digit numbers of cores, it doesn't seem like anyone is going to stop producing new processors any time soon.
Andy Out!
Is it just me, is the phrasing a little off, or does that last sentence seem to imply that the latest games consoles exist outside of Moore's law? The latest game consoles are cheap and graphically impressive... because of Moore's Law...
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
People seem not to realize that the same principles are in effect on cheap systems. The Wii and the PS3 are both based on 90nm processes, after all.
Moore's law doesn't mean "faster faster faster"; it can also mean "cheaper and lower power consumption".
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but not a whole lot "faster" for things like boot-up, word processing, and other office productivity applications.
That's because in most cases we're doing much more at boot up today. 20 years ago we weren't going to the internet looking for software updates, we weren't loading background process for IMs, QuickTime and RealPlayer. Our passive virus scanners were much lighter and less sophisticated not to mention that most do all types of other side tasks aside from looking for viruses. As I look at my system tray today I see that four out of the eight icons that are there are because of our "always on" internet connection society. This isn't even to mention the stuff I don't see.
As for office applications. Why do they need to be faster? My bet is that they are actually faster but suffer from the same bloat as our startups do. But in the end who notices? I would be hard pressed to find users using office suite applications on such a level that they speed of the machine was causing more of a problem then the users ability to enter data. Perhaps on some very large documents, sure, but these types of documents would have been impossible 20 years ago.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
One quote from the article:
Money quote:
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
Everything you wrote proves my point: From the user experience, things are better/more feature-laden, but not significantly faster. It's a design trade-off driven in part by what the software vendors think the customer wants.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Where can I purchase this cheap laptop and can I view porn on it?
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
Yeah. All the demand for cheaper stuff means is that Moore's law will apply on the per-dollar level as well as the bleeding edge level - which it is implied to do anyway.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
As processors have gotten faster, a certain set of developers have migrated to slower and slower languages to create applications; others are guilty of using less care to optimize for speed for the same reason. Operating systems too; Vista is a good example of an OS that is, frankly, a real pig.
As machines get faster, they can do things like run an application in an interpreted environment and still not seem too sluggish. The press has (correctly) pointed out that the current trend towards multiple cores instead of faster single cores will require a re-thinking of how to make apps take advantage of the power inherent in this type of enhanced CPU than one took towards a CPU that was simply quicker and more efficient on the same old code.
Should a relatively slow machine become widespread and be seen as a viable market for an application, developers may see an incentive to move to faster mechanisms. Perhaps we'll see a bit of refocus on pure C applications. Of course, products that are already small and fast are a natural fit for this type of thing.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The rule I have always used relative to any type of technology is this: In five years any current technology will cost 10% of its current price. I used to think this was Moore's Law. By the time I learned what Moore's Law really was, I couldn't remember where I learned this rule. Computer prices have only remained at the prices they are due to constantly raising the bar.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Moore's law is not about exponential increases in absolute performance, it's about exponential increases in performance PER UNIT COST. The original formulation was based on the fact that the number of transistors in a chip using the CHEAPEST transistors was doubling every 24 months.
It doesn't matter whether you get twice the performance for the same price, or the same performance for half the price (and half or less the power usage), you're still following Moore's Law.
The really interesting thing is that Moore's Law applies to everything we make. The doubling time depends on the technology, but the best performance-per-unit-price for every technological product from oxcarts and clay tablets to rockets and ebooks can be shown to follow an exponential curve back as far as we have hard enough figures to plot meaningful points.
I'm interested in buying a laptop for $100, but I'd prefer it not to have neon colored case and a 7" screen.
I want to buy one of these OLPCs for my kids. The OLPC are looking for market so they can sell millions, and are ignoring the most obvious one. U.S. consumers looking for mid-priced items for kids. I would guess that is a 1-10 million unit market. The problem with Moore's law and PCs ultimately is that inorder for Moore's law to be broken, all that is required is totally or partially satiated desire for performance needs to be a factor significant enough to be clearlly observable. Obviously, this has to come at some point, why not now?
viva la $175 computer.
