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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bad news for computer-makers, since users will be less inclined to upgrade — only proving that Moore's law has not been repealed, but that more people are taking the dividend it provides in cash, rather than processor cycles."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
More: 27752 bytes
Wow, that's right!
Summation 2
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.
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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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.
We reached the point of "fast enough" years ago. Computers were so fast we needed a semi-useful way to waste cpu cycles. And so the GUI was born.
It's Moore's other law - once fast enough is achieved, you have to slow it down with shite like rounded 3d-effect buttons, smooth rolling semi-transparent fade-in-and-out menus and ray-traced 25 squillion polygon chat avatars.
Actually, that's Cole's Law, which states that an unused plate space must be occupied with cheap filler that no one really wants.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
Its usually expressed as Gate's Corollary to Moore's Law: Whatever Moore Giveth, Gates Taketh Away.
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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.
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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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