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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bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade — only proving that Moore's law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles."
Some of you may remember the 1980s and early 1990s, where PCs started out costing $5,000 and declined slowly to around $2,500 for name brand models.
Around 1995, CPUs exceeded the GUI requirements of all the apps then popular (this is pre-modern gaming, of course). Around 1996 and into 1997 the prices of PCs fell off a cliff, down to $1,000.
Those who fail to remember history...
sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software that hardly anyone uses anyway
I think if you took out all the features that 'hardly anyone uses' you wouldn't have much of a product left. Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
Years back when everyone in the mainstream were trotting out how many Mhz/Ghz their processors ran and how their Latest And Greatest system was *soooo* much better, I insisted that the computer industry had a dirty little secret. The mid to low end computers would work just fine for 90% of users out there. Computer makers didn't want people knowing this and instead hoped that they would be convinced to upgrade every 2 or 3 years. Eventually, though, people learned that they were able to read their e-mail, browse the web, and work on documents without buying a system with a bleeding edge processor and maxed out specs. This seems like the continuation of the secret's collapse. People are realizing that not only don't they need to buy a system with a blazing fast processor just to send out e-mail, but they don't need to buy 10 different servers when one powerful (but possibly still not bleeding edge) server an run 10 virtual server instances.
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I guess that's what happens when you cut and paste computer science terms from an Economist article. In the next sentence, you state correctly that Moore's "Law" is an observation not a law! It's not that the computer industry (and I think we're only talking hardware here) follows this observation, it's that historically it has held true. No one's going to make a huge leap in R&D to be able to put 10x the number of transistors on a chip only to have engineers come down on them to stop it saying "no one has ever broken Moore's Law and we're not going to start now!" That idea is preposterous. We're limited by our own technology that happens to follow an ok model, it's not a choice!
Yes, that's all true, but if you don't think chip makers throw up graphs with a curve on them for Moore's Law and use that as a guideline for where they should be in the future, which could be called "following"... you're mistaken. Obviously if the observation continues to hold true, that's only because of the advances in R&D that produce new technology. However those advances come as a result of choices, like how much and what kind of R&D to do, and those choices are themselves driven in part by Moore's Law.
Now as far as going faster and getting 10x more transistors on a chip, sure that's not much of a choice. That's because the industry is already busting its ass to maintain the current exponential trend. For that very reason I'd never take the phrase "following Moore's Law" to mean intentionally limiting technology advancement. Au contraire, if anything I take it to mean we're "following" in the sense that you'd be "following" Usian Bolt in the 200m dash -- if you're anywhere near keeping up, you're a bad ass. The only motivation would be to drop off that pace.
Which, to some extent, we've already seen in the 00's. It's still exponential growth, but the time factor has increased somewhat. I can't remember the data I saw, but it appeared to have gone from a doubling every 18 months to 24?
By the way, I agree the examples are pretty poor. For virtualization you want the newest beefiest processor with the best hardware support for virtualization you can get. The whole idea is that you want a single machine to appear as though it is a plethora of machines each with enough horsepower to do whatever that specific machine needs to do. This is the opposite of just wanting to do the same thing cheaper, it's wanting to do the same thing times a plethora, so you need a machine that is at least one plethora times as powerful. Being cheaper overall is just a desirable side effect. I hope you agree that "plethora" is a great word.
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I can buy a $350 mini laptop, $500 decently speced laptop, or a $500 desktop with what would have been unbelievable specs not long ago. I remember when I picked up computer shopper and was thrilled that there were any bare bones dekstops that sold at the $1K mark. Now you can get full featured systems for under .5K that do things that $2-3K machines couldn't do.
Really, there is no such thing as a "Moore's Law." It's Moore's trend lines that have been holding. That it lasted 10 years, much less this long has been utterly amazing. I fully expect for us to run into problems keeping with "Moore's Law" before 2100. 5-10 years after the trend is broken it'll be something the future folks will either forget about it entirely or look back and kinda giggle at us like we were just silly about it all. 50-100 years later no one will care though every one will be making use of the by products of it. Do you notice where the stuff for roads comes from or what Roman engineer built the most or best roads? That's generally what they'll think of any computing device older than 20 years. If Moore's law holds until 2050, every computing device that we've currently made will be either trash or museum pieces by that time. Heck, you have people getting rid/upgrading of cell phones almost every 3-6 months already.
We imagine replicators in Star Trek, but we don't need them with Walmart and 3-6 months for new products to come out. Consider Amazon+UPS next day shipping. Replicator tech would have to be cheaper and faster than that to compete. I think that it's more likely that we'll keep on improving our current tech. What happens when UPS can do 1 hour delivery to most places on the globe? Replicators might spring up, but only for the designers to use them to spend a week making 10K of a unit, to put it went on sale today, which would be sold out in two weeks and discounted by the week after. Face it; we are already living in a magical golden age. We just want it to be 1000x better in 50 years.
One of the things I learned many years ago, is that computer and computing speed isn't a function of how fast something runs. Rather it is a matter of whether or not you actually run something.
If computer speeds are twice as fast, and it currently takes you ten seconds to accomplish Task A, and a new computer will allow you to accomplish that same task in 5 seconds .... getting a new computer is not that big of a deal.
However, if you run Task B, which takes 1.5 hours to complete, and a new computer will run that same task in say 4 minutes (Real world example from my past, log processing), the difference isn't necessarily the 86 minute difference, but rather if and how often you actually run that task.
It is endlessly amusing to see "real world benchmarks" that run in 3 minutes for most processors, separated by less than 2 x. Or frames per sec. Or ...... whatever.
When shit takes too long to get done, you tend NOT to do it. If the difference is a few seconds, that is nice and all, and a few seconds may be of interest to "extreme" hobbyists.
But Real World differences are not marginally decreasing from 300 to 279 seconds. Sorry, but those extra few seconds aren't going to prevent you from running that Task.
The true measure is not how fast something gets done, but whether or not you actually do the task, because the time involve is prohibitive.
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This is dangerous territory for Microsoft to be in. Levelling off of computer power means that buyers are getting off the upgrade treadmill -- they're not buying new computers every couple of years. Preloads on new computers are where Microsoft makes the bulk of their Windows sales.
To make matters worse, without constant upgrades, Microsoft and ISV's can't count on new API's becoming widespread anytime soon, so they have to write applications for the lowest common denominator. This prevents Microsoft from forcing its latest agenda onto everyone -- and even worse, it could potentially provide the WINE team enough time to reach feature parity with Windows XP. (Spare me the lecture, have you tried WINE lately? It's surprisingly good these days.)
All in all, Microsoft is being forced to stand still in a place where they can't afford to. Commoditization sucks when you're a monopolist, doesn't it?
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