Another way to look at Moore's "Law" is from the point of view of wafer manufacturing economics. Typically you can shrink processes in stages of not much more than 30% at a time. The time it takes to shrink and tune the process is going to be on the order of 6 months to a year. Plus the wafer processing equipment has to be stretched out to last until it's paid for itself and then some. So even if the techies could shrink the process even faster, it's uneconomical as it would mean buying a whole new set of wafer making equipment long before the previous generation was amortized.
It's the same thing with disk drive density, the techies can often move faster than the economics can accomodate.
And it's not really a 'law' in the scientific sense, it's a prediction. I wish people would:
1. Stop calling it 'Moore's Law'.
2. Stop panicking when a good reason for the 'law' to be invalidated shows up.
Sheesh, who really gives a shit anyway. Moore's Law is not driving the processor industry, there are plenty of other incentives for continual product improvement.
... because people are just so ecologically minded and price conscience that they'll happily give up large SUVs for smaller and cheaper fuel-efficient cars.
So watch out, expensive and overpowered desktop and laptop computers; you're going to go the way of the SUV and the fuel-sucking trucks!
Just means computer power will expand into more niches, while the central platform gets more powerful. You'll have the power of your 1970s Cray supercomputer in your toaster or cellphone beacuse that is an economical small CPU to manufacture.
If you look at the North American market people are still buying SUVs and other large vehicles despite the abundance of cheaper options.
I can't see why it would be any different for computers.
This is OT, but has anyone played with the OLPC operating system? Holy jesus h. christmas that may be one of the worst atrocities of interface design I've ever witnessed. Somewhere along the way, someone clearly decided that kids in Africa needed a radical rethinking of the gui. And wow did they mess things up. Not only is it barely usable, but I was utterly lost and confused for a long while trying to make sense of their "intuitive" design. Unfortunately they tried to not only make it "hip", but they tried to give it a cohesive design schema which makes for very "cool" looking uselessness. As if the kids in Africa didn't have enough problems already, now we're throwing them a disaster of interface design which doesn't even teach them the common elements of Gnome, KDE, Windows or MacOS design. Ouch.
(If you'd like to try it yourself you can use Moka5 for a quick peek without having to do a full install.)
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That's why I gave 16-32 cores for a machine 10x as expensive, making a tradeoff between market size and cheap addition of cores. Get it?
If low-cost laptops are, as they say, a roadblock for Moore's Law, then I would suggest that manufacturer's stop fleecing Americans and do two things: lower costs by reducing the pay for American workers to something more in line with the rest of the world and, enforce lower MSRPs so that low-income people ($6,000 to $10,000 per year) like me can afford a laptop with the power of my desktop instead of forcing me to choose a desktop simply because a laptop in the same price range has a significantly slower processor, less system memory, lower capacity and slower hard drive, and less non-shared video memory. I don't care if they have to make them larger. This whole smaller is better thing has gotten way out of hand. I'd be happy with a portable the size of the old 8086-based Compaqs of the early 80's. Until then, I'll keep my cheaper, faster, more reliable, easier and less expensive to upgrade desktop.
mores law is not a "law" in the sense of the second law of thermodynamics.
It is meerly an observation that applys to a particular industry for a relatively short (historical) period of time.
I would wager dollars to donuts that similar "laws" abound in the historical record, on things like miles of railroad track/year, the cost of oil/bbl, etc etc etc
I was wondering why, in mid-April, I got a bunch of extra email from Nigerian princes. Then, I followed the link in the story, and found this.
I can see tons of uses for such a thing:
/
- kid's laptop. If it gets trashed, so what?
- LTSP terminal.
- heck, MY laptop. I wouldn't choose to do kernel compilations on any laptop in my price range to begin with, so as long as the OLPC has a browser, an email client, ssh, and WiFi, I'm pretty much done (although I wouldn't turn down an mp3 player). All I really want is that it be light, have a (preferably decent) keyboard, and legible in coffee shops for a couple of hours at a go.
