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Less Is Moore
Hugh Pickens writes "For years, the computer industry has made steady progress by following Moore's law, derived from an observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months. The Economist reports however that in the midst of a recession, many companies would now prefer that computers get cheaper rather than more powerful, or by applying the flip side of Moore's law, do the same for less. A good example of this is virtualisation: using software to divide up a single server computer so that it can do the work of several, and is cheaper to run. Another example of 'good enough' computing is supplying 'software as a service,' via the Web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software that hardly anyone uses anyway. Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon: the next version of Windows is intended to do the same as the last version, Vista, but to run faster and use fewer resources. If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version. That could be bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade — only proving that Moore's law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles."
Let's be honest here. What does the average office PC run? A word processor, a spreadsheet, an SAP frontend, maybe a few more tools. And then we're basically done. This isn't really rocket science for a contemporary computer, it's neither heavy on the CPU nor on the GPU. Once the computer is faster than the human, i.e. as soon as the human doesn't have to wait for the computer to respond to his input, when the input is "instantly" processed and the user does not get to see a "please wait, processing" indicator (be it a hourglass or whatever), "fast enough" is achived.
And once you get there, you don't want faster machines. More power would essentially go to waste. We have achived this moment about 4-5 years ago. Actually, we're already one computer generation past "fast enough" for most office applications.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's already a method for that: it's called by the catchy title "buying a slightly older one".
A related technique is called "keeping the one you've already got".
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
This could simply be down to the tanking economy: people look at what they're spending, and quickly realise that:
1) the upgrade treadmill over the last twenty years has produced insanely powerful and dirt-cheap hardware. When was the last time you had trouble running Linux on your hardware? I'm old enough to remember!
2) and that you don't need teraflops of CPU/GPU power just to draw greasepaper-style borders around your Microsoft Word windows. Perhaps the entire industry has woken up and seen how unbelievably wasteful modern computing is, and have decided to take the dividend of Moore's Law in cash instead.
3) recessions are good for purging wasteful and suboptimal behaviour generally.
Maybe people will realize what an obscene waste of money and computing power and operating system like Windows Vista, which requires a gig of RAM to run, really is.
Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon: the next version of Windows is intended to do the same as the last version, Vista, but to run faster and use fewer resources. If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version.
Without Vista, MS wouldn't be able to claim that 7 was faster than their previous version of Windows.
Yes, and as so many have pointed out, their history of doing so is now backfiring on them in a big way. And it's not just with Vista, it's with Office as well.
Case in point - several months ago my department bought upgrade licenses to Office 2008. I was perfectly happy with Office 2004, but I installed Office 2008 because I knew that if I didn't, I wouldn't be able to read whatever new formats that Office 2008 supported. It had happened with every other Office upgrade cycle in my experience - you either upgraded or you'd be unable to exchange documents with your peers.
But something funny happened this time - I have yet to receive a .docx, .xlsx, or .pptx file from anyone. I have quite consciously chosen to save every document in .doc, .xls, or .ppt "compatibility" format. Everybody I talk to says they're doing exactly the same thing. Everyone now knows the game that Microsoft plays, and no one is willing to play it anymore. I could have stayed with Office 2004 and never noticed the difference. So what motivation will I have to upgrade to the next version of Office?
If it weren't for Microsoft's OEM licensing deals, Vista would have a tiny fraction of its current market share. XP is "good enough". But Microsoft doesn't push Office onto new machines the way it does Windows, the older Office formats are also "good enough", and you have open source alternatives like OpenOffice if Microsoft tries to deliberately break Office compatibility on the next version. I fully expect Microsoft's Office revenues to take a steep dive in the next few years. The Vista debacle is only the beginning.
Not really, especially in the days when you had Intel and AMD racing to be the producer of the fastest chip.
you can pipe to more from a DOS prompt too. so a few of us get to stay on the lawn.
While I can see the desire for cheaper rather than more powerful, I do wonder how much of the power/price tradeoff curve actually makes sense. Traditionally, the very high end of the curve makes very limited sense, since it is the nightmare world of low yields, early adopter taxes, and super critical enterprise stuff. In the middle, the power/price curve tends to be roughly linear; before gradually becoming less favorable at the bottom, because of fixed costs.
As long as a processor, say, has to be tested, packaged, marked, shipped, etc.(which costs very similar amounts,whether the die in question is a cheap cutdown model or a high end monster) there is going to be a point below which cutting performance doesn't actually cut price by any useful amount. Something like the hard drive is the same way. Any drive has a sealed case, controller board, motor, voice coil unit, and at least one platter. Below whatever the capacity is of that basic drive, there are no real cost savings to be had(incidentally, that is one of the interesting things about flash storage. HDDs might be 10 cents a gig in larger capacities; but that doesn't mean that you can get a 4gig drive for 40 cents, I had a quick look, and you can't get anything new for under about $35. With flash, you might be paying 100 cents a gig; but you pretty much can get any multiple you want).
