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Opportunities From the Twilight of Moore's Law
saccade.com writes "Andrew 'bunnie' Huang just posted an excellent essay, Why the Best Days of Open Hardware are Yet to Come. He shows how the gradually slowing pace of semiconductor density actually may create many new opportunities for smaller scale innovators and entrepreneurs. It's based on a talk presented at the 2011 Open Hardware Summit. Are we entering an age of heirloom laptops and artisan engineering?"
when the IBM clones started to hit market all those makers vanished.
But that took years. For quite some time the ST, Amiga and the like were considered to be the home computers to own while PCs were primarily for business use; only when Windows 3.0 came along did the PC really take off for home users because it then offered most of the capabilities of those other computers at a lower price.
and i seriously dont think that moores law will end soon. Bumps in both directions, extending over some time are nothing unusual. New technologies will rise and Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor processes wont be dominating forever.
I believe you are talking about Datamancer's steampunk laptop. http://www.datamancer.net/steampunklaptop/steampunklaptop.htm
The number of people predicting the end of Moore's Law doubles every two years.
A 3GHz i7 is a _lot_ faster than a 3GHz P4. Have you tried actually comparing them?
Heck, a 2GHz Core 2 Duo core was about comparable in raw speed to a 3.6GHz P4 core last I measured. And an i7 is a lot faster than a Core 2 Duo.
More to the point, Moore's law is about transistor count, not clock speed. Transistor count continues to increase just fine; scaling clock speed just got hard because of power issues and such.
By the time Moore's law slows down, we'll also have systems on a chip. Replaceable parts? We've moved the other way from the days you could solder chips and until today. Extension cards are almost gone, more and more of the north/south bridge and motherboard chips is moving into the CPU, now even the graphics card is moving into the CPU for many.
His argument sounds to me to use the same logic as arguing that once computers don't get faster, we'll have to make applications faster so we'll see a return of assembler language and hand optimization. Somehow, I don't think that's very likely. I'd make a fair bet that custom hardware is even more of a niche in 20-30 years than it is now.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Firstly it's high unlikely that Moore's law will be retiring any time soon. All we are seeing is a slow down in the advancement of shrinking the manufacturing process. That doesn't say anything about performance improvements by other means. We are continually seeing advancement in performance per watt which is enabling CPUs to spread their dies not only "out" but even now we're seeing the prospect of "up" with promising research in layering techniques. Beyond that there are carbon rather than silicon based materials coming online that promise to further improve upon the performance per watt angle. We're even starting to see glimmers of hope in the quantum computing arena which would be game changing.
With respect to small companies being able to enter the market and compete with the "big guys" I would seriously doubt it. The first and obvious reason being the cost factor being a barrier to entry. The equipment isn't cheap and contending in the patent arena is worse. The most you'll ever see here is university level research being sold off to the big guys.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I'm sure some things actually are faster, but in terms of what's available to consumers, it hasn't seemed to get all that much faster the last few years..
Heres a reality check for you.
Im speccing out a machine for a pfSense firewall; Ive settled on a low power, 20 watt Xeon E3 1220L. At about 1/5th the power consumption of a Pentium 4 2.8ghz (and at about 75% the clockrate), it can handle about 13.5gbits of AES encryption, compared to the Pentium's 500mbps.
So we're talking a 36-fold improvement in processor performance in the area of encryption, along with a 5-fold reduction in power requirements; not to mention the improved memory bandwidth and whatnot.
Processors continue to improve at a rapid pace; Intel is supposed to be releasing Ivy Bridge soon, which should have another ~15% performance increase, and they just released Sandy Bridge which mostly eliminates the need for a dedicated GPU on laptops and about 80% of users.
So when people bemoan the rate of computer improvement, despite the MASSIVE leaps in performance, reductions in power usage, and price drops (a core i3 @ $100? A phenom x3 @ $60? Yes please), it boggles my mind. 5 years ago a "modern", decent gaming rig could be had for about $800. Prior to that, getting a fabled 2GB of ram was like $200 on its own. These days, you can have a decent gaming rig for about $500, with none of your parts costing substantially more than $60. For goodness sake, RAM is down to about $6 per GB.
Heck, I just priced out and ordered 2 laptops for 2 different clients-- they come with i3s, 4GB of RAM, a 4hr battery life, and very high build quality, all for under $500. Where the heck could you have gotten a laptop anywhere close to that value 3 years ago? A celeron? A crappy AMD mobile?
Seriously, come back to reality please.
The new i5s and i7s are about 7 times faster at AES encryption with the new instruction set, than an equivalent processor without it. So try scaling that up to 21ghz, if you want to compete with an i5 2600k. Which do you suppose is easier, adding that instruction set or dealing with the TDP of a 21ghz cpu?
For the.millionth time, Moore's law is not about processor speed. And no a 3 year old cpu is not the samesame as today. Take for example the sandy bridge intel cpus. They blow away the older core2quads in performance and at lower clock speeds.
Moore's law has applied, and will apply - at least by inference - to all past and future computing paradigms.
The exponential growth trends of price/performance started long before CMOS processes were developed. While Moore's law specifically refers to integrated circuits, the facts remain: exponential growth trends were present in relay-based machines, vacuum tube based machines, transistor based machines (pre-IC), and integrated circuits.
In fact, the exponential growth trends are actually accelerating at an accelerating pace, as we are just now approaching the "knee" in the exponential curve.
The simple truth is today's ICs are manufactured at the nano scale ( 100nm), and will continue to shrink for several more generations of chips.
Before transistor size even begins to approach theoretical limits, new paradigms will emerge to replace current metal-oxide-semiconductor technologies.
We can already see this today. As we approach the limit to two dimensional ICs, we see the new emerging trend of three-dimensional circuits. We see the rumblings in research circles of optical systems at nano-scales. We're just now beginning to scratch the surface of quantum computing.
While Moore didn't invent the exponential, the trends he predicted more than four decades ago will be alive and well throughout the 21st century, even if by inference, as we transition away from CMOS to new, as-of-yet undiscovered paradigms.
To those seriously interested in this field, please consider reading Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near". You may not agree with everything the man has to say, but the man's data on this subject doesn't lie.