- if it has usb, low power consumption file server. See things like the kurobox, or the guys who are hacking the BuffaloTech stuff. You don't NEED tons of power to torrent or serve files.
- disposable redundant server. Take ten of them, hook them to a load balancer and an NFS, and you've got a (functionally) infinite capacity web server for (basically) the cost of the load balancer and NFS, for which you can make a case anyway. I'm a little surprised somebody hasn't done this already with old Xboxes. In any event, that group that put together that Apple supercomputer proved that you can do things with multiply redundant hardware, and these would be perfect for low level apps.
- Disposable emergency server. Say a hurricane is coming. It would be trivial to set up a databased refugee tracking system for 25 clients on one of these. GPL/BSD/whatever the software, and your app is completely portable for $100 in HW costs.
- Heck, firewalls. Something like this: http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/travelpower/90c6
- I'm sure people smarter than I can append to this list in a big hurry.
Is it for everyone? No. Would I want to make it my primary computer? No. Would I make it a companion piece to my 4000x1280/1GHz C7/1GB workstation? You betcha.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
This is typical of almost all FOSSie objectives. In preaching radical (and generally destructive) views of technology and business, FOSSies seek to tear down progress and assure that nobody benefits from innovation and progress.
Take Lunix, for example. IBM and Redhat are making tons of money from Lunix... but how much of that makes it's way to the people actually writing the code which enables them to make that kind of money? Not much- FOSS is essentially slave labor, at least as far as the code monkeys are concerned.
But hey, those Bentleys IBM and Red Hat executives drive aren't gonna buy themselves! OLPC is a similiar topheavy scam. But since FOSSies are still keeping that dot-bomb era "new economy" flame alive, it's hardly surprising they keep coming up with these goofy, nonproductive, and ultimately destructive ideas.
The laptop I use now is a 1 Ghz with 512M of memory. I do a lot of useful work on this puppy; circuit simulation, schematic capture, user manuals and software development for embedded hardware.
The only reason I use this laptop is because I got it free with a dead hard disk - it cost about $50 to replace it with a 20 G. I used to use (and it is still my backup) a 10 year old laptop with a 333 M processor, 128 M RAM and a 10 G hard drive. It still has all my software installed on it and I regularly sync the two laptops so hardware failure will not shut me down.
Face it: obsolete != useless
When I can get Photoshop or Aperture or Final Cut all working and rendering together at real time, THEN my computer MAY be fast enough. Until then...
And seriously, look at Jeff Hans' multi-touch user interface demos. That's the future of interface design, and to get there you're going to need systems powerful enough to handle it.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I've known more than one person who is frustrated that he can type faster than his word processor can keep up. Usually the solution is to disable features like real-time spell-checking or turn off some of his computer's background tasks. Sometimes the solution is to quit using a big bloated word processor and use a slimmer, less bloated competitor.
I've known MANY people who are frustrated at the time it takes Windows to start up. Thankfully, these days we have suspend and hibernate so it's not as big of an issue. Combine this with solid-state machines that are coming out and boot and un-hibernate speed will improve even more. It sort of reminds me of the Mac Classic, 8-bit non-DOS machines like the Commodore64, some Mac competitors, and even some 1980s DOS machines that could boot disk-less.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Will ridiculously cheap laptops wean consumers off ridiculously fast components?" How about those of us who want ridiculously fast laptops?
And here I thought Moore's Law applied to the top of the line chip designs, from manufacturers, not units sold...
Not that they automatically are incompatible, but Moore's law seemed to pace "research" a lot better than market, ever since I first heard of it...
The low-cost laptop units are among the first units I've seen to approach what customers really want, as opposed to what manufacturers want... Meaning the olpc won't be "necessarily" obsolescent in a year... And even if it was, people would(wisely, I might add) refuse to pay another 100$ next year...
