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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?"
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
True, but I think something like the $100 computer will have more of an effect in the laptop market as opposed to the desktop market. Generally (and a lot of /. ers are the exception) laptops are bought more for portability than for raw power. Whereas the desktop market has the more serious gamers as well as software developers that want more power. Granted, there are exceptions on both sides, but I would think the laptop market would be affected more by cheap hardware.
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.
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.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
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.
Please quote the law properly: http://foldoc.org/?query=Moore's+Law
' s%20Law%20Sept02.ppt
It's every 24 months, not 18, and it has nothing to do with power or speed. CPU speed has increased at significantly higher pace than Moore's law. Moore's law views the number of transistor junctions in an IC, nothing more. The size, power consumption, MIPS, and other values have had significantly different curves, most at higher paces than the law, and not in direct comparison to transistor count. CPU power (in watts) over all is relatively the same as where it started in the 80s, and is currently reducing even as Moore's law increases. http://www.eng.tulane.edu/Tef/Slides/Tulane-Moore
Also, Moore's law clearly states that the number of transistors doubles "as costs remain the same." This means if we can have a $100 laptop today, in 2 years it will still cost $100 (or more accurately the portion of the $100 cost represented by the CPU will be the same), but the CPU will have 2X the number of transistors. It may be faster, maybe not. It may use more or less wattage. This is determined by transistor spacing, impedance layers (SoI, etc), volts, and clock frequency, not Moore's law. The articles premise is simply a logical fallacy.
One more thing: Moore's law does not apply to EVERY processor, only the leading generation vs. the predecessor. There's no reason to believe the notebook will use the current processor generation, and in fact likely it will not. This has no impact at all on the validity of the law as other processors will exist that follow the law. They may simply decide that instead of the build cost for the notebook being $90 to sell at $100, that they'll use previous generation hardware using more modern manufacturing processes, and reduce the build cost to $60-80, and still likely make it faster or better somehow in the process.
Were I a betting man, I'd put money on the $100 laptop not only having a faster chip with more transistors, but that it will use less watts, have a higher resolution display, faster or stronger wireless antenna, more storage, and more ports when we look at it in 2 years. Of course, part of the design of the machine, and it's low cost, is the intent of model line longevity. We don't expect to have a new one of these every 2-4 months like the retail PC industry does. Likely, this will be re-engineered at most once per year.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
640K...
The 286 processor was called a "supercomputer on the desktop", way too much power than what the average user will ever need.
It's not just the alienware crowd, once your average user gets a taste of what can be done with more power they will jump on the bandwagon too.
As somebody here mentioned in another post, video encoding and editing requires quite a bit of power, and this may become more mainstream with cheaper and cheaper camcorders. The personal computer is constantly expanding beyond the glorified word processor and their will always be new applications that come along that require more power, and it is kind of short sighted to believe that future apps will be nothing more than improved versions of only what exists today.