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Whither Moore's Law; Introducing Koomey's Law
Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, Beorytis writes "MIT Technology review reports on a recent paper by Stanford professor Dr. Jon Koomey, which claims to show that the energy efficiency of computing doubles every 1.5 years. Note that efficiency is considered in terms of a fixed computing load, a point soon to be lost on the mainstream press. Also interesting is a graph in a related blog post that really highlights the meaning of the 'fixed computing load' assumption by plotting computations per kWh vs. time. An early hobbyist computer, the Altair 8800 sits right near the Cray-1 supercomputer of the same era."
My favorite example of computing (in)efficiency is the USAF's SAGE bomber tracking computers introduced in the 1950s. These vacuum tube machines had CPU horsepower probably in the same ballpark as an 80286, but could draw more than 2 megawatts of power each. They didn't decommission the last one until the 1980s.
Is there a limit to how efficient calculation can get? Is there some minimum amount of energy required to do one computation? How do you measure "computations" anway, and what units would you use? Bits? Inverse bits?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I read the first paragraph of TFA, and what do I see? An incorrect statement of Moore's Law. The correct Moore's Law is transistor count doubles every 18 months, not this vague and misleading idea of computing "power". I understand where the "computing power" version came from and it's usefulness for people without a technical background, but this article is for technically minded people and should have the correct definition.
The private sector seems to be doing pretty well at getting in debt and causing unemployment as well. Just look at BofA, Cisco, etc.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Does this take into account the miniaturization of electronics and the associated increase in battery size? We're seeing this in many mobile platforms. I'm curious if this is taken into account when they consider 'battery life' while possibly ignoring that batteries themselves may be more efficient or simply larger due to more space in the enclosure.
Yeah, because exponential growth is ALWAYS a good sustainable strategy. Especially exponential growth in something like efficiency, which is capped by the very laws of physics.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
The Cray-1 was ECL. The Altair 8800 was TTL. We're now CMOS, but I wouldn't mind an ECL i7, despite the fluorinert waterfall... (My real point is that there were very serious differences between the Altair 8800 and the Cray-1 despite the obvious which lend to significant differences in power dissipation...and speed.)
Additionally, the other thing this article doesn't take into account is the preponderance of battery-powered modern devices -- before, power consumption wasn't really much of any consideration (plus, now it's marketing!)
I do not think that you get net energy savings (by using the same basic technology, e.g., CMOS at room temeprature or "cold"), if you take into account the fact that cooling things down also costs energy! For example, liquid helium refrigeration costs about 1 kW of wall outlet power to compensate for 1 W dissipated at 4.2 K.
Changing your basic technology to, e.g., some version of superconductor-based logic can help (a lot!), current state of the art (in my very biased opinion, since I am cheering for those guys, and have been involved in related research for years) is here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/superconductor-logic-goes-lowpower ...
Paul B.
Where is the human brain on that chart?
dictionary.com says:
adverb:
1. to what place? where?
2. to what end, point, action, or the like? to what?
conjunction:
3. to which place.
4.to whatever place.
To what place Moore's law? Where Moore's law? To which place Moore's law? To whatever place Moore's law?
No, none of those make sense. WTF? Is this Use an unusual word day?
Whither thou goest, so goest I.
Maybe because not all nerds are over 45.
Ray Kurzweil already showed us this, in 2005. 'The Singularity is Near', pg 129.
His reference was Gene Frantz's article, “Digital Signal Processing Trends,” from IEEE Micro 20.6 (November/December 2000)
Bank of America is "private sector"? Not with all the subsidies, mandates, protections, regulations, moral hazards and government insurance. Cisco? It was always overpriced and it ate well with government contracts.
Nonsense. What kind of fixed load did they define? How does this fixed load utilize available system resources? I could define a code payload targeted at technologies present in early 90s Pentium CPUs, and then run this code on a modern machine for a much greater overall gap in efficiency. Producing any target number I want, thus correlating or wildly disproving this law. This hardly qualifies as a constant, let alone a "law." There are just to many factors involved to make any kind of statement like this. Moore's law isn't wrong...it just didn't take into account all the variables. Neither does Koomey's.
Altair? Wasn't he a character in Assassin's Creed?
Oh, so those examples are invalid because they're involved with the government, whereas Intel is a valid example despite government contracts?
You are an example of confirmation bias in action.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I hope submitter realizes that is a logarithmic scale and that by my best guesstimate graph reading the Cray was about 5 times more efficient than the Altair,
They may indeed "sit next to each other" but that doesn't in this case imply comparable efficiency.
Did Intel get free money to gamble with while getting regulated to sell mortgages without paying attention to risk as banks did? Did Intel get a bail out?
Private companies CAN go into debt and fail. There IS a difference between those who make stupid or just wrong decisions and fail and lose investor money and those who do stupid things because of government regulations, moral hazards, free money and protection and when they fail they get bail outs.
