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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?"
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.
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.
There are theoretical limitations to how small things can get, and how much work can be done per unit of space, but we're nowhere near that yet.
The author claims that semiconductor density improvements have been slowing over the past few years, but that's not true at all. One need only look at past schedule of Intel's die shrinks, or their transistor counts, to realize that we're still going ahead at full steam. The pace of reductions has held pretty much constant to Moore's law for at least the past decade, and Intel's roadmaps seem to show that continuing for at least another two die shrinks (which will each double density).
It's kind of amazing, when you think of it. Comparing the best of 2002 to 2012, you get from 90nm to 22nm. In just one decade, that is a 16.7x increase in density, and that doesn't even take architectural improvements into account.