Which isn't to say bundling a low-cost laptop, with say, internet service(as I've heard bandied about) might not work...
Moore stated the the number of transitors per unit area will double every 18 months. This is in effect the ratio of cost to performance.
There are two ways to look at this (1) For fixed cost performance will double every 18 months or (2) For a given performance the cost will be reduced by 1/2 every 18 months.
So, if people decide they don't need fast computers Moore's law will continue to apply. and the machines will just get cheaper.
In the real world we are seeing both sides of Moore's law. The cost is falling and performance is improving but neither at the double per 18 month rate. Again Moore talked about a ratio transistors per unit area. Later in an interview he said his "law" was simply the result of how much Intel spends on R&D and new facilities and that the "law" is driven by economics rather then technology.
Now that broadband is ubiquitous, and Internet-attached telephones and wireless laptops are becoming ubiquitous, having faster and faster computers on the client side is becoming less relevant. The move to network computing is officially underway. How much processing power do you really need to run what is essentially going to be an information and media terminal? Let the mega processing power go where it belongs: behind the glass in a data center.
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I can't believe Apple isn't offering support for 64bit Operating Systems for my new iWatch. Other than that it is a great piece of hardware. Way to go Steve.
$diff terrorists hippies
$
$rm -rf *terrorists *hippies
I sincerely hope that the OLPC, Linux, and devices like this do the same for Microsoft and Intel. The fact is, even if you compile software, do graphical design, and encode mp3s, you can get by more than nicely with a $200 used IBM Thinkpad, 600 MHz and 256 MB RAM, which consumes only 15 to 23 watts (I measured).
You don't need a 2 GB, 3.2 GHz machine to browse the web any more than you need 300 horsepower to get to the grocery store, merge into traffic with a load of kids, and take the occasional road trip. The 600 watt power supply was invented because people will buy bloatware if a TV commercial tells them to.
For a while, that is.
"when consumers realize their personal lust for faster hardware makes almost zero financial sense, and hurts the environment with greater demands for power, will they start to demand cheaper, more efficient 'third-world' computers that are just as effective?" Will ridiculously cheap laptops wean consumers off ridiculously fast components?"
Maybe these same consumers will also realize that Moore's law also means that in 18 months you will be able to do the same computational work at roughly half the power cost (modulo leakage current, of course), a fact that appears to escape the razor wits at CNet.UK!
Moore's law is the only reason that we now have $5.00 calculators running off of solar cells generating a few miliwatts from ambient light, or $10.00 quartz wrist watches that run for years off a single button cell. If anything, the $100 laptop will accellerate Moore's law by increasing the volume of products produced and resultant economies of scale.
The folks at CNet.UK are a bunch of clueless wankers.
just a ghost in the machine.
Was She his girlfriend, or was Chii a pet?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
There's a spectrum here, and Moore's Law works at both ends (and points between): it can be formulated as predicting exponential growth in the computing power available for a given constant price (and/or device size, and/or energy consumption, etc.), or it can mean exponential decay in the price (size, energy, etc.) for a given constant level of computing power. One form of the equation is simply the logarithm of the other. And it's largely the same basic technological improvements that drive it at both ends.
So a series of ever-smaller/cheaper devices with roughly constant functionality isn't a threat to Moore's Law, it is Moore's Law! It's just that the industry has tended to ignore that end of the spectrum in favor of the "faster! faster! faster!" end, and that may be changing.
It could, however, be a (much-needed!) threat to Gates's Law, the observation that the efficiency of software seems to halve every 18 months or so, giving us roughly constant functionality for our exponentially-growing computing power. Your example of JavaScript driven productivity software illustrates this perfectly:
"But what'll we do with all those cycles/megs when computers are 1000 times more powerful than what we have today?"
"I know! We'll create a new software platform that's 1000 times slower than what we're using today, and rewrite all our existing applications in that!! Web!!!"
