Slashdot Mirror
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bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade — only proving that Moore's law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles."
Less: 120884 bytes
More: 27752 bytes
Wow, that's right!
Summation 2
For years, the computer industry has made steady progress by following Moore's law ...
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!
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.
I don't see how SaaS supports the idea of consumer demand for yesterday's computer cheaper today. SaaS is a new business model for software, not a response to us settling on "good enough" computers--and it's been growing for a lot longer than just recently. The software of yesterday can still run on this hardware. Google Docs, online CRM & accounting tools are SaaS but they are not evidence of consumers wanting cheaper netbooks with less computing power. I think you will find that OO.o runs just as well on a netbook as Google docs, I know my older machines have a hard time with the amount of memory my browser sucks up when looking at a large Google spreadsheet or Google doc. Again, I don't think the logic behind SaaS is we need to cope with weaker client machines, I think SaaS has other more important benefits like netting more money, avoiding piracy, easier to patch, etc.
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.
Aside from how ridiculous that statement sounds to me ("Vista makes your computer run faster?"), it is my opinion that the Vista Capable debacle drove this more than consumer demand. Microsoft is notorious for ignoring customer desires to fix what they have and offering unprompted additions and UI changes.
I think what you are witnessing is consumers and businesses hurting because of the shrinking economy and a $250 netbook is looking mighty affordable to them. This isn't going to stop any of the companies doing R&D to keep pace with Moore's observation.
My work here is dung.
Proof that Moore's law is driven by economics as much as (or even more than) technological discovery/innovation?
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
...around here, more is Microsoft. So, let's get on with it and find a tie-in so we can cash our payoff checks. Oh! Wait...there it is!
Microsoft is everything /. and /. is everything microsoft! What a wonderful thing, being able to come to one place and read all about wonderful microsoft...just wonderful!
If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version.
Nooo...computers are running at exactly the same speed. They just won't have to chew through bloated software. Microsoft is (supposedly) making their software more efficient.
Can't stand writers who don't understand tech.
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.
Even in the downturn there will still be gamers that want more out of what they are playing. Look how many people are still waiting for something to play Crysis decently. and GTAIV is a joke with its lack of anti-aliasing.
An Athlon XP should be enought for almost any home user, unless you like to hand real power for your botnets.
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.
Or, it could be good news for them. Especially in the light of the things like the "Vista Capable" bru-ha-ha, and the impact Vista had on RAM prices when fewer than the projected number of consumers ran out to buy upgrades.
Maybe Intel and NVidia are going to be wearing the sadface, but I'm willing to wager HP and the like are almost giddy with the thought of not having to retool their production lines yet again. They get to slap on a shiny new OS and can keep the same price point on last year's hardware.
Some of the corporations in the world buy new hardware simply to keep it 'fresh' and less prone to failure. My own company has recycled a number of Pentium 4 machines that are still quite capable of running XP and Internet Explorer. With the costs of new desktop hardware at an all-time low for us, we get to paint a pretty picture about ROI, depreciation, budgets, and the like.
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.
With added features. Now if only bash would default auto-complete to use it...
Wait, there's a story somewhere?
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...
Continually making the same thing for less money is not a very good business model.
Pretty soon the customers will be asking for the same performance, free.
Reminds me of the old quote, "We have being doing so much with so little for so long we are now qualified to do anything with nothing at all".
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.
Cost is very important particularly in business, but for home users the price for a "good enough" PC has been in the same 600-1200 price range for a long time. What I think will drive sales particularly in the home, and mobile professional is size, have less wires, and use less energy. Folks are willing to pay more for that; rather than more powerful chips that they don't need. This should be good news for OEMs, because it is easier to show the "average" user a more aesthetic case, or more wireless peripherals, or a better/faster OS, than convincing them that Word, IE and MSN Messenger are going to be "better" on a 2.4GHz chip over a 2.0GHz chip.
The only companies that should be frightened are CPU manufactuers (particularly as more and more functions are being passed off to GPUs; and as developers are not catching up to multi-core development as fast as they'd like).
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
There once was a man named Less Moore. .44.
He got shot with 4 rounds from a
No less, no more.
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.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I have one of the "original" EEE PCs. The 701 4G. Even with the stock 512Meg RAM and the underclocked to 670MHz CPU, I can do pretty much everything I want to do. The limitation here being the screen (Thank you slashdot for the "previous track icon" on the front page!)
Let's see: I do Word Processing (AbiWord), Spreadsheets (Gnumeric), Browsing (Iceweasel), Email (Icedove), and many things more. All courtesy of the Debian EEE Project. (I run LXDE and the afore mentioned applications). For day-to-day personal stuff this is plenty.
