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Fifty Years of Moore's Law
HughPickens.com writes: IEEE is running a special report on "50 Years of Moore's Law" that considers "the gift that keeps on giving" from different points of view. Chris Mack begins by arguing that nothing about Moore's Law was inevitable. "Instead, it's a testament to hard work, human ingenuity, and the incentives of a free market. Moore's prediction may have started out as a fairly simple observation of a young industry. But over time it became an expectation and self-fulfilling prophecy—an ongoing act of creation by engineers and companies that saw the benefits of Moore's Law and did their best to keep it going, or else risk falling behind the competition."
Andrew "bunnie" Huang argues that Moore's Law is slowing and will someday stop, but the death of Moore's Law will spur innovation. "Someday in the foreseeable future, you will not be able to buy a better computer next year," writes Huang. "Under such a regime, you'll probably want to purchase things that are more nicely made to begin with. The idea of an "heirloom laptop" may sound preposterous today, but someday we may perceive our computers as cherished and useful looms to hand down to our children, much as some people today regard wristwatches or antique furniture."
Vaclav Smil writes about "Moore's Curse" and argues that there is a dark side to the revolution in electronics for it has had the unintended effect of raising expectations for technical progress. "We are assured that rapid progress will soon bring self-driving electric cars, hypersonic airplanes, individually tailored cancer cures, and instant three-dimensional printing of hearts and kidneys. We are even told it will pave the world's transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies," writes Smil. "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least the production of food and energy and the transportation of people and goods."
Finally, Cyrus Mody tackles the question: what kind of thing is Moore's Law? "Moore's Law is a human construct. As with legislation, though, most of us have little and only indirect say in its construction," writes Mody. "Everyone, both the producers and consumers of microelectronics, takes steps needed to maintain Moore's Law, yet everyone's experience is that they are subject to it."
Andrew "bunnie" Huang argues that Moore's Law is slowing and will someday stop, but the death of Moore's Law will spur innovation. "Someday in the foreseeable future, you will not be able to buy a better computer next year," writes Huang. "Under such a regime, you'll probably want to purchase things that are more nicely made to begin with. The idea of an "heirloom laptop" may sound preposterous today, but someday we may perceive our computers as cherished and useful looms to hand down to our children, much as some people today regard wristwatches or antique furniture."
Vaclav Smil writes about "Moore's Curse" and argues that there is a dark side to the revolution in electronics for it has had the unintended effect of raising expectations for technical progress. "We are assured that rapid progress will soon bring self-driving electric cars, hypersonic airplanes, individually tailored cancer cures, and instant three-dimensional printing of hearts and kidneys. We are even told it will pave the world's transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies," writes Smil. "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least the production of food and energy and the transportation of people and goods."
Finally, Cyrus Mody tackles the question: what kind of thing is Moore's Law? "Moore's Law is a human construct. As with legislation, though, most of us have little and only indirect say in its construction," writes Mody. "Everyone, both the producers and consumers of microelectronics, takes steps needed to maintain Moore's Law, yet everyone's experience is that they are subject to it."
I think we've been hearing about the end of Moore's law for the last 15 years... inevitably, some process improvement comes along and it all keeps on going.
I don't think that it's necessarily "inevitable". Take aviation, for example. There was arguably exponential increases in the capability of aircraft for 55 years from 1903 to 1958, when the Boeing 707 was introduced. Ever since, further progress on economically viable aircraft has been pretty much limited to incremental increases in fuel economy and marketing strategies to keep costs down by keeping planes full.
I don't think it's that your older. Home computing was very much in its infancy in the 80s, and only started growing up in the 90s. As with all things, it was a period of wild optimism, rapid change, rapid improvements and huge variety. Now it's settling down and becoming much more boring as all the low hanging fruit has gone and larger and more expensive operations are required to squeeze out the remaining performance.
The exact same thing happened in both the automobile and aeroplane industries as well, but I was born long after they entered the boring phase.
In the early 1900s, any yahoo with a bicycle garage, a couple of petrol engines a good supply of wood, some optimism and some giant brass ones could build and fly a primitive aircraft. And they did in huge quantities. There were all sorts of whacky things like rotary engines where the whole crank case rotates, wings that twisted, weird paterning and layouts of wings, on-wing gantries for in-flight servicing of broken down engines and so on and so forth.
Now it's about bumping 0.1% off the fuel burn by optimising for short-haul versus long haul flights and so on.
IOW, it's not "thing were better when we were kids", rather many industries have gone through these transitions and computing is no exception.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think this XKCD says it all.