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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."
I think the next couple of decades will be mostly about efficiency. Between mobile computing and the advantage of ever-more cores, the benefits from lower power consumption (and reduce heat load as a result) will be huge. And unlike element size, we're far from basic physical limits on efficiency.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As somebody that has watched what has been going on in that particular area for more than 2 decades, I do not expect anything to come out of it. FPGAs are suitable for doing very simples things reasonably fast, but so are graphics cards and with a much better interface. Bit as soon as communication between computing elements or large memory is required, both FPGAs and graphics cards become abysmally slow in comparison to modern CPUs. That is not going to change, as it is an effect of the architecture. There will not be any "massive" performance increase anywhere now.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
There was an article not too long ago (can't remember where) that mentioned that a lot of the performance improvement over the years came from better algorithms rather than faster chips (e.g. one can double the processor speed but that pales with changing an O(n**2) algorithm to O(n*log(n)) one).
SSD's based on flash aren't the ultimate answer. Ones that use either magneto-resistive memory or ferroelectric memory show more long term promise (e.g. mram can switch as fast as L2 cache--faster than DRAM but with the same cell size). With near unlimited memory at that speed, a number of multistep operations can be converted to a single table lookup. This is done a lot in a lot of custom logic where the logic is replaced with a fast SRAM/LUT.
Storage systems (e.g. NAS/SAN) can be parallelized but the limiting factor is still memory bus bandwidth [even with many parallel memory buses].
Multicore chips that use N-way mesh topologies might also help. Data is communicated via a data channel that doesn't need to dump to an intermediate shared buffer.
Or hybrid cells that have a CPU but also have programmable custom logic attached directly. That is, part of the algorithm gets compiled to RTL that can then be loaded into the custom logic just as fast as a task switch (e.g. on every OS reschedule). This is why realtime video encoders use FPGAs. They can encode video at 30-120 fps in real time, but a multicore software solution might be 100x slower.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there