But there'll also be no shortage of uses for ever-increasing CPU power. You're right that future computing applications will be radically different from what we have today. Re-inventing the desktop in the browser doesn't qualify, and even the Gibson-esque cyberpunk vision of virtual reality is a bit quaint compared to the Singularity (and related) stuff currently going on in science fiction. (Lately, I've been reading a lot of Charles Stross -- I highly recommend Accelerando, which is free to download).
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Advantages to owning a low cost/low power laptop
- Less heat
- Not tragic if you leave it in the airport or drop it.
- Longer battery life
- Can still buy food after buying laptop
- email
- Word processing
- Spreadsheets
- Databases
- Internet
- Games
- Presentation Software
- compilers
- etc...
Disadvantages to owning a low cost/low power laptop- Burnt genitals from trying to use on lap
- Excess heat from trying to keep up with desktop machines
- Cant run the latest Autocad, Echelon, Carnivore, Windows Vista, or EA's latest FPS.
Cheap wireless laptops will come packaged with wireless-anywhere deals and they will be given to kids and purchased by mid and low income individuals. If you think I'm wrong go explain it to wal-mart. They sell 300 dollar desktops. The only people who will have expensive laptops are rich hackers, poor hackers, or people whose companies bought them one. Most people are going to say oo, look, it does what I need and I won't hate myself if it gets broken. AND it's cool.Parent is correct.
Moore's law is neither a scientific law, nor a legal one.
It has no real bearing on what might happen in the electronics industry.
It might, for as long as we're on this road of technology, be a relatively correct approximation, but once AMD and Intel will be producing at around 10nm the stretch will be out of this path of technology and a new kind will need to be sought. This then will probably go in large jumps of performance, rather than a continuous improvement on the previous chip.
Moore was lucky with his guestimate so far, but it'll end somewhere, and it'll not be the end of the world. I seriously doubt anyone at Intel and AMD research gives Moore's approximation a serious thought.
As long as we have Windows, we will always need faster computers.
"SUVs and big expensive cars are a status symbol...."
Sure, but the "size" requirement seems to have plateaued. If the price of SUVs started to plummet in the next coupe of years, what would happen?
Would people buy the ridiculously oversized SUVs the manufacturers are boud to start making to try and keep the price high or would they want the "old" SUVs at bargain prices?
No sig today...
I believe the price drops have more to do with AMD becoming competitive than with computers being fast enough.
"Will ridiculously cheap laptops wean consumers off ridiculously fast components?"
My A$400 Dell Inspiron 1100 bought on eBay that I use via wi-fi for convenient web browsing, email and writing documents says yes.
Even works for older games too.
And yes I did have to clean out the heatsink when I got it. No problems with overheating or random shutdowns at all. Battery life is OK for a 5yo machine.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Yes, this is the first time in the history of computing that any company has ever offered a lower-end, economy model. It will shake the computing industry by storm!
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I quit lusting over cool hardware several years ago but it doesn't mean everybody will.
The article strikes a chord though because I've put 80 Plus PSes in two machines so far this summer, one of them a down-wattage, and I'm lusting over one of those Asus $299 linux subnotebooks in the works to replace my old Satellite.
Real news a bit slow today?
Consider that Moore's law predicts an increase in the number transistors on a chip. In order to achieve this, the transistors get smaller, and smaller transistors are more energy efficient while costing less to produce. So Moore's law isn't really counter to energy efficiency and price. The cost to the environment has to do with people wanting more computing power vs. the same computing power for less.
Take it easy? I'll take it anyway I can get it . . .
"Will ridiculously cheap laptops wean consumers off ridiculously fast components?"
I don't know, let's ask IBM and see how their super soaraway PC-Jr product is going...
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
I've personally got four and think that's one too many. One media, one development/work, one game and an old one to support a legacy device. (A VR helmet, POS VFX1 needs a VESA feature connector on VGA and an ISA slot, I know I should build a linkbox. FU2 is still cool.)
