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Everyone knew Moore's law was going to be a sigmoid curve, otherwise we'd be getting transistors smaller than atoms which is impossible. Today the term is used
by api 5y ago
Everyone knew Moore's law was going to be a sigmoid curve, otherwise we'd be getting transistors smaller than atoms which is impossible. Today the term is used as vernacular for "well we are still getting smaller." Nobody knows what the last process node for conventional flat semiconductors will be, but recent speculation is around 1.5nm.
Small embedded and low performance chips may have already topped out in a cost/benefit sense. There's no benefit to a 5nm process microcontroller for a coffee maker. The really small nodes may stay reserved for high performance or ultra low power chips.
After we really do hit the top of the sigmoid it doesn't mean computers getting more powerful is over. It just means we would have to go to 3D, massively parallel systems with chiplets, compute/memory integration to reduce RAM latency, special purpose accelerators using quantum or photonic computation, etc.
It does probably mean the free lunch of "faster systems with existing code" is largely over. Of course that free lunch train started to end in the 2000s when clock speeds on conventional chips topped out in the 2-5ghz range. It meant we had to go parallel, a transition very much still in progress.
Edit: remember too that there is a TON of performance on the table on today's systems via more efficient slimmed down code. I think we will see the small/simple/efficient trend increase and bloat will be seen as much more embarrassing than it is today.
Look at what could be done with efficient code on an 8-bit 64K RAM computer in the 1980s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
- mjburgess 5y ago> transistors smaller than atoms which is impossible It's not clear that it's impossible. A H+ atom is just a proton -- it's not inconceivable that there can be subatomic switches.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BizarroLand 5y agoBy 2100 I would assume we would be computing on quarks.
- brokenmachine 5y ago> Edit: remember too that there is a TON of performance on the table on today's systems via more efficient slimmed down code. I think we will see the small/simple/efficient trend increase and bloat will be seen as much more embarrassing than it is today. 100% agree on that, but GEOS was terrible. I can't imagine anyone actually using it for anything useful.
- api 5y agoMy point was that GEOS worked... on less than 64K of usable memory and a ~2mhz 8-bit in-order CPU. I do remember painting, writing, and using a (300 baud!) modem with it as a kid. It was highly constrained but basically usable and it always stuck with me later as impressive for the resource constraints. LUnix is another impressive C64 project, a Unix in the same tiny memory/CPU footprint! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUnix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LUnix We got highly useful very good GUIs on computers with hundreds of kilobytes of RAM and 8-16mhz 16-bit and 32-bit CPUs. Windows 3, OS/2, macOS Classic, and X11/Motif were a lot more useful and usable than GEOS. Today's computers are hundreds to thousands of times more powerful. They should be a lot faster than they are.
- brokenmachine 5y agoI agree, it's so disappointing how slow computers are now. We really should never have to wait for anything. I'm hoping you're right that the pendulum might switch towards leaner applications, but I haven't seen that happening yet.
- brokenmachine 5y ago> Today's computers are hundreds to thousands of times more powerful. Thought I'd look it up. https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second https://gamicus.fandom.com/wiki/Instructions_per_second C64 6510: 0.43 MIPS. PS4: 200,000 MIPS. A 3950X is 749,070 MIPS according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second So it's actually almost 2 million times more powerful...