When it still ran Xandros, I even installed Eclipse for fun and kicks. While it wasn't that fast, it was doable and after configuring the interface minimally, it was ever halfway usable. Granted, I wouldn't want to use it over 8 hours.
I hate to be the "640KByte is enough for everyone" guy, but a 1GHz machine with 512Meg RAM and a lean operating system is indeed enough for most uses.
That also explains my wifes machine: a P-IV 2.6GHz Hyperthreaded which was bought in 2003 and still is our primary and only desktop. (Had a few minor upgrades...) We have no intent of changing it. It runs Windows XP Pro.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
1) No one is following Moore's law. It's a description of what happens.
2) You can, of course, come up with some equation that describes the cost of a set amount of processor power over time.
3) This article and this summary make bad economic assumptions and use faulty logic. I suggest to all reading the comments that it's not worth reading.
That is all.
To put all those idle resources to good use. There needs to be a new generation of programs and games to put all the hardware to work.
There are many options. Multiseat, Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), thin clients (netbook and barebone desktop), etc. In other words, the return of time-sharing evolved and using hi tech.
Multiseat
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration
LSTSP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Terminal_Server_Project
thin client
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_client
netbook
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook
Computer terminal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal
etc...
http://tech.yahoo.com/blog/null/24753
A low end computer is enough for 99% of the work. Almost nobody need or use a 4 core CPU (except for games), but usually, this kind of power is not used in the enterprise.
Moore's law does not say "that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months." Moore's law says that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit increase exponentially, doubling approximately every two years.
Darien Graham-Smith: "Vista has had us driving with the handbrake on for the past two years, but at long last Windows 7 is coming to set us free." .....I hope this doesn't turn out like the transition from Hoover to FDR.
Contrasting Xenserver with VMWare would have been a better comparison. Xen have gone down the super-thin hypervisor route with only a few tens of thousands of lines of code in their core software, the rest plugged in via API. This is in contract to the integrated bigger approach by the existing market leaders.
AG
There is a possibility (however unlikely) that Microsoft has made a very clever and astute move going for a streamlined version of their current technology rather than a new iteration with whatever arbitrary new features weighing it down. It's clever because it's timed for release in a global recession and a switch in focus to developing markets - the 'next billion' users.
But it's unlikely, and I would hesitate to say microsoft has actually preempted anything, I'd say their responding to what they've been told by hardware vendors who have put their foot down and said, "this is what we will be selling, if you don't come up with something we're going to take matters into our own hands with linux".
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
My 8 year old laptop running ME can boot in 14 seconds and shut down in just under 4. I think XP and Vista were a big step in the wrong direction. When a set of hardware that's overall about 30x faster still takes at least 5x longer to boot XP or Vista, somebody screwed up. It's about time operating systems got thinner and more efficient regardless of the economy of stalling hardware speeds.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
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.
I could care less for having "the latest (and not necessarily the greatest)". I still have a single core Sempron 3500+ (socket 939), and guess what? I don't feel the need to upgrade. It plays the games I like (CSS/TF2), runs the apps I use, all without problems. Plus, when I do finally "upgrade" to a dual core in a few years, today's games will be cheaper, and cracks'll be available for em, so I won't need to have that dang fangled DRM.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Proof that Moore's law is driven by economics as much as (or even more than) technological discovery/innovation?
You have a good point that this could be a test of your hypothesis. The purchase of a computer to a company or governement is frequently considered a "capital" purchase. Even though over time, the cost of computing is dominated by the operating cost of software, power, upgrades and IT.
However since capital is usually scare in organizations it tends to drive acqusitiion decisions. People buying things that they can't easily replace will tend to seek higher perfromance equipment.
But that may be about to change. things like cloud computing let people push their computer budgets into operating budgets. If they are lucky they might even become "overhead" contracts paid for bythe company rather than by the project.
So there is a huge incentive now to further comoditize computing to the point where people compete at the bottom of the barrel rather than at the high end.
Dell has sought to prevent that. For example, you can't buy those el cheapo dell's you see advertised in the back of the sunday paper glossy if you work in the govenrment or a large corporation.
But the netbooks now are cracking that facade since you can buy those on a gov't contract. dell will have to respond at some point.
it's a new economics. Will it drive moore's law too?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
A previous company I worked for would lease their workstations for 3 years. That did mean that they were constantly paying for computers ... and rolling out new boxes.
But there weren't many problems with the HARDWARE during those 3 years.