If someone made a better VR helmet I'd pass the VFX1 off to my nephew in a second. He needs his eyes ruined.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This is largely due to a lack of a Killer App out there that really necessitates upgrading. If you need to do something special, really fast, you can patch together lots of off-the-shelf hardware to do the job. For the rest of us? Well I have had this Sempron machine an awful long time. Dual-monitor video, a 200 GB drive, a faster DVD-RW, more RAM -- all these have accreted onto it over time, but at no point have I really thought "man, this machine just isn't fast enough." I've thought my connection is slow, or this or that subsystem is slow, but the processor is usually not the problem.
I will pretty much be forced into a major upgrade at some point, since ATA is dying, AGP is an ex-parrot, and Socket A is way past its prime. Fortunately, I do have SATA ports, and DDR is not completely impossible to get, so one of the core components would have to die and be irreplaceable before I really will be compelled to start over.
I have used faster machines. I use a 3 GHz Prescott machine at work, and have spent long stretches on a dual core Pentium D. Yes, they are smoother. Yes they burp less when you start getting close to their limits. But there is little I could do on one of them that I can't do reasonably well on this machine. Other people using this machine don't gripe about the speed either (though it is rare that anyone tries, between the Dvorak keyboard and left-handed mouse).
The next box will almost be a specialized machine -- a multi-track audio workstation, or a PVR, for example. It will be designed from the ground up to do something I can't do right now. As it ages, it will probably be relegated to more generalized duty, and any recyclable hardware will go into the next specialty box.
When there is an app that people REALLY want, that will work at some level of hardware that is affordable but also not what they have now (so there is no good upgrade path), then people will start another upgrade cycle. Microsoft was hoping that Vista would be all that and a slice of buttered toast on the side, but people want computers to DO something, not just run a flashy OS. Software can and does drive the upgrade cycle, but only if people want it badly enough.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
First off, this is in general directed at those who want to buy an OLPC, and not those who in general want a slower laptop with better battery life.
As someone who actually had a chance to sit down and play with an OLPC, I'd like to make a few comments.
First, unless you also want to tote around a USB hard drive, you're limited to a 1GB NAND flash drive and an SD slot for all your storage. The revolutionary battery life estimates assume there's no mechanical hard drive to suck up power.
Second, the keyboard, while very high quality for the price (it's a nice ruggedized rubber), is made for a child's hands. I don't consider myself to be one with sausage fingers, but it was hard as hell to type on.
Third, it's got this weird user interface based on the X Window system. Now, it might be quite intuitive to someone who has never used a computer before, for someone like me, with Windows, Mac, and Unix experience, I still had some trouble finding my way around. From what the guy who had it mentioned, it wasn't an easy task to switch out their default install with Damn Small Linux or something similar.
Basically the OLPC is designed to let students write papers, view electronic textbooks, browse the web, and create wireless mesh networks to interact with each other in absence of internet connectivity. It's very, VERY basic for even an African schoolchild's needs. It is not suitable at all for day to day use, at least until large flash storage is much cheaper.
While I respect the fact so many of you want a machine that meets your needs, and nothing more, I feel your $100.00 would be better spent buying an older thinkpad machine and beefing up the RAM. (Though I hope you'll consider donating to the OLPC foundation... it's tax dedecutable!)
"Very few people want to actually *DO* anything anymore, other than be entertained."
Perfect! Finish him!
OTOH, youtube shows average joes being entertained by other joes! Please make it stop! Please let me know there's more to modern humor than seeing fat people dancing, cats falling and a general trends towards bodily fluids!
Entertainment and fun always remind me of a drooling, cheetos-encrusted fatty staring at a display in the sofa. One step to the drool-filled suspension pods for the Matrix-connected vegetable human...
I don't feel like it...
Software grows features until the performance is just a bit better than "tolerable" on a high-end developer machine. This makes it barely tolerable on a typical user machine.
