End of Moore's Law Forcing Radical Innovation

dcblogs writes "The technology industry has been coasting along on steady, predictable performance gains, as laid out by Moore's law. But stability and predictability are also the ingredients of complacency and inertia. At this stage, Moore's Law may be more analogous to golden handcuffs than to innovation. With its end in sight, systems makers and governments are being challenged to come up with new materials and architectures. The European Commission has written of a need for 'radical innovation in many computing technologies.' The U.S. National Science Foundation, in a recent budget request, said technologies such as carbon nanotube digital circuits will likely be needed, or perhaps molecular-based approaches, including biologically inspired systems. The slowdown in Moore's Law has already hit high-performance computing. Marc Snir, director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory, outlined in a series of slides the problem of going below 7nm on chips, and the lack of alternative technologies."

Comments

Rock Star coders!

[Anonymous Coward]

The party's over. Get to work on efficient code. As for the rest of all you mothafucking coding wannabes, suck it! Swallow it. Like it! Whatever, just go away.

Moore's Law isnt a law you know

[Osgeld]

Its more of a prediction, that has mostly been on target cause of its challenging nature

Ends of Moore's Law in software ?

[Taco Cowboy]

The really sad thing regarding this "Moore's Law" thing is that, while the hardware had kept on getting faster and even more power efficient, the software that runs on them kept on becoming more and more bloated.

Back in the days of pre-8088 we already had music notation softwares running on Radio Shack TRS-80 model III.

Back then, due to the constraints of the hardware, programmers had to use every trick on the book (and off) to make their programs run.

Nowadays, even the most basic "Hello World" program comes up in megabyte range.

Sigh !