It is OK for a company to fail. It's not OK for it to get bail outs.
Private companies DO create wealth, as shown by this story and all other stories. Government do NOT create wealth, they create debt and economic destruction.
How does any of this apply to Cisco?
Then how did the USSR have a GDP > 0?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Consider the logistic equation : dQ(t)/dt=(Q(t))*(1-Q(t)).
What it models is the rate a resource can be extracted is proportional to how much of the resource you have consumed times how much you have left. As the amount you consume grows higher, your capacity to extricate the remaining resource grows, but only to a point - beyond that, there is an ever dwindling resource left.
It looks exponential at first, then surprise, it bends over and decays.
This equation has been found to model many phenomena in nature which are depletional in nature, such as oil well production, or growth of yeast in a petri dish.
I would be very wary of predicting future growth in a finite system based on the ascending part of what is likely a logistic (sigmoid) curve...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The government is the one who paid (and is paying) for most of the basic research that allows the increase in efficiency and density - and the government is also one of, if not the, biggest customer of the final products.
That is true for far more than just the computer industry, too.
=Smidge=
It's the inverse of Moore's law so yeah, duh....
If your compute power doubles in the same size die every 1.5 years, then if you halve the die size keeping the compute power the same you actually cut the power in half. This is a very well known phenomenon and Koomey is doing what he has been for a while, making headlines with little substance and lots of flair.
That Microsoft and Intel paid for this research calls into question what it was they were actually paying for.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
The Altair 880 is nowhere near the Cray 1. True, they're separated by something less than an order of magnitude (perhaps a factor of 5 or so) but the Altair isn't exactly near the Cray. It'd be fair to say, however, that the Altair is about the same as the PDP-11/20. Learn to read the graph.
This is totally not surprising to me. both the sage and the colossus were designed to do something really specific. The 286 is designed to be much more general purpose. Therefore it is of no surprise that SAGE and the Colossus can do their jobs faster, but give them any other task and the 286 would win hands down.
Isn't this a trivial consequence of Moore's law, if we interpret the latter to mean exponential growth of (computations/time), and additionally make the very reasonable assumption that users' tolerance for power consumption (energy/time) is more or less constant?
What about the energy used creating efficiency?
Are we experiencing an increase in efficiency?
OR
Are we expending every increasing amounts of energy creating the appearance of efficiency?
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
What about Intel Atom, Nvidia Tesla, Transmeta , ARM, MIPS, TI MSP430, PicoChip, XMOS, Ubicom32, Hyperstone, ...?
The recent ones listed there are pretty boring.
I've not read the article (in true Slashdot fashion), but I'm taking issue with the statement "An early hobbyist computer, the Altair 8800 sits right near the Cray-1 supercomputer of the same era" from the stub. Really? Is that meant to be insightful? They're from the same era, so the same research has been done to get both to the same point. The Cray has many more CPUs of the same generation as the Altair, so uses a lot more power. Am I supposed to be surprised by this?
Either way, I don't really see an application for this "law" other than as benchmarking progress. Neat trend to notice, but not exactly useful.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
USSR's GDP was impossible to calculate it was using slave labor, which is what you do when you pay with fake money.
USA today is not different - currency is printed, not generated via investment and savings by deferring consumption. Anything that Fed buys in fiat they print is stolen, because the federal reserve not is not backed by anything, so the 'note', as an IOU, a promise to give something real for the dollars is an empty promise. They'll give you nothing for it, which means that it's counterfeit and anything bought for that currency printed by the Fed is stolen - be it assets or labor.
By the way, Schiff just testified in front of Congressional Jobs Committee.
video (his participation starts at minute 31 and goes on till the end). Here are cuts to his stuff only
and here is his presentation given to the committee as pdf (but the video is very interesting in itself, it goes much beyond his text presentation). My journal entry on it from some time ago
This is the guy who understood the crisis and explained it much before it struck and understands the next one.
Are they saying because Moore's law is a slightly bit off and that someone has proved that it is a .5 year off, that we rename the law to this new scientists name?
If I proved something different with the theory of relativity, does that mean that Einstein is any less the creator of that theory?
I would hope not....
55,000 tubes vs. 134,000 transistors
Had 256 KB + 16 KB RAM vs. the 512-640 KB common in the 286
75,000 instructions per second vs. 1.2 million (@6 MHz)
SAGE used 52 of them, half online at a time, geographically dispersed, all working on tracking aircraft. But they did communicate with each other, so you might consider this a 1,950,000 instructions per second cluster, beating the first 286s that came out around the time SAGE was stood down.
Cosmonaut? Methinks you are not really a friend.
I think you might want to loosen it, that tinfoil hat seems to be cutting off the circulation to your brain.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
With computers it is pretty much like with cars. Better enegry-efficiency is possible, but the consumers want more performance rather than higher efficiency. So they are fed with what they want, regardless of the climate-catastrophy taking place on our planet already.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/media/FiveInterwovenEconomies.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.