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Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. Unless a killer applicatio

Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. Unless a killer application needs a billion transistors, the value created over a previous iPhone is incremental. I think a better way to measure value is invention's cost effectiveness = price / (time * improvement to well-being) The denominator is how much the invention makes our life better as measured by (the amount of time * the extent it helps). By this measure, smartphones are not bad but probably lose out to the Internet, washing machines, and air conditioners/heaters in hot/cold climate. Google is a pretty big improvement over older search engines and is worth quite a lot although the price we pay as privacy is not obvious.

dwaltrip 9y ago
> Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. I think this is far more difficult to evaluate than your comment admits. More transistors -> more software that can do more things, written by developers with a wider range of skills, in a society with increased tech permeation, and so on...
- julian_1 9y ago
  I don't think that's entirely clear. At least for cpus, less transistors in practice means you get rid of super-scalar architectures, and over-engineered microcode decoding and branch-prediction units. This leads to a modest reduction in processing speed with far larger gains in battery life for mobile devices (think X86 versus Arm). Client side applications are mostly unaffected in terms of end-user functionality.
  - Retric 9y ago
    First change is smaller cache, then fewer cores. Pentium 4 Willamett had 44 million transistors and a long pipeline etc. 8 core Ryzen on the other hand is 4,800 million.
- Retric 9y ago
  The trade off is usually ~same functionality but better graphics. Compare Office 1997 with Office 2017 and the average user sees a very modest improvement relative to how much better of a computer you need.
  - marpstar 9y ago
    Another thing is that users also have a lot more applications running in the background, calling servers, caching data, disk I/O.
kehrlann 9y ago
Agreed. Discussing trends (speed of progress) with just two data points doesn't work.
- DashRattlesnake 9y ago
  ...and one data point that is unnecessarily consumerist. True technological progress isn't going to be presented at a fancy keynote, it's going to be messier.
amigoingtodie 9y ago
I would take hot water and refrigeration/AC any day over a smartphone.
- 3chelon 9y ago
  I'd take antibiotics over all of it. And they might not be around for much longer, which is the really shocking part.
clairity 9y ago
your first point about diminishing returns posits a reasonable (if ambiguous) definition of (incremental) value to the consumer: that it should improve the lives of users. but then you say... > Google is a pretty big improvement over older search engines and is worth quite a lot although the price we pay as privacy is not obvious. which is puzzling in light of your very own definition of incremental value. is google's search engine so much better than bing or yandex or anything else that it deserves a much higher valuation? if you apply your own incremental definition of value to search itself, the billions of searches done on other search engines seems to contradict that conclusion. it seems the other search engines are just fine for many situations, so the incremental value of google's search is not high on either your "time" or "improvement to well-being" metric (price is hidden in ad revenue, but likely higher for google). google's valuation broadly comes from (1) it's ad business and (2) speculation that google will conquer another industry, not from it's search technology per se, although search is certainly a core component of the ad business. it seems to me the way that search contributes to value is that it exhibits winner-take-all characteristics (not considered in your model), so that even a slight (perceived) improvement leads people to flock to the better search engine en masse (which is how google won search in the first place, then they developed/borrowed the ad auction model and became a runaway financial success). by garnering more search queries, google has greater and better ad placement inventory (i.e., your eyeballs) to sell to advertisers.
- nopinsight 9y ago
  I compared Google to "older search engines" like Altavista and Excite in the 90's. Bing and other current engines are indeed much closer to the current Google in quality than those older engines to the initial Google at its inception. The delta in quality that Google provided when it was invented was a huge factor in getting people to switch from well-established engines then.
  - clairity 9y ago
    then we are in violent agreement! =)
SilasX 9y ago
So true! Sadly, the relevant Econ agencies work opposite to your logic. The worst example was when a Fed banker insisted that faster iPads cancel out food inflation: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad/ipad-price-remark-gets-feds-dudley-an-earful-idUSTRE72A4AC20110311 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad/ipad-p... You're right, 10x the transistors is less than 10x as useful. 10x faster CPU in an iPad is not 10x better, because you won't be able to harness all that speed before you hit another bottleneck. And you can't buy a fraction of an iPad. And you definitely can't eat one.
sytelus 9y ago
One can build computer just using gears, pullies and other mechanical devices without using any electricity at all. It would be mind boggling to compare cost of mechanical iPhone X to build in 1600s.