Killing the existing features is never an option, even if the features are near-useless.
Thus one can never regain the lost performance and return to the slower hardware of the past.
Seriously. Who says we *have* to double processor power every 18 months? What if we could do it in 6 or 24? So what? Just make the damn chips better and better. If it conforms to ML, fine, if it doesn't get back to work. Maybe the next gen of laptops won't be ML compliant. So what? Cosmically speaking, it doesn't matter. /grr
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I am amazed that nobody has mentioned the comment from the article that Nigerian kids are browsing for porn and that the OLPC PCs will now be fitted with internet filters.
It is truly amazing to me that youth that are from the remote third world would jump into searching for porn with their new PCs. I would have thought that without the influence of the western media that they would not have a drive to search out porn sites. But - I guess that it only takes one kid to find a site and then share his "find" with his buddies.
Laptop? For gaming? Are you serious? Obviously not. There is a set of gamers who do not heed thrift in pursuit of their hobby, nor should they.
I figure Moore's "Law" only exists, only works, because we are and have been in a situation where there's a lot of potential for rapid growth and refinement.
Moore's "Law" is an estimation of how quickly that potential will be realized. But the apparent potential for new advances doesn't necessarily increase as fast as potential is realized - so I think there will be times when the potential for new developments becomes much more limited - this could be a result of market factors (for instance, if people just aren't buying faster hardware anymore) or limitations to the technology we're trying to use to solve the problem.
We think of it as a "Law" because it has been pretty reliable for a while now, but it's actually just a model that fits the current pattern of growth...
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Giant bloated slow expensive machines for everyone !!!!!!
This is silly.
Why would Moore's Law (suggestion? possibility?) have anything to do with a budget laptop aimed at getting have-nots in the world a chance to access knowledge and information. These laptops aren't about to replace my ThinkPad or my wife's Compaq. I need the power for the kludgy development I'm asked to do, she needs it for encoding songs on iTunes and spyware.
As time goes on and for whatever I have to aggregate more information at a single time I would say it's a pretty safe wager to say that I'm gonna need more processing power not less. Or better processing power anyway...
Vista-specific features that are well worth the slightly higher resource usage (this machine is fast enough it's not really a slowdown; I almost never max out both cores):
SuperFetch: My programs start almost instantly, even huge ones like EVE Online. Starting even a simple, everyday Linux program such as Konqueror takes a few seconds the first time it is loaded after a reboot, running natively on the same hardware.
Integrated instant search: I don't even use the Start Menu's programs list anymore. I hate it, to be honest; it's slow, virtually requires mouse control, and finding things can unintuitive unless you spend time tweaking stuff. In Vista, it's WinKey + a few letters + Enter to start a program, and the program is loading in less time than the All Programs menu would have expanded in XP. Also very useful for finding documents, and even more useful for finding pages in my web history. I literally only need to remember a few words that were on a page I recently visited and I can get right back to it.
Built-in two-way firewall: Stop programs from phoning home, block web access to programs that I don't trust, get notifications when a program tries to go online, and block pings and such... all without needing third-party software.
UAC: You might not believe me because there are a lot of dumbshits in the world who are used to running Windows as an Administrator and can't believe they need to approve privilege escalation dialogs just to make a change in their Windows system folder and so they whine about it, but UAC is possibly the best thing to happen in Vista. It's more convenient and requires less work then sudo (although you can configure it to demand your password for privilege escalation, handy if you either might have an untrusted user accessing your account or you want to avoid the automatic click-though response), is automatic rather than requiring that the user know when a program will need full permissions, and makes the pile of shit I had to go through using Runas on a non-admin XP account look really, really ridiculous.
Media Center: Fantastic program, really nice for those of us who neither have the money nor the space for a dedicated PVR box + TV but still wants to record the Colbert Report, some sci-fi, and the occasional sports game... or even just wants to occasionally WATCH more-or-less-live TV while skipping ads, pausing when people walk in, and creating my own instant replays. Those aren't nearly all the features of WMC but I don't have an extender or external TV so those are the ones I use most. Yes, Media Center was available for XP, if not when it first shipped, but only in versions that lacked a lot of other things found in the professional/tablet editions.
