Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
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
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.
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?
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.
And we all need suckers like him to buy the latest overpriced, overhyped hardware, so that we can wait a couple of years and buy the next generation for 1/10 the cost.
The "early adopters" get what they want - which is mostly "I want it now!" , and the rest of us get what we want, which is improved hardware cheaper by waiting a bit.
Look at the people who paid $500 for a 15" LCD screen with crap specs, when you can now buy a 20" for $150.00.
Same thing with video cards - they paid $500 for a card with a quarter-gig of ram - those cards are now under $100.00
Let them keep spending - the benefits trickle down to the rest of us because we're patient.
Kevin Smith on Prince
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
Exactly. What a frickin' retarded argument... since when has the low end of computing actually dragged down the high end?
We may have unprecedented demand for low-power 200 MHz ARM processors these days, but we also have unprecedented demand for quad-core 2 GHz beasts in 1U rack-mount servers, so we can stuff more and more of them into vast underground data centers. Moore's law applies equally to the low end and the high end. Today we can put a powerful computer in a $500 iPhone, maybe tomorrow we can put it in a $50 iWatch. There's absolutely no economic reason for Moore's Law not to continue unabated.
My bicyles
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.
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.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
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.
Right... so what does Vista do for YOU, better than XP did five years ago ?
I remember a long long time ago, I was surfing on a puny little 96mb 200mhz Pentium. The World Wide Web may have changed a bit since then, but it's still just a bunch of text with a few pictures mixed in. A quad-core 3.2ghz monster doesn't do it 64 times faster today, instead we throw more garbage at it to "make use" of the extra power.
The problem with Moore's law is simple: computers may evolve quickly, but humans sure don't. We're as dumb as we were ten years ago. Life on earth is pretty much the same as it was before, it just costs more money now. We consume more and more, and produce less and less. Why aren't these "thinking machines" doing our work for us ? Productivity is supposed to have increased, but what have we done with the excess ?
If anything, cheap laptops are a roadblock to progress. We're right on track to becoming telecom slaves, just the way they want us.
-Billco, Fnarg.com