As they started keeping the workstations longer, there were more problems with the hardware AND there were problems with replacing the hardware that broke. Which was leading to a non-uniform desktop environment. It's more difficult to support 100 different machines with 100 different makes / models, etc than it is to support 100 identical machines.
The reality is that hardware has pulled so far ahead of software, it will be years before we exploit out current level of technology to its capacity.
We have some apps that don't understand how to task between CPU's. (We have some OS's that barely grasp that). We have applications that were designed in a time of 16 bit machines and fairly low limits on memory that have been patched and slowly moved along when they really need a completely new architecture underneath now to function well. We have some software companies that have pressed the limits in terms of graphics or number crunching, but that has not had time to diffuse through the overall industry.
Within a few years, we will have computer architectures that have an arbitrary number of processor cores and no real apps to handle that. We have a lot of stuff that was in enterprise level boxes that have worked their way down into desktops and laptops.
How about we get some balance back. The current technology has been barely scratched in terms of its capabilities.
The first 486 I got my hands on came with a $5,000 price tag.
My first Pentium came in, well spec'd, around $2,500.
The PCs I was building for myself ran about $1,500 five years ago and the last one was down around $1,100 - all "mid-range" machines, capable of playing the latest games in fairly high quality and reasonably functional for at least 18 months to 2 years.
Since a little after that Pentium, the systems I see more casual friends buying have dropped from few people buying $3,000 laptops to a fair number of people getting $2,000 laptops to most of them having $1,000 laptops, to $699 Circuit City or BestBuy "deals" to $300 netbooks.
When Moore came up with his law, in the mid 60s, what was the single cheapest usefully functional computer you could buy? I wasn't buying then but I'm guessing several hundred thousand dollars and it took up half the room. From day one, people have been trading processor cycles for cost.
Adding transistors doesn't matter, it's the software that matters.
Multi-CPU machines can only be as efficient as the software that drives them, and right now, the interaction between the hardware and software is complex and poorly understood by engineers (or at least, normal programmers like myself). There's a lot of unnecessary experimentation involved in getting something to utilize the hardware efficiently, because it's very much an exercise left to the reader (though I'd be pleased to be proven wrong with a kickass resource).
Many applications just use one of your 8 cpus. In fact, Moore's law has already been busted, because computers have not gotten faster, they've just gotten more chips.
I expect a huge paradigm shift in programming to take advantage of now ubiquitous multi-CPU systems, but it hasn't happened yet, not even close.
Flash taketh away.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Ok this has always annoyed me so it's time to finally rant about it.
As I see it, this guy Moore, who seems like a fine guy otherwise, has been made utterly FAMOUS for, well, stating the fucking obvious! "Computer speeds will double every year" is about as clever an observation as "human population will increase every year" (with similar limitations). In fact, whenever you talk about population increase, would you start referring to it as "AC's Law"? That would make me happy and have a nice irony to it.
Ok, I suppose it helps that he co-founded Intel or whatever.
Thatisallthankyou.
by Gordon Moore that the amount of computing power available at a particular price doubles every 18 months
-------------
BZZZZ wrong answer
Moore's original law states that: the number of transistors we are able to pack into a given size of silicon real estate inexpensively, doubles every 18 months. He changed this prediction to every 2 years in 1975, which bolstered the perceived accuracy of his prediction.
Number of transistors for a particular price is a moving target which is entirely dependent on the supply and demand of said silicon, how much the R&D for the die cost, perfecting the process, how much waste there is etc etc etc. This is a subtle, yet very important, distinction.
You can pay $1200 for a bleeding edge CPU, or you can wait a few months and pay $400.
While the raw silicon has a relatively stable price, the process and it's requirements are a variable cost which is depreciated over the life of the process. This is why finished retail CPUs drop rapidly in cost over time.
The r&d and manufacturing cost per unit area actually goes up over time.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Dont attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Maybe Windows 7 is faster and use less resources than Vista because their engineers didnt figured how to be slower and require even more resources. You need real talent for that.
Make the engine, upon which the winning succinct byte code runs, a new W3C standard browser programming language (or at least virtual machine) and reduce the Microsoft OS CD to those components required to create a web-delivered application platform using the winning engine. Such an engine would, of course, have some features that dynamically encached expansions (and/or "memoizations") similar to the Hotspot optimization technology that originated with the Self programming language (and was later adopted by Sun's Java Virtual Machine). Hence it would make sense to have the OS CD contain a partially pre-expanded/optimized code base.
Then, for delivery of software services to pre-existing platforms, create a legacy port of the services code to pre-existing W3C standards like XForms implemented in a downloadable ECMAScript Client/SOA library in a manner similar to the way TIBET(tm) does. The idea is to go "Live", ie: web-delivered, with a fundamentally new W3C base (whatever engine won the prize) but support legacy W3C environments for migration.
