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David Patterson Says It's Time for New Computer Architectures and Software Languages (ieee.org)
Tekla S. Perry, writing for IEEE Spectrum: David Patterson -- University of California professor, Google engineer, and RISC pioneer -- says there's no better time than now to be a computer architect. That's because Moore's Law really is over, he says : "We are now a factor of 15 behind where we should be if Moore's Law were still operative. We are in the post -- Moore's Law era." This means, Patterson told engineers attending the 2018 @Scale Conference held in San Jose last week, that "we're at the end of the performance scaling that we are used to. When performance doubled every 18 months, people would throw out their desktop computers that were working fine because a friend's new computer was so much faster." But last year, he said, "single program performance only grew 3 percent, so it's doubling every 20 years. If you are just sitting there waiting for chips to get faster, you are going to have to wait a long time."
We've only had three new ones come out this week. We need M0AR! M0AR languages!! M0AR syntaxes!!
M0AR of all the things!
In fact, it should be a requirement for all CS majors to develop their own language before graduations, so everyone can be *THE* subject matter expert in a language. That would be awesome. Everyone would be able to charge $500/hr for being the ONLY expert in their language.
What could be wrong with this??
I am pretty sure David Patterson is out there doing it. He is a professor in the field who has accomplished plenty. He is 70 now and is likely past his academic prime, so now he is doing what he should be doing at this time in his career: teaching, mentoring, and inspiring the next generation.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Moore's law predicted early exponential growth in semi-conductors, but as in all fields it eventually hits an inflection point and becomes asymptotic, infinite transistor density will never happen.
Because Moore's law is more about transistor density. It's an easy nit to pick.
It's still a big deal that we aren't getting any easy gains on single core speed, or, factoring in all their new fancy branch predictions, single thread performance. But newer CPUs are fitting more cores in, newer GPUs are wildly more effective (at a fundamentally parallel task). These are the arguments for Moore's law actually being still online.
Anyone who was around for the late 90s or before knows that computers simply aren't doing what they did before- completely obliterating previous generations of computing. A machine from 2008 can run most current games, and those it can't inherit their restrictions artificially (a motherboard that won't take a new enough GPU, for instance). It can certainly run the latest version of pretty much any OS, and many productivity programs. If you do that comparison from 1999 to 1989, it's a joke- a Pentium III at nearly a gigahertz compared to a 486 at like 50 or 66 megahertz. Look back again at 1979, and you are comparing to an 8086 or something.
People confuse Moore's law with performance. Moore observed that the total number of transistors on a chip was doubling every 18 months. For a long time, that meant that the clock frequency was also doubling.
Then, a nasty habit of physics to smack us in the phase --- err, face --- came along in the form of speed of light limitations. Given the size of contemporary chips, it just is not (and is unlikely to ever be, if what we know about fundamental physics is correct) possible to communicate from one side of a 1 cm die to the other much faster than in the range of a handful of gigahertz clock speeds, give-or-take. Even with photons going in straight lines in perfect vacuum (none of which happens on a chip) the best you could hope for would be a 30 GHz clock rate, a paltry ten times faster than today's CPUs.
One obvious solution is to make circuits that are smaller, and thus we started to get more CPUs on a single die. Still, those CPUs need to synchronize with each other, the cache system, etc., so there remain chip-spanning communications constraints.
The limits on the size of transistors, and thus perhaps on the total number on a chip, are looming but haven't arrived yet. The limits of raw clock speed most definitely have. It is safe to say that our chips will continue to get faster for a while, but the heady days of generation-to-generation massive improvements in single-thread CPU performance are over.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Show me an architecture that would make me want it. With C++ as a platform language
"Show me a new vehicle to replace the carriage. It has to include a horse."
Ezekiel 23:20