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> It’s likely that cloud computing will continue to see decreases in costs, which means the availability of computing will continue to raise after Mores Law has

> It’s likely that cloud computing will continue to see decreases in costs, which means the availability of computing will continue to raise after Mores Law has stopped giving. Why would cloud computing continue to see significant decreases in costs once Moore's law stops? Clearly there will be some ongoing decline in infrastructure costs, but if your main requirement is for lots of compute (for AI) then it seems hard to maintain an exponential rate of improvement overall if the silicon is no longer getting faster and cheaper, and the exponential is what you need, else your costs get out of control quickly.

npo9 7y ago
I was speaking about linear decreases. Cheaper power, more refined manufacturing processes, and economy of scale benefits are where I expect some of the linear benefits to come from. We can also expect CPU manufactures to compete for awhile, getting increasingly marginal improvements. Linear improvements will get us there in the end.
- martinpw 7y ago
  > Linear improvements will get us there in the end. No, they won't. That's the point. To quote directly from the article: we’re talking about exponential rates of growth here, linear expense adjustments won’t move the needle.
- dogma1138 7y ago
  Why would power will become cheaper? Also manufacturing refinement? Sure it happens but not to any meaningful degree these days it’s more about bribing a new process to the same cost/efficiency as your older manufacturing processes. As far as economy of scales goes it’s also not a given. Large cloud providers are much more adapt at reusing old hardware for their PAAS and weaker instances. I’ve had a chance to talk to a few reps from Dell once and while cloud buy a lot of servers they also upgrade them much less often than large enterprises that run their own DC this is because Amazon can always continue to make money on 3-5 year old hardware by shifting it off to cheaper tiers or by running things like SQS or Lambdas on it in the background. On the other hand if you have a 3-5 year old server and you need more horse power if you manage your own DC or rack space the hosting costs make it economical to keep underperforming hardware. Not to mention other costs such as support are quite different, if an Amazon server dies they don’t care. Traditional self hosted environments will require extended support because they can’t have the same redundancy as Amazon. If you delegate a 5 year old server to some back office applications while you use your new ones for client facing apps the old server is still a mission critical box even if it doesn’t directly run revenue generating services. Basically Amazon buys to grow, on-prem orgs buy to both grow and upgrade. If you have an organization the size of Amazon that is completely self hosted they will end up buying much more hardware over a decade than Amazon.

npo9 7y ago

I was speaking about linear decreases. Cheaper power, more refined manufacturing processes, and economy of scale benefits are where I expect some of the linear benefits to come from. We can also expect CPU manufactures to compete for awhile, getting increasingly marginal improvements. Linear improvements will get us there in the end.

martinpw 7y ago
> Linear improvements will get us there in the end. No, they won't. That's the point. To quote directly from the article: we’re talking about exponential rates of growth here, linear expense adjustments won’t move the needle.
dogma1138 7y ago
Why would power will become cheaper? Also manufacturing refinement? Sure it happens but not to any meaningful degree these days it’s more about bribing a new process to the same cost/efficiency as your older manufacturing processes. As far as economy of scales goes it’s also not a given. Large cloud providers are much more adapt at reusing old hardware for their PAAS and weaker instances. I’ve had a chance to talk to a few reps from Dell once and while cloud buy a lot of servers they also upgrade them much less often than large enterprises that run their own DC this is because Amazon can always continue to make money on 3-5 year old hardware by shifting it off to cheaper tiers or by running things like SQS or Lambdas on it in the background. On the other hand if you have a 3-5 year old server and you need more horse power if you manage your own DC or rack space the hosting costs make it economical to keep underperforming hardware. Not to mention other costs such as support are quite different, if an Amazon server dies they don’t care. Traditional self hosted environments will require extended support because they can’t have the same redundancy as Amazon. If you delegate a 5 year old server to some back office applications while you use your new ones for client facing apps the old server is still a mission critical box even if it doesn’t directly run revenue generating services. Basically Amazon buys to grow, on-prem orgs buy to both grow and upgrade. If you have an organization the size of Amazon that is completely self hosted they will end up buying much more hardware over a decade than Amazon.