Again, this prize-oriented strategy would, of course, require a rigorous specification of the software services so the testing could be largely automated.
This approach addresses Microsoft's 2 biggest problems deriving from the same fundamental reality: Everyone has needed their OS to interoperate with the bulk of the information industry.
The first problem is ethical and really goes beyond the scope of my professional opinions to my public opinions about the support of property rights. Suffice to say, I have no trouble with someone who goes after a natural monopoly position and succeeds. I have a problem with someone who then refuses to use that position of success to fix the bug in the society that made them inordinately rich and their technology inordinately influential.
The second problem is technical, which is what my argument here is really all about.
Basically Microsoft's code bloat problem derives from its monopoly position. This may seem like a truism since all of the software "profession" suffers from code bloat, but only Microsoft can take this to monopolistic proportions -- proportions that make Ma Bell's monopolistic complexities of yore look Spartan.
So Microsoft has this problem and it has many programmers (contributing to the code-bloat problem). It also has mountains of cash.
So how can Microsoft bust its own monopoly position turning its many programmers (many newly laid off!) and mountains of cash into succinct code?
Monetary Incentives for the Programmers. For example, the original idea for the Hutter Prize was:
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at the time of the new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Something similar can be done with the size of the binary that passes the entire suite of tests for Microsoft's software suite.
What happens very rapidly is the programmers first apply their skills to maximally refactoring. What falls out is a series of legacy API layers written atop a tight core.
They'd have to spend more money on code testing to verify the compressed code-bases of the competing teams actually worked to spec but the results should be quite gratifying.
Seastead this.
...and you'll find that your system resources will be used efficiently and seamlessly. The installation is easy and NinWM can be configured to perfectly emulate a Win desktop with just a few clicks. So why look any further...highly efficient and fast computing is here NOW...with Ninnle Linux!
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.
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.
We more-or-less got enough computing power for most things with the introduction of the PIII 1GHz CPU. You might not agree with this, but it's at least approximately true. A computer outfitted with that processor and reasonable RAM browses the web just fine, plays MP3s, reads email, shows videos from YouTube, etc. It doesn't do everything that you might want, but it does a lot.
If we took the amazing technology that has been used to create the 3 GHz multi-core monsters with massive on-chip cache memory in a power budget of 45W or so in some cases, and applied it to a re-implementation of the lowly PIII, we'd win big. We'd get a PIII 1GHz burning a paltry few watts.
And this is precisely why chips like the Intel Atom have been so successful. Reasonable computing power for almost no electricity. We don't necessarily need just MORE-FASTER-BIGGER-STRONGER, which is the path Intel and AMD have historically put the most effort into following, we also need more efficient.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
This new phenomenon of people praising Windows ME on Slashdot is really beginning to worry me.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The original Slashdot article (and the original Economist article) got so close, but missed it: the reason we won't have cheaper computers is Microsoft. It glosses over it by mentioning that Microsoft wants its new OS to use fewer resources.
But the real way that Microsoft is the problem is that Windows licenses are one per computer, and the price of one isn't going down. Decreasing the price of the other components of a PC instead of doubling their power would mean that Windows takes up a larger and larger slice of the PC's total cost. Microsoft would be under pressure to reduce the price of Windows, and they really don't want that....
That second linked article doesn't actually say this is the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster, and in fact it's not true. Windows 3.1 ran significantly faster than 3.0.
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?
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Netbooks Intel Atom processor blah, blah, blah...
> [windows 7 same as] 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.
I think this somewhat misses the point. People are less likely to buy new hardware in an economic downturn. It doesn't really have anything to do with whether the next version of Windows drives hardsware sales, as previous versions have done.
If Windows 7 really "runs faster with fewer resources" than Vista, (I'm hopeful, but this won't be established until it's actually released) then it could be that Microsoft is recognizing the fact that they will get more over-the-counter purchases if they make it more likely to run on legacy hardware. Else, people will just stick with what they have. It's the economy, not Microsoft, that's the main driver.
I am actually hopeful that we've broken the mindless upgrade cycle. I'm sorry it took a recession to do it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In my area, we used to get 3-4 analog stations and now get 8-9. Plus the picture and sound are markedly improved on all of them.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Continually making the same thing for less money is not a very good business model.
Sometimes it is a good model. If you can achieve adequate margins and sell a lot more of it, you end up making more money.
When supercomputer-level power cost multiple millions, only a few sold. Now it costs dollars (in the form of GPU chips in video adapters) and a LOT of those are sold. Which makes more money for the manufacturers?