Cost, overall, is gradually being whittled down; but, once all the low hanging super high margin products are picked off, there is going to be a point past which it simply isn't possible to exchange price for performance at any reasonable rate. Used and obsolete gear offers a partial solution(since it can be, and is, sold below the cost of production in many cases) but that only works if your needs are small enough to be fulfilled from the used market.
I'm not even going to get into the number of FOSS-based companies you leave in the cold by hanging onto .doc and the proprietary document format that it represents instead of using the freely available OOXML specification.
In recent years not only has CPU performance been increased, but the efficiency in terms of power consumption per unit of work has greatly improved.
Even if the majority of users begin realize they have no practical use for top end CPUs with gobs processing power, everyone still benefits from higher efficiency CPUs. It reduces electric bills, simplifies cooling systems, allows for smaller form factors, etc. I think in the future the power efficiency will become more important as people start to care less about having the ultimate killer machine in terms of processing power. People are already performing actions on their mobile devices(iPhone, Blackberry, etc) which were possible only on a desktop in past years. The strict power requirements of these devices with tiny batteries will continue to demand improvements in CPU technology.
I'm waiting for the day when it is common to see completely passively cooled desktop computers, with solid state hard disks, no moving parts, sipping just a few watts of power without emitting a single sound.
The article you pointed out is pure nonsense. It claims that bloat isn't important due to the fact that memory cost dropped. Not only that, it tries to base that claim on this idiotic metric of dollar per megabyte and how the fact that software like microsoft's excel bloat from a 15MB install in the 5.0 days to a 146MB install in the 2000 days is somehow a good thing because in the 5.0 days it took "$36 worth of hard drive space" while "Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space". No need to justify a 100% footprint. We are saving money by installing more crap to do the exact same thing.
In fact, the idiot that wrote that article even had the audacity to state:
Up is down, left is right, bloat is actually good for you.
But people still complain. Although it appears that we should be grateful for all that bloat, we are somehow being ungrateful by believing that all that bloat is unnecessary. But fear not, the idiot that wrote the article has a nice accusation for all those bloat haters out there:
Yes, that's it. We don't hate orders of magnitude increase in bloat simply to be able to perform exactly what has been easily done with a fraction of resources. We don't hate to be forced to spend money on hardware to be left with a less than adequate solution when compared with the previous generation. We simply hate windows. Good call.
The article is bad and you should feel bad for posting a link to it.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Well, actually it's just proof that history repeats itself. Because this thing has happened before. More than once.
See, in the beginning, computers were big things served by holy priests in the inner sanctum, and a large company had maybe one or two. And they kept getting more and more powerful and sophisticated.
But then it branched. At some point someone figured that instead of making the next computer which can do a whole megaflop, they can do a minicomputer. And there turned out to be a market for that. There were plenty of people who preferred a _cheap_ small computer, than doubling the power of their old mainframe.
You know how Unix got started on a computer with 4k RAM, which actually was intended to be just a co-processor for a bigger computer? Yeah, that's that kind of thing at work. Soon everyone wanted such a cheap computer with a "toy" OS (compared to the sophisticated OSs on mainframes) instead of big and powerful iron. You could have several of those for the price of a big powerful computer.
Then the same thing happened with the micro. There were plenty of people (e.g., DEC) who laughed at the underpowered toy PCs, and assured everyone that they'll never replace the mini. Where is DEC now? Right. Turned out that a hell of a lot of people had more need of several cheap PCs ("cheap" back then meaning "only 3 to 5 thousands dollars") instead of an uber-expensive and much more powerful mini (costing tens to hundreds of thousands.)
Heck, in a sense even multitasking appeared as sorta vaguely the same phenomenon. Instead of more and more power dedicated to one task, people wanted just a "slice" of that computer for several tasks.
Heck, when IBM struck it big in the computer market, waay back in the 50's, how did they do it? By selling cheaper computers than Remington Rand. A lot of people had more use for a "cheap" and seriously underpowered wardrobe-sized computer than for a state of the art machine costing millions.
Heck, we've even seen this split before, as portable computers split into normal laptops and PDAs. At one point it became possible to make a smaller and seriously less powerful PDA, but which is just powerful enough to do certain jobs almost as well as a laptop does. And now it seems to me that the laptop line has split again, giving birth to the likes of the Eee.
So really it's nothing new. It's what happens when a kind of machine gets powerful enough to warrant a split between group A who needs the next generation that's 2x as powerful, and group B which says, "wtf, it's powerful enough for what I need. Can I get it at half price in the next generation?" Is it any surprise that it would happen again, this time to the PC? Thought so.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.