dwaltrip 9y ago

> Having a billion transistors is not 10 times as useful as 100 million transistors. The diminishing return kicked in even before that. I think this is far more difficult to evaluate than your comment admits. More transistors -> more software that can do more things, written by developers with a wider range of skills, in a society with increased tech permeation, and so on...

julian_1 9y ago
I don't think that's entirely clear. At least for cpus, less transistors in practice means you get rid of super-scalar architectures, and over-engineered microcode decoding and branch-prediction units. This leads to a modest reduction in processing speed with far larger gains in battery life for mobile devices (think X86 versus Arm). Client side applications are mostly unaffected in terms of end-user functionality.
- Retric 9y ago
  First change is smaller cache, then fewer cores. Pentium 4 Willamett had 44 million transistors and a long pipeline etc. 8 core Ryzen on the other hand is 4,800 million.
Retric 9y ago
The trade off is usually ~same functionality but better graphics. Compare Office 1997 with Office 2017 and the average user sees a very modest improvement relative to how much better of a computer you need.
- marpstar 9y ago
  Another thing is that users also have a lot more applications running in the background, calling servers, caching data, disk I/O.

kehrlann 9y ago

Agreed. Discussing trends (speed of progress) with just two data points doesn't work.

DashRattlesnake 9y ago
...and one data point that is unnecessarily consumerist. True technological progress isn't going to be presented at a fancy keynote, it's going to be messier.

amigoingtodie 9y ago

I would take hot water and refrigeration/AC any day over a smartphone.

3chelon 9y ago
I'd take antibiotics over all of it. And they might not be around for much longer, which is the really shocking part.

clairity 9y ago

your first point about diminishing returns posits a reasonable (if ambiguous) definition of (incremental) value to the consumer: that it should improve the lives of users. but then you say... > Google is a pretty big improvement over older search engines and is worth quite a lot although the price we pay as privacy is not obvious. which is puzzling in light of your very own definition of incremental value. is google's search engine so much better than bing or yandex or anything else that it deserves a much higher valuation? if you apply your own incremental definition of value to search itself, the billions of searches done on other search engines seems to contradict that conclusion. it seems the other search engines are just fine for many situations, so the incremental value of google's search is not high on either your "time" or "improvement to well-being" metric (price is hidden in ad revenue, but likely higher for google). google's valuation broadly comes from (1) it's ad business and (2) speculation that google will conquer another industry, not from it's search technology per se, although search is certainly a core component of the ad business. it seems to me the way that search contributes to value is that it exhibits winner-take-all characteristics (not considered in your model), so that even a slight (perceived) improvement leads people to flock to the better search engine en masse (which is how google won search in the first place, then they developed/borrowed the ad auction model and became a runaway financial success). by garnering more search queries, google has greater and better ad placement inventory (i.e., your eyeballs) to sell to advertisers.

nopinsight 9y ago
I compared Google to "older search engines" like Altavista and Excite in the 90's. Bing and other current engines are indeed much closer to the current Google in quality than those older engines to the initial Google at its inception. The delta in quality that Google provided when it was invented was a huge factor in getting people to switch from well-established engines then.
- clairity 9y ago
  then we are in violent agreement! =)

SilasX 9y ago

So true! Sadly, the relevant Econ agencies work opposite to your logic. The worst example was when a Fed banker insisted that faster iPads cancel out food inflation: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad/ipad-price-remark-gets-feds-dudley-an-earful-idUSTRE72A4AC20110311 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad/ipad-p... You're right, 10x the transistors is less than 10x as useful. 10x faster CPU in an iPad is not 10x better, because you won't be able to harness all that speed before you hit another bottleneck. And you can't buy a fraction of an iPad. And you definitely can't eat one.

sytelus 9y ago

One can build computer just using gears, pullies and other mechanical devices without using any electricity at all. It would be mind boggling to compare cost of mechanical iPhone X to build in 1600s.