This is encoded in a snappy saying:
"Fast nickels are better than slow dimes."
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I agree that the shift will is towards smaller cheaper more energy efficiency and ubiquitous computers. However it doesn't necessarily follow that computers won't get faster and software to make use of it. Moore's inacurately named Law is still holding true at the bleeding edge, driven by gaming, content creation and research. What we are getting is a growing gap between the lowest end and the highest end. The high end will become a smaller slice of revenue for sure.
For chip manufacturers little will change, performance per watt and cost/die/wafer require the same thing: ever smaller transistors that use less power per iteration. It's the same thing. So in reality Moore's Observation is still iterating unchecked, it's just the end packaging that will be different.
Instead of dozens of billion-transistor multicore behemoths from a wafer, they will get hundreds of tiny cut-down processors with a lower transitor count.
Now, it's been shown the latter which is a more profitable approach.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
When my old computer broke I bought a new one which is actually less powerful than the machine it replaced.
However, it is also much smaller, very affordable, consumes up to 90% less energy, and is almost perfectly quiet during operation.
I am talking about the ASUS Eee Box. I love my new computer and I plan to stick with such "nettops" in future. Obviously it is not an option if you want to play 3D games (very weak graphic chips), but that's not an issue for me.
$ ls -l /bin/more /bin/more -> /usr/bin/less
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Jan 28 15:17
So on my box, less is more...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
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.
.. ELIZA sure looks better now.
I suspect my MacBook already 2 years old will hold me down for another 4 years, including running XP fast enough to play the old school games well enough for me to be satisfied. I also can edit video, use photoshop on large images, do web development, and run Ubuntu on another virtual machine Note that I got this computer used of Craigs list.
If you had told me me in 2000 I'd be buying a used notebook computer and holding onto for 5+ years I would have laughed in your face. Good for me, and the environment. And for the computer manufacturers? Not so much...
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
So paying some corporation EVERY MONTH for my software, aka "web app", is now suddenly somehow cheaper and more practical just because of a recession? WTF? It's entirely the reverse! That's why software publishers are so eager to sucker people into using web apps aka software-by-subscription: they want the extra profits it will bring.
Web apps are to software publishers what fries-and-a-coke are to fast food: PURE PROFIT.
Folks, you do SEE what they're doing here? They're now trying to use the recession, in a perverse twist of logic, to sell you on the notion of software subscriptions! Take Nancy Reagan's advice, and "JUST SAY NO." Please, don't give in and ruin it for the rest of us.
Processors decrease in price as new technology comes out. When a faster processor hits the market it means the old processor becomes "inferior". If Intel stopped increasing the clock frequency/#cores, then the current top of the line equipment would stay at the top, and the price would stay relatively stable.
Even if the demand for processing power is decreasing, the demand for processors is increasing.
Don't expect the price of processors to fall anytime soon.
You don't have to imagine futuristic AI to think of computationally intensive stuff that's in the process of being pushed to the client. Excel is getting machine-learning and data-mining algorithms added to it, for example, so in future versions you'll be able to not only plot your data, but plot kernel-smoothed versions, cluster it using various clustering algorithms, fill in incomplete labels using, say, SVMs, and so on. A lot of the stuff that statisticians and savvy business analysts do in R now will be things that are standard and expected for a much wider range of people in the future (and R itself is getting more uptake outside of statistics professors).
Maybe Google will offer a server-side version of that sort of thing for Google Docs, but that would require a lot of processing power on their end.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I like Pretty interfaces. They take just a little of the drudgery out of work. I design some baroque interface schemes because I like to pretend I'm working on some alien computer out of Star Trek.
But you hit on the divider line: Colors and Fonts are Cheap. "If it moves, kill it".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Lately they quit waiting for Fast Enough and began adding stuff that made your expensive comp feel like a 486.
Some trolls were saying "who cares about efficiency" the past couple of years. Now we care. Like that other post elsewhere, we grew into features pretty well. Now it's time to slice the efficiency cake for 2 iterations. Win7 is Polished Vista.
Let's hear about Windows 8!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Nope. AI is the holy grail, and as such it needs such ridiculously complex resources we still won't be there for a decade.
We can get SubAI Expert Fragments right now. But there's an entire layer full of meta processing interactive context containers concurrently with the limited task that's going to chew cpu.
I'd like to say it would need 64 cores with about 1 process per core for 60 cores and 4 cores to manage it all into something useable at the people level.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It should be obvious, shouldn't it? Our work enviroment of choice has been the Desktop metophor for about 20 years now. Todays computers are powerfull enough to handle very luxurious desktop enviroments. I've basically replaced my very first PC - the first ever ATX bigtower casing, an InWin from 1996, that ways around about a metric ton - with a Mac Mini. 3D wise I even think it's a downgrade, allthough I only have a Geforce 4200 Ti as my latest 3D card in there.
