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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bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade — only proving that Moore's law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles."
Less: 120884 bytes
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Wow, that's right!
Summation 2
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Um, no it wasn't. "Moore's law" is a term that was coined after Thomas Moore gave a presentation showing that the company was managing to double transistor density each month. This observation created an interesting problem for the company. What should they do with all those extra transistors?
One option was that they could keep getting higher yields on existing chips, eventually driving the cost per unit to mere fractions of a penny. The other option was that Intel could do something useful with all that extra circuitry and maintain higher prices.
Considering that contemporary CPUs of the time were barely more powerful than the interrupt controller sitting next to them, using that silicon for sophisticated 32bit processors with on-die floating point units and SIMD instructions seemed like a no-brainer for the company. Thus as each successive generation of technology has made CPUs smaller, Intel has used the extra space to add more features and more optimizations.
At this point, things are getting a bit ridiculous. CPU manufacturers have so much extra space on which to work that they can fit 2-4 CPU cores on a single die and STILL produce a smaller chip than the last generation.
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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.
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.
And now I'm going to do something shocking and unprecedented. I'm going to look-up the actual quote, instead of guessing what Moore's "Law" means.
"April 1965:
"The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ..." Notice he claimed *complexity* not power doubled, and that it happened EVERY year. His original statement has not held true.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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 just admitted to RTFA. This is /. Nobody RTFA here.
Turn in your /. ID at the door. Thank you.
Warning: Corny karma killing post above.
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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If you only installed Office 2008 for the new file formats, you can wipe it and go back to whatever ancient version you were using, as there are updates available which add support for the new xml based format. Obviously the old binary format must be so much that I'm not sure what my point was any more.
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.
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.
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This new phenomenon of people praising Windows ME on Slashdot is really beginning to worry me.
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The Open Office XML format (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, etc)
That's the "Office Open XML format". MS was trying to create confusion with OpenOffice.org's format, OpenDocument Format, when they named it but they weren't quite blatant enough about it to call it "Open Office XML".
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.
I wonder how well F/LOSS suites handle MSOOXML at this point. They seem to handle the old proprietary formats just fine, and given the nature of the freely-available MSOOXML spec, it's not unlikely that they haven't implemented all of it yet.
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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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> [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.
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ooo 3 reads them perfectly as far as ive seen.
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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.
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.
Actually, it's called Moore's law because he plotted it in his 1965 paper while at Fairchild semiconductor.
specifically:
"The complexity for minimum component costs has in
creased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year (see graph on next page). Certainly over the short term this rate
can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the
longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly
constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost
will be 65,000.
I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single
wafer."
"CPU manufacturers have so much extra space on which to work that they can fit 2-4 CPU cores on a single die and STILL produce a smaller chip than the last generation."
Either you put that poorly, or you have no idea how a fab works.
There is no extra space.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
My own opinion is that it sets the limit for where they can stop and relax their efforts, internally.
They can never stop and relax. They're chasing an exponential growth curve.
Given the amount of secrecy in this industry, I'm not certain how you can back this statement up with any fact. My own assumption is that 'they' have developed technology far more capable than what they currently claim to be working on at any given time. I personally believe that what they claim is on the drawing board is actually in prototype, what they claim to be in dev is actually ready for production, and their 'latest and greatest' is already old tech.
I've worked at several processor companies with top-of-the-line fab tech, including Mr. Moore's. While my NDAs probably mean I can't tell you anything specific with regard to scheduling, I can tell you without fear of revealing any secrets that you're way off base. They are not sand-bagging with more advanced tech waiting in the wings.
The only sense in which you are correct is that the 'latest and greatest' thing you can buy is old tech relative to things then under development. That's because there's typically a year give or take (usually give) between receiving the first silicon from the fab in the transistor node the product was designed for and all the validation, bug fixes, and spins on the product before it's ready to be sold. That means the fab tech has to be done and mostly stable by the time you start this process, so go roughly six months back before that where they're making test chips in the new fab to make sure it's working. And development of that fab tech before it's ready to run its first test chip wafer is two or more years before that, with R&D going on for years before that.
So yeah, when you could buy a 65nm CPU in the store, there may have been a 45nm CPU or just a test chip coming out of a fab somewhere, and a 32nm lithography machine being developed somewhere else, and a lab somewhere working out how 22nm lithography would work. But that's not 'sandbagging' because all of those things were years of serious non-stop development away from becoming products! Keeping on the exponential growth curve means that there has to be a constant pipeline of developments, and this pipeline is quite long.
And believe me, if they could increase the rate at which those future techs become available for making product, they would. "Sandbagging" means wasting competitive advantage, and wasting money. The machinery in the fabs for each node cost billions of dollars, and they depreciate rapidly. If they had some new tech working flawlessly, but weren't using it in products and just waiting in the wings, they'd be flushing hundreds of millions down the toilet. Time to market is one of the most important things they look at.
Honestly, if you look at actual press releases and actual product launches, it's much more likely that what they claim is a prototype is really on the drawing board, and what they claim to be ready for production is really still in development -- see the AMD Barcelona for the most recent example. You think they had the Phenom II just waiting in the wings while they got beat up in the press and the market over the launch of Phenom?
Now this isn't to say that they wouldn't sandbag if it were possible, and to some minor extent they have. When K7 had a big leg up over P3 in frequency headroom, or Core 2 vs aging K8s, sure they held back a little to get more margin on a cheaper part. But we're talking a speed grade delayed by a month or two. Barely noticeable noise on the curve. Actually tracking that curve requires non-stop expenditures and execution of R&D, and any significant slip-up could send a company flat on its face. To slow development on purpose? Ridiculous.
In my mind, this is the only way to sustain this curve - by limiting the release of new technology onto the market until Moore's says that it is time for it.
Think about it in terms of l
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.