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Moore's Law Blowout Sale Is Ending, Says Broadcom CTO
itwbennett writes "Broadcom Chairman and CTO Henry Samueli has some bad news for you: Moore's Law isn't making chips cheaper anymore because it now requires complicated manufacturing techniques that are so expensive they cancel out the cost savings. Instead of getting more speed, less power consumption and lower cost with each generation, chip makers now have to choose two out of three, Samueli said. He pointed to new techniques such as High-K Metal Gate and FinFET, which have been used in recent years to achieve new so-called process nodes. The most advanced process node on the market, defined by the size of the features on a chip, is due to reach 14 nanometers next year. At levels like that, chip makers need more than traditional manufacturing techniques to achieve the high density, Samueli said. The more dense chips get, the more expensive it will be to make them, he said."
When people say this, I think that the person is not being imaginative about the future. Sure, we can meet 99% of current computing needs, but what about uses that we have not yet imagined.
Image processing and AI are still pretty piss poor, and not all bound by network and bandwidth limits. Watch a Roomba crash into the wall as it randomly cleans your room, Dark Ages!
If that's true, we can only hope that the exponential bloating of software stops as well. Software has been eating the free lunch Moore was providing before it got to the users; the sad reality is that the typical end-user hasn't seen much in the way of performance improvements - in some cases, common tasks are even slower now than 10 years ago.
Oh sure, we defend it by claiming that the software is "good enough" (or will be on tomorrow's computers, anyway), and we justify the bloat by claiming that the software is better in so many other areas like maintainability (it's not), re-usability (it's not), adherence to "design patterns" (regardless of whether they help or hurt), or just "newer software technologies" (I'm looking at you, XAML&WPF), as if the old ones were rusting away.