But, as others here have pointed our allready, it consumes about the tenth of the power, makes almost no noise at all - even now I can barely hear it - and it is like 40 times as small. Meanwhile FOSSnix based systems are only getting better without making computing skills obsolete and making it even more finacially attractive to go for cheap and small.
The next performance race for most people will only take place after the standards for powerconsumption, size and noise have been raised and met. After that regular computers will be heading for more power again. I presume that next league will stall after a decade again, when 200$ computers the size of my external HDD have reached the power to render photorealistic motiongraphics in real time.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
No man, GUI was the greatest thing to hit comps since ENIAC.
I don't ever want to prepare taxes in DOS again.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I work in the VLSI field. Over the years I have seen chips from 60nm to 45nm and down to 22nm in the current state.
Why did tech shrink?
Because you could do the same function for lesser silicon, i.e. lesser cost.
From 60nm-45nm etc., the reductions were substantial.
But around 22nm, if tech is reduced(technology is there), the cost benefit is zilch.
So you may have a chip 10% smaller, doing the same thing, but it will consume almost same power and cost more.
So moore's law will actually be broken by 2010,unless something really out of the box is invented.
As of the current state of affairs, the focus in on 2 things.
1. Optimization of architechture
2. Reduction of power.
The shrinking phenomena is a thing of the past.
The newer chips will be slightly faster but consume less power and will cost less, thats all, no more hyper speed jumps for now. The party was good while it lasted, now with the current economic state, R&D funding is not what it used to be, so innovation will also suffer for some time
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I recall a few folks here echoing my aesthetic taste for a comp to run fast and clean by heavily stripping down the junk.
I'd like to see a modular DLL version of Windows where it doesn't bother to boot the whole OS, but only the parts you need! Then something like UAC will kick in to say "that weird last action requires loading addl components, please wait..."
(Someone has done this with Linux, but since I don't "speak linux" yet, I am using Windows for my example.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
> first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version.
So now it will only be 10x slower then Linux instead of 100x for the same operations.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
For goodness sake, Moore's law never specified anything to do with "computing power"!
Moore observed that typically the number of transistors doubled ||on the lowest price process|| around every 2 years.
At least the poster got something right: the cost of the process.
But, it's not a law AT ALL; it's a self-fulfilling prophecy! Manufacturers know the target they have to hit (Moore's!) and they do everything they can to hit it. Anything less would result in company failure.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
GUI is really a dead end, though. You only have one mouse pointer that takes a whole arm to control. That's a huge resource bottleneck which slows down human-computer interaction enormously.
I hate to be the "640KByte is enough for everyone" guy, but a 1GHz machine with 512Meg RAM and a lean operating system is indeed enough for most uses.
'halfway usable'??? Get back to me when these Eee machines can substitute for an '8 hour' machine, without running some 'lean' OS. RAM is cheap these days.
I could perhaps tolerate a cramped netbook computer for when I was in transit if it meant being able to plug in an external keyboard and 1080p screen when I was at a desk. I don't play games or use intensive graphics software but that Eclipse you speak of routinely takes up > 1GB by itself. yet, IIRC, the specs on these netbooks were limited to 1GB by the chipset.
One of those 64bit dual core atoms with 2GB might suffice but that's still 2 generations away before they hit that price point. Until then, I'll stick with my Core 2 Duo 12" machine, which incidentally cost less than $US1K but means I don't have to maintain multiple environments
You yourself mention a primary desktop machine, which being 6 years old is still gruntier than your portable - why have two machines? QED, these netbooks aren't powerful enough yet.
I don't mind Office 2007 overall (although I didn't go out of my way to get it); I'm one of the people who *likes* the Ribbon.
I have it on my home computer (relatively cheap retail copy purchased by someone else in the house) and it's on my university's computers (probably off of an el-cheapo volume license). Thus, the vast majority of my computer use is done on computers that all have Office 2007.
Even so, I find myself using the old formats on purpose, and it's been long enough that I don't think that's just due to force of habit.
The file incompatibility thing is a pain, although the format-converter add-on has really caught on amongst those with older Office versions.
I notice that the 2007 formats carry a much smaller file size [for the same content] than the 2003 ones (or RTF for that matter); I wonder if this is an actual advantage of OOXML or malicious/shoddy coding on Microsoft's part in the handling of the other formats. Sure, disk space isn't much in this day and age, but that still irritates me.
The bibliography manager [Word], one of the few non-UI changes I've noticed, requires you to use .docx for the relevant documents for it to work properly.
When word-processing on my Linux box, I output to .RTF instead of .ABW or .ODT - their .rtf's are smaller file size, but their .doc's are bigger.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The observation behind Moore's Law doesn't say anything about performance. It's a projection about the rate at which transistor density on a wafer grows every 18 months. Historically most companies incl Intel had used this to make bigger dies for larger and more complex processors, but you can also use the improvements in transistor real estate to simply make smaller dies and hence, more of them, increasing yield and bringing down the price. So bringing the price down isn't different than Moore's Law, it's just another way to use ML.
1. Take random article from news site
2. Somehow manage to make it justify a new slashdot story that includes a link to ooold blog promoting windows 7.
3. ?????
4. Profit / Win laptop ?
How is vista seven related to this at all? It didn't get faster for doing less... That article states clearly that it is just using a more responsive interface, I mean, come on!...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The presentation of the false choice fallacy is that you must choose option a or option b. As far as I can tell, businesses want not only option a and option b, they also want "the same performance in less watts". And a number of other things.
By presenting the trend as a singular choice the author presents a false choice. What is actually happening is that the computing ecosystem is becoming more diverse. As we select from a richer menu, we are enabled to pursue our goals large and small with equipment that suits the application. It's a good thing.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version."
This is the 2nd bit of falseness -- WinXP was faster than WinME.
Second -- WinXP is still quite a bit faster than Win7.
The article states that Win7 improves in areas where Windows was "OS-bound" over Vista. However, it says there is NO IMPROVEMENT in Win7 for applications. It was applications that noticed a 10-15% performance hit in Vista vs. XP due to the overhead of the DRM'd drivers. As near as I can tell from everything that has been leaked out about Vista before, during and after its development was that MS added (not replaced), but added a whole new abstraction layer. They tried to make it transparent where they could, but this was the basic reason why nearly all drivers that actually touched hardware had to be rewritten -- the USER has to be completely isolated from the real hardware -- so DRM can detect hardware/software work-arounds or unauthorized modifications or "taps" into the unencrypted data stream. This goes down to the level of being able to tell if something is plugged into a jack due to impedance changes -- if impedance or electrical specs don't match exactly with what the circuit is supposed to produce -- the OS is supposed to assume tampering and mark the OS-state as "compromised". Think of it being similar to the Linux - Kernel's tainted bit. Once it's set, it is supposed to be irreversible unless you reboot -- because the integrity of the kernel has been compromised. The DRM in Vista-Win7 was spec'ed to be similar but with finer level sensors -- so if anything -- a code path takes too long to execute, or circuits don't return their expected values, it's to assume the box is unsecure, so content can be disabled or downgraded at the content-providers option.
All this is still in Win7 -- the only difference it all the drivers that were broken during the switch to Vista won't be rebroken -- so you won't get anywhere near the OEM flack and Blog-reports about incompatibilities -- those will all be buried with Vista -- along with your memories -- so hopes MS. But MS has already made it clear that you won't be able to upgrade an XP machine to Win7 -- so they can control the experience from the start -- either by starting with corrupted Vista drivers, or Win7 drivers -- take your pick. Both are designed to ensure your compliance, but more importantly -- both cause performance degradation that everyone pays for by needing a bigger machine than they needed for XP.
The whole planet will be paying an excess carbon tax -- forever -- all to add in content-producer's demanded wish list.
This whole bit about the IT industry warming up to Win7 because it's not so bad compared to Vista just makes me want to puke. It's still corrupt and slow.
The government should require MS to open-source WinXP -- so it can be supported apart from MS -- who's obviously going for a "content-control" OS (like the next Gen Apple's are slated for). This will be the beginning of the end for non-commercial, open-source OS's or media boxes. It will be all pay-to-play -- just like Washington.
Way back when I was in college (Windows 3.1 days) I read every computer magazine I could get my hands on to learn what I could about Windows and computing in general. Then a few months before Windows 95 came out the hype began and I realized that computer magazines for the general public were really just PR tools for Microsoft which you pay for. I'm noticing this same trend on the internet today. Notice the subtle little plug for Windows 7 in the above article (... If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version.) I've heard all this before.... I stopped buying computer magazines and I certainly tune out most of the marketing dribble I read on the Internet.
Ach, my friendly Mr. Martin.
I only declared UserInterfaces WithGraphics as TehCat'sMeow.
By no means have our current designs reached the apex, although they are usable.
