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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."
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.
Its more of a prediction, that has mostly been on target cause of its challenging nature
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 !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
We might even stop writing everything in Javascript?
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Moore's yawn ... er, law. It has ended, again again. It must be the co-joined twin of Voyager which has left the solar system 78 times in the past 14 years.
Wake me up when some real news gets in.
just need to shoot more advanced alien spaceships down near roswell
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.
I see many emerging technologies that promise further great progress in computing. Here are some of them. I wish some industry people here could post some updates about their way to the market. They may not literally prolong the Moore's Law in regards to the number of transistors, but they promise great performance gains, which is what really matters.
3D chips. As materials science and manufacturing precision advances, we will soon have multi-layered (starting at a few layers that Samsung already has, but up to 1000s) or even fully 3D chips with efficient heat dissipation. This would put the components closer together and streamline the close-range interconnects. Also, this increases "computation per rack unit volume", simplifying some space-related aspects of scaling.
Memristors. HP is ready to produce the first memristor chips but delays that for business reasons (how sad is that!) Others are also preparing products. Memristor technology enables a new approach to computing, combining memory and computation in one place. They are also quite fast (competitive with the current RAM) and energy-efficient, which means easier cooling and possible 3D layout.
Photonics. Optical buses are finding their ways into computers, and network hardware manufacturers are looking for ways to perform some basic switching directly with light. Some day these two trends may converge to produce an optical computer chip that would be free from the limitations of electric resistance/heat, EM interference, and could thus operate at a higher clock speed. Would be more energy efficient, too.
Spintronics. Probably further in the future, but potentially very high-density and low-power technology actively developed by IBM, Hynix and a bunch of others. This one would push our computation density and power efficiency limits to another level, as it allows performing some computation using magnetic fields, without electrons actually moving in electrical current (excuse me for my layman understanding).
Quantum computing. This could qualitatively speed up whole classes of tasks, potentially bringing AI and simulation applications to new levels of performance. The only commercial offer so far is Dwave, and it's not a classical QC, but so many labs are working on that, the results are bound to come soon.
You may see them, but no actual expert in the field does.
- 3D chips are decades old and have never materialized. They do not really solve the interconnect problem either and come with a host of other unsolved problems.
- Memristors do not enable any new approach to computing, as there are neither many problems that would benefit form this approach, nor tools. The whole idea is nonsense at this time. Maybe they will have some future as storage, but not anytime soon.
- Photonics is a dead-end. Copper is far too good and far too cheap in comparison.
- Spintronics is old and has no real potential for ever working at this time.
- Quantum computing is basically a scam perpetrated by some part of the academic community to get funding. It is not even clear whether it is possible for any meaningful size of problem.
So, no. There really is nothing here.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Then a GPU will typically beat an FPGA solution. There's a pretty large problem space for which GPUs suck. If you have memory access that is predictable but doesn't fit the stride models that a GPU is designed for then an FPGA with a well-designed memory interface and a tenth of the arithmetic performance of the GPU will easily run faster. If you have something where you have a long sequence of operations that map well to a dataflow processor, then an FPGA-based implementation can also be faster, especially if you have a lot of branching.
Neither is a panacea, but saying a GPU is always faster and cheaper than an FPGA makes as much sense as saying that a GPU is always faster and cheaper than a general-purpose CPU.
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