Slashdot Mirror
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."
That guy is going to be pissed when we don't get cold supercomputers with billions of times more power than the brain using reversible computing.
Uh....
Well...
cough-cough
You see...
Aww screw it.
Could there have been worse examples of "LOL those crazy promises!"?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Incidentally Moore's law died sometime last year technically, as Intel failed to ship its new node within "18-24 months" of its last one, meaning the density of transistors did not, for anyone, double within the time limits specified by Moore's Law. With the other foundries (TSMC/GloFlo/Samsung) still ramping up the same feature density size with finfet transistors that Intel had 3 years ago, and 10nm bringing even more difficulties than Intel's "14nm" it's a question how much longer feature size can continue to shrink at all, let alone somehow coming within the Moore's Law cadence of ever 18-24 months.
“It’s your father’s Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This is the weapon of a computer hacker. Not as clumsy or as random as an iphone, but a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For years, the hackers were the guardians of peace and justice in the internet. Before the dark times, before the NSA.”
Andrew "bunnie" Huang argues that Moore's Law is slowing and will someday stop
Moore's Meta-Law:
The number of people predicting the end of Moore's Law doubles every eighteen months!
I remember watching Star Trek (TOS) and thinking how fantastic it would be to have all that storage in that little cartridge the size of a matchbook; books, movies, medical records, the Encyclopedia Galactica, all on one little memory device. I never expected it happen in my lifetime.
Then in 1985 once the initial glow of the original Macintosh had worn off a little, my brother and I brainstormed on what our _ultimate_ computer would be: 1024x768 TrueColor display, a whole _8_ megabytes of memory, and a 50 Mhz 68000 series CPU. Wheee!
Now we have 128 GB microSD cards smaller than your fingernail. And that super-computer in your pocket that happens to make phone calls? It's more powerful than a 4 processor Cray YMP M90 circa 1992.
We've come a long way!
--aj;
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.
The pace of technological advance has been accelerating for some time, and "Moore's law" was not the driving force by any means, because the phenomenon started long before the invention of the transistor or integrated circuit.
Let's compare 0 AD and 1000AD. Sure, there are some advances and changes, but by and large not too different. Jumping from one time to the next, technology is going to be the least of your concerns as far as difference.
Now let's go from 1000AD to 1500AD. Changes are a little more apparent, from gunpowder to better ships, but still not that much farther forward.
1500 to 1750AD - Still pretty similar, but things are visibly more advanced.
1750 to 1850AD - Railroads, early industrialization. Noticeably more advanced.
1850AD to 1900AD... and the further ahead we go, the more changes and advances we see in a shorter and shorter time period. At the moment, things are changing so rapidly that the difference between today and 25 years ago looks more like the difference between 1500AD and 1750AD, if not moreso.
Part of the reason that people kept heirlooms for generations and generations is not only that they were built to last, but they were expected to have designs that lasted, because things didn't change in design or function for hundreds of years at a time.
Moore's law is sort of a mangled version of Koomey's law. Koomey's law states that the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling every 1.6 years. It appears to have been operative since the late 1940s: longer than Moore's law. Moreover, Koomey's law has the appeal of being defined in terms of basic physics, rather than technological artefacts. Hence, I prefer Koomey's law, even though Moore's law is far more famous.
There is another interesting aspect to Koomey's law: it hints at an answer to the question "for how long can this continue?" The hinted answer is "until 2050", because by 2050 computations will require so little energy that they will face a fundamental thermodynamic constraint—Landauer's principle. The only way to avoid that constraint is with reversible computing.
Regarding Andrew âoebunnieâ Huang ridiculous article....
As commercial success and product differentiation starts to depend less on quickly leveraging the latest hardware and moreso on algorithmic improvements, companies will not magically become more inclined to publish source code. When the path to improved performance involves massive man-hours optimizing code, small teams & startups will not somehow gain an advantage.
Click baiting "open source" and an interactive graph might bring a lot of page views, but the entire premise is truly absurd.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
âoeItâ(TM)s your fatherâ(TM)s Sinclair ZX Spectrum. This is the weapon of a computer hacker. Not as clumsy or as random as an iphone, but a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
Um, yeah. I had one of those, and elegant is not a word that was used to describe them, even when new. Being that I was alive back then, I can also assure you that it was not a more civilized age either. Crime and pollution were much worse than now. Racial prejudices were starting to die off, and sexual orientation prejudices were very prevalent.
For years, the hackers were the guardians of peace and justice in the internet. Before the dark times, before the NSA.â
I'll give you that. Hackers were pretty damn benevolent. Most cracking was meant to be more for humor or to see if you could do it, than anything harmful. But the internet was a much different place. You wouldn't recognize it. Nor could most of us afford to be on it more than 10 hours a month, connecting with our 300 baud modems. The NSA were also the "good guys" back then. They were "No Such Agency" and hadn't turned on the population they were tasked to protect.
And yes, I saw that movie you are referring to when it was in the theaters for the first time. That was when it was called "Star Wars". No Episode anything.
At some point it will cease to make sense to update your computer on a regular basis. I have a 10 year old one that is fine for internet browsing and word processing. I have a friend who still uses Windows 2000 on hers - though her household does have another one. As computers get to be point of being good enough for all but the latest, most processor intense, activities, then the concept of keeping an heirloom one - especially ones designed to be upgradeable - will probably make more and more sense.
The last major, world changing thing, was the internet - some 25 years ago. Since then we've just seen it get better and better - but no real breakthroughs
Um, 25 years ago was... 1990. In that time we've gone from computers being a comparitive rarity (many people didn't even have a home PC) to nearly 80% of the population carrying round a computer in their pocket. No one had cellphones in 1990 to a first approximation. Now almost everyone does.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
One Moore's law will be a thing of the past, developers will have to take care of software performances, instead of requiring latest hardware to run badly optimized code.