Aero's live thumbnail views: mostly used when I want to see if a program is done compiling, or a file down downloading, or something like that. All I need to do is move the mouse over the program's taskbar button and I can see - if not well enough to read, well enough to see if anything is happening - without waiting for the be restored and start handling user events again. Also handy when alt-tabbing, and if I need to be able to read the windows as I'm switching I use Flip-3D (admittedly this is uncommon but it happens).
Application-level volume control: A lot of programs don't have an easy volume control, but are too noisy or too quiet. Or perhaps I just want to mute all programs except the TV r movie I'm watching, or something like that... in Vista it's easy.
Sidebar: The notes gadget is far and away the one I use most often, because it's fantastic for those numbers you hear on the phone and need to write down, or grabbing those three text snippets or URLs or whatever without needing to copy and paste each one to its final destination before grabbing the next. That said, the Live Maps gadget is great for a quick glance at traffic before heading across the bridge or something, the meter gadget lets me know when I'm getting close to using all available RAM or CPU at a glance, and the fe
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
You may like to check out TekGear as a vendor of choice. They offer a number of attractive wearable displays for a bit less attractive prices.
I don't think you understand capitalism. Computing products will become both faster and cheaper.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
Unfortunately, most people are first and foremost just consumers. They don't want to edit video. They just want to watch it.
Very few people want to actually *DO* anything anymore, other than be entertained.
I couldn't agree more. As a kid, I often enjoyed drawing silly pictures on the computer instead of playing games... I messed around with sound recording/playback. That was teriffic as a kid.
The Internet eventually got popular and I got my first taste of "high-speed" Internet at a local university (late 1990s). I remember thinking to myself, "What would the world be like if everyone had an ethernet-speed connection (~10mbit/sec) to the Internet from their home?" The thought was mind-boggling and I figured it wouldn't happen for a long, long time. I remember being frustrated at attempts to share files and remote-control (VNC-like,etc) another computer over a dialup connection. Even 56k modems didn't seem to be enough for simple web-browsing (probably due then to the latency).
Well, today ~10mbit to the home is pretty much a reality. A vast percentage of the population has access to multi-megabit Internet connections to their home. My internet connection (cheapo cable modem) is now faster than the CD-ROM drives used to be a few years ago. What has changed? What previously unforseeable possiblities now exist? Well, pr0n is faster to download, that's about it.
Today, I have a scanner, DV video camera, and digital camera. I have never edited video, scanned many pictures (over a few rare occassions), but done practically no image editing (other than simple cropping, color/brightness adjustments). I mainly just create and archive photos, documents, and videos aside from regular internet browsing and email. I use Linux and tinker with my own software a bit.
For me, my daily personal routine just doesn't involve the need for any of the exotic things for which people puportedly use computers. I'm not a gamer, and with a lean Linux distro, I would probably be happy with a 500mhz Pentium, etc... (I am writing thing from a 1ghz laptop that is fairly old). If my family had a once-in-ten-year reunion, I might be inclided to edit & splice a commerative video... On a rare event (solar eclipse on a blue moon), I might be inclined to talk to someone with a webcam over the internet. Of course, given today's cell phone rates, they would have to be outside the country and have high-speed internet, otherwise it wouldn't be worth the hassle.
In short, I feel for *consumers*, the bubble has already burst and no-one realizes it. Further advancements in high-speed connections and faster computers aren't going open much more than what is currently possible with today's technology. In terms of the Internet, I don't see any 'killer app' that will be enabled with further advances...
Perhaps the biggest upcoming change will the economic savings that will allow the developing world to more easily adopt these technologies... For us (in relatively wealthy nations), the wave of change has already begun to pass.