I have had two mice operating at once, usually as a result of some weird testing though. Apple&iPhone are on to something with touchpad gestures. There's EVERY reason why you can have a gesture pad operated by one hand with the mouse on the other.
Heck, hook up a Rubik's cube to the OS so that you can compose an entire letter with 137 twists of the cube. My main point was that while easy to program for, DOS was a bear on usability because it only had 1 direction of input and once you were stuck in a badly written program deep into nested input, the human feel was gone and it became very upsetting.
("No, after tab-tab-tab-altF1-tab-pageUp, it's F-SIX, not F-twelve, and then you do the tab-tab-AltF5-PageDown-Pagedown part, and you can fix that sub schedule.")
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Take a low-end Sun of the early 1990s, in the ELC / IPX / Classic direction. It would have a processor clocked at between 25 and 50 MHz, between 4 and 16 MB of RAM and (if not running diskless) a disk of between 140MB and 500MB onboard or hung out the back. If you were a developer or a student and had one of those on your desk, you'd be relatively content. If you step up to a medium-sized Sun of the era, something like a 10/514, you'd have four processors clocked at around 50MHz, perhaps as much as 512MB of RAM and a few GB of disk in multipacks. Networking, of course, was mostly 10Mbps, although you might have FDDI, CDDI or similar around --- we fitted that to some of our 514s.
A Netbook blows any of these away on any metric except, for the cases where you had multiple spindles plus disksuite striping, IO bandwidth. I've got Open Solaris on an elderly P5020 laptop with a gig of RAM, a 100BaseT ethernet connection and a 120GB disk drive and if I wanted to relive the 1990s, it'd do as an excellent compute server. The first Auspex I bought in 1993 will win score on raw IOPS as it spread its 14GB over about twenty spindles. But even then, the little Atom 330 with a pair of 2.5" drives mirrored with ZFS I have at home would probably run it quite close --- the 2GB of RAM (cf the Auspex's 16MB) plus the journalling will help offset the lack of raw disk bandwidth in many scenarios.
Now if in 1994 you had, say, 20-odd ELCs and IPXen plus a couple 10/514 compute-servers driven off an Auspex you'd think you were pretty hot stuff, and plenty of top-quality software got written on less. 20 SSD Netbooks running OpenSolaris (diskless, even!) and my £300 Atom home server (plus another the same for compute, let's say) would be more than the same capability --- and would have faster networking, better graphics, 1GB vs 16MB of RAM per user, etc --- and yet if you presented that as a student lab people would laugh at you. But the whole thing would probably only consume 20W per seat, total, and cost about $300 per seat, total.
But we don't think we have that choice. Perhaps a recession will hammer home the fact that in five years, with computers we now regard as little better than pocket calculators, Xerox PARC redefined modern computing. Meanwhile, with three orders of magnitude more computing power, little of the same import has emerged from a research lab this century. It's not about the computing power.
ian
I suggest to regulate market capitalization of companies (for e.g Microsoft) so that more opportunities are created for start-ups.
"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."-- Reagon
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
One of the folks at the LUG I went to tonight had one of these with him:
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/embedded/artigo/
It does have one small fan, but it's pretty close. He had a standard laptop HDD in it, but you could easily substitute solid state. The whole thing is the size of a 5.25" optical drive. And how much power does it use? Well, when I looked at it (he brought a Kill-A-Watt with him) it was using 11 watts running a *buntu. He said that it topped out at 13 watts.
Awesome.
It is, of course, "weighs" - not "ways". It was late last night, sorry.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I know we're talking about business desktops here, but since the summary is challenging Moore's Law I want to make a point about thirst for CPU grunt.
I believe mainstream video content will drive demand for faster processors - especially with consumers - over the next few years, with codec complexity looking set to keep pace with chip development. Streamed, purchased and pirated SD has proven that watching video content on the computer is something Joe Public wants to do. Now HD is gaining momentum and marking CPUs obsolete; Joe's computer won't play His.Favourite.Show.720p.x264.OMG-WTF.mkv. Joe might even rip DVDs to play on his PMP/phone/netbook - or he would if it didn't take so long.
Oh, and if you think your pre-2007 computer has still got it, try playing some 1080p movie trailers.
Gordon Moore himself has admitted that his Law was idle speculation projecting an observed general trend, that he's used it to describe various things at various times, and that application to any concrete metric is going to fail. This is not to discount his vision - betting on his company's ability do drive progress at this geometric rate has long been a winning proposition.
And so if you work for his company you had better be looking for ways to fulfill his prophecy. They stay in business by grinding out innovation after invention like clockwork. Tick-tock goes the Intel clock and woe be on their competitors.
Help stamp out iliturcy.