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Yes. The cost of the exotic silicon and post silicon alternatives are dramatically higher than todays costs, which are dramatically higher than yesterdays. Co

Yes. The cost of the exotic silicon and post silicon alternatives are dramatically higher than todays costs, which are dramatically higher than yesterdays. Couple that with the fact that the majority of people have far more computing power than is necessary for their day-to-day existence (e.g. emailing, posting on FB and looking at cat pictures and/or pornography.) So costs continue to increase by some super-linear function but benefits follow a sigmoid curve. The disconnect between marginal cost and marginal demand for computational power is what's going to knock Moore's Law off it's curve IMO, not some hard technical barrier. The futurists are always spending someone else's imaginary money, so they don't have to worry about stuff like that.

ericb 14y ago
> The futurists are always spending someone else's imaginary money. A $35 raspberry pi can outrun what used to be multi-million dollar mainframes. Are you sure that cost factors are relevant when the trend is so strongely toward lower costs? If prices drop, then lower utility uses become feasible.
- carsongross 14y ago
  Past returns do not indicate future performance. Technical innovation is slowing down, not speeding up. Raw, usable linear CPU performance at the fingertips of normal humans using personal computers has been essentially flat for half a decade, with the majority of material perf changes coming in the I/O subsystem, and yet still the CPU sits idle for the vast majority of its life. I'm probably wrong, but it's still a reasonable position: we've seen technical stagnations before. I'm simply (and probably incorrectly) projecting the current trend I see, as an end user of technology: raw straigh-ahead cpu perf is stagnating and, unless I see real progress on AI (which I don't) I'm skeptical that a lot more of it will help most people doing most things, unless we are talking a lot lot more. If some of the more exotic technologies get practical and cheap, I'm happy to be wrong, but I think it's important to note that Moore's Law was observational: he was describing what he saw happening rather than envisioning it. We no longer are seeing what he saw. A phase change may fix that, but that's very different than what we've been mining for the last half century, and much harder to project out.

ericb 14y ago

> The futurists are always spending someone else's imaginary money. A $35 raspberry pi can outrun what used to be multi-million dollar mainframes. Are you sure that cost factors are relevant when the trend is so strongely toward lower costs? If prices drop, then lower utility uses become feasible.

carsongross 14y ago
Past returns do not indicate future performance. Technical innovation is slowing down, not speeding up. Raw, usable linear CPU performance at the fingertips of normal humans using personal computers has been essentially flat for half a decade, with the majority of material perf changes coming in the I/O subsystem, and yet still the CPU sits idle for the vast majority of its life. I'm probably wrong, but it's still a reasonable position: we've seen technical stagnations before. I'm simply (and probably incorrectly) projecting the current trend I see, as an end user of technology: raw straigh-ahead cpu perf is stagnating and, unless I see real progress on AI (which I don't) I'm skeptical that a lot more of it will help most people doing most things, unless we are talking a lot lot more. If some of the more exotic technologies get practical and cheap, I'm happy to be wrong, but I think it's important to note that Moore's Law was observational: he was describing what he saw happening rather than envisioning it. We no longer are seeing what he saw. A phase change may fix that, but that's very different than what we've been mining for